The Collective Intelligence

The Collective Intelligence

The main stakes for humanity are not hunger, poverty, sustainability, peace, healthcare, education, economy, natural resources or a host of other issues but our capability to build new social organizations that are able to provide solutions. Our main stake is Collective Intelligence.

This is a key issue in the corporate world as well. Today most large companies encounter insurmountable difficulties when dealing with the complexity and the unexpectedness of the world when operating against a global backdrop. They undergo conflicts of interest in many areas – between profitability and sustainability, secrecy and transparency, values and value, individual and collective dynamics, and knowledge fertilizing – that opens – and competition – that closes.

What most medium and large organizations have in common is an infrastructure based on pyramidal hard-coded social maps, command and control, labor division, and a monetary system stimulated by scarcity. Until recently, this social architecture was the only information system at our disposal to pilot and organize complex human edifices. We call it pyramidal intelligence. It remains efficient as long as the environment remains stable, but it becomes vulnerable and inefficient in fluctuating contexts, namely when markets, knowledge, culture, technology, external interactions, economy or politics keep changing faster than the capability of the group to respond.

Evolution has provided humankind with specific social skills based on collaboration and mutual support. These skills reach their maximum effectiveness within small groups of 10 to 20 people, but no more, where the individual and collective benefit is higher than what would have been obtained if everyone remained alone. We call it original collective intelligence. As individuals, we all know what it is because it is very likely that we have experienced it at some degree in our lives.

Well-trained, small teams have interesting dynamic properties. These include transparency, a gift economy, a collective awareness, a polymorphic social structure, a high learning capacity, a convergence of interest between the individual and collective levels, interactions characterized by human warmth, and, above all, an excellent capability to handle complexity and the unexpected.

Is it possible for large organizations to benefit from the same properties? Can they become as reactive, flexible, transparent, responsive, and innovative as small teams? Can they evolve even further, toward a global Collective Intelligence? Can they conjugate their interests with overriding concerns of humanity such as ethics, sustainability, etc…? The answer today is a resounding yes. It is not only possible, but absolutely necessary for not just the efficiency of these organizations but above all for the well-being of human society.

The aim of this paper is to provide the key concepts underlying collective intelligence and to explore how modern organizations and individuals can concretely learn how to increase their collective intelligence, i.e. their capability to collectively invent the future and reach it in complex contexts. This will draw the guidelines of a universal governance, provide an outline of the next democracies and help us forecast an economy in which competition and collaboration as well as values and value are reconciled. By Jean-Fraçois Noubel