Throughout my professional life I have been able to see how it is possible to create organizations, on a large scale, where everyone is a colleague, knowledge is shared, where a special kind of energy arises between people that allows them to explore and solve problems collectively successfully. Leadership thus becomes everyone’s job, people with very different ideas, skills, experiences and knowledge use that creative diversity to achieve results that would be impossible individually.
However, by observing the behavior and decisions of many managers in the face of the current uncertainty, I come to the conclusion that it is much easier to produce collective stupidity than collective intelligence. I mean, groups of smart people often make stupid, uncreative, and even destructive decisions for themselves. Although in principle each person in the group is intelligent and creative, when they come together to make a decision, fears, conflicts of interest, or power struggles produce results far below what would be expected from the composition and experience of the group. In other words, observation and experience lead us to think that collective stupidity is at least as possible in our organizations as collective intelligence.
The truth is that in any of its forms, whether intelligence or stupidity, this collective behavior exists in our organizations and largely determines their ability to adapt to their environment and thrive in the future. I’m sure you’ve experienced one of these situations. Are mediocre people more likely to become a smart group, or do you think smart people are more likely to become a mediocre group? What are the conditions that lead organizations towards collective intelligence instead of collective stupidity? Can an organization ignore the ideas of employees, customers, and distribution channels and expect to thrive in a digital and connected world? These are the questions for our reflection today.
If we accept that in a networked society connecting with the collective intelligence of our organizations is a requirement for innovation and success, it is important that we dedicate some time to understanding what collective intelligence really consists of, what factors influence its creation and how we can make it a reality in our organizations.
What do we mean by collective intelligence?
The etymological origin of the concept of intelligence refers to those who know how to choose: intelligence makes it possible to select the most convenient alternatives for solving a problem. Therefore, it is understood that an individual is intelligent when he is able to choose the best option among the possibilities that are presented to him to solve a problem. At the organizational level, it is also understood that a group is intelligent when it is able to organize and use collective experience to respond appropriately to new challenges that are vital to its well-being and progress.
Academically, Collective Intelligence (CI) has generated a growing interest as an emerging discipline, although there is still no really operational definition or consensus on what it really means or how to take its possibilities to a deeper level than the current one. Amalio Rey, in his excellent blog on collective intelligence, summarizes very well the two lines of thought that dominate the current debate; “Aggregation vs collaboration”.
On the one hand, there is the proposal of James Surowiecki, who in his book “Wisdom of Crowds” popularized the vision of “collective wisdom” as a model of collective intelligence that can occur as a process of merely statistical “aggregation” of knowledge, in situations where the participants do not interact directly with each other, nor are they aware of functioning as a collective. This is the case of our daily experience with Google searches that produces incredibly intelligent answers to the most varied and complex questions, based on the information and judgments issued by millions of people, who create their blogs, comment on their Facebook pages or shop on eBay. This modality of CI requires diversity in groups of people, independence of individuals so that their contributions are not influenced by the estimates of other individuals, and aggregation mechanisms to move from individual estimates to a collective estimate.
On the other hand, Pierre Lévy, the main source of inspiration for many scholars on the subject, in his research, refers to “collective intelligence” as an emergent process and the result of “collaboration” and the conscious interaction of participants, with an explicit desire to seek solutions to problems that affect them. This modality of “collaborative” intelligence requires social platforms that facilitate the conscious participation of group members in orderly deliberation, and decision-making on common challenges. In this CI modality, the results depend to a large extent on the social sensitivity of the participants and the level of participation of each one. So there are significant variations in the effectiveness of a group if the engagement or collaboration process is designed and managed one way or another.
The Imperative of Collaboration
In the new digital economy, innovation cycles are shortening, customers no longer buy products but unique and singular experiences, and talent is increasingly digital and ubiquitous, so companies increasingly need to effectively apply the knowledge and experience of all the people in the organization. regardless of your position, experience, or status quo. By leveraging collective intelligence, organizations can generate new business ideas, make more informed decisions, address strategic challenges, and work in new innovative ways, making leadership and innovation everyone’s job.
The competitiveness of an organization in an uncertain and complex context is determined by its collective ability to interact with the new reality, so the need to connect with collective intelligence is not an option. Undoubtedly, the success of organizations in the new digital economy will depend to a large extent on their ability to connect with new digital talent and use collective intelligence to stimulate innovation, not only within the organization, but beyond its current borders, with customers and strategic partners.
The good news is that new social media allows individuals to express their opinions, share experiences, and make decisions based on the collective intelligence of all members of the community. And at the organizational level we can equally connect people and take advantage of the distributed knowledge and experience of individuals inside and outside the formal boundaries of the company. The application of this knowledge can offer tangible benefits in the development of new products and services, the sharing of best practices, distributing work in new and innovative ways, and making the most of the new ways of doing things and the new models of collaboration that the social web offers us.
Redarchy: The Architecture for Collaboration
It is obvious that hierarchy is not the natural order for collaboration. The fundamental goal of the pecking order is to ensure operational results, scalability, and maximize profits for shareholders, including senior executives. Its values are efficiency, reliability, scalability and predictability. This means that behaviour in this mode of operation is conservative, tends towards risk aversion and conformity with the status quo. People in this context naturally don’t feel involved or find purpose in collaboration. Their focus is to maintain the daily demands of corporate activity, exploit old certainties and preserve the achievements of the past, so they have difficulty identifying new opportunities well in advance, formulating innovative initiatives with the necessary agility and, above all, putting them into practice with the speed they require.
You may have noticed that the natural order in social media is redarchy. Redarchy emerges as a natural structure of new networked organizations, facilitating collaboration and making it possible for creative people to choose those contributions that most motivate them and that best align with their own skills. In the networkarchy, tasks can be chosen and not imposed, and the decision-making capacity of each person is determined by their personal reputation and the added value they bring to the organization.
It is precisely this participatory and dynamic nature of the network that gives it its ability to connect with the collective intelligence in our organizations and respond to exceptionally complex challenges in a hyperconnected society. The mere fact of collaborating and sharing on an equal footing generates interactions, proposals and innovative solutions, and allows the activity to be transferred, in a natural way, to the nodes where value is really being added to the organization. In other words, decisions are not made at the top of the organizational pyramid and solutions do not prescriptively descend from above, in a cascade, but emerge from below, the result of collaborative relationships based on trust, participation and the added value of people.
The networkarchy as a structure makes possible the participation of all, working in community, and it is at the same time the first coordination mechanism, that is, the main method that intelligent organizations use to coordinate their activities of innovation and exploration of new realities. It fosters trust and gives transparency to added value, so it has a special effect of attraction for digital talent, and is capable of motivating and retaining competent, committed people with the necessary values to make collective intelligence possible.
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