Collective Intelligence (CI) or crowdsourcing is the aggregated knowledge, insight and expertise of a diverse group.
When different minds come together, a new level of understanding and proficiency emerges: collective intelligence strongly contributes to the shift of knowledge and power from the individual to the collective.
Several studies reveal the untapped know-how of a team working cooperatively.
In his book The Future of Work, MIT Sloan School of Management Professor Thomas Malone, explains that the company of the future will not be built on controlled and centralized management. Organizations that thrive will loose hierarchies and focus on enhancing collective intelligence in their teams.
Each person on the team will bring something of his knowledge and skills to the group. Together, all of their intelligence will create a group having its own IQ, which is higher than any one member on his own!
But in a very intriguing way, research revealed that group intelligence had little to do with individual intelligence: collective intelligence wasn’t just the average of all the individual IQs in the group.
The smarter groups were the ones with people having open minds and sharing criticism constructively. Indeed, very smart people dominating the conversation didn’t produce very intelligent groups.
Research suggests also that teams need a modest level of cognitive diversity to be effective: overly homogeneous or diverse groups didn’t score high level of intelligent.
Collective intelligence is significantly correlated to the group composition and surprisingly it was higher with a higher concentration of female in the group, reports a Harvard Business Review research. Diversity is good but so far, the data show, the more women, the better. The result is probably linked to the higher women’s social sensitivity.
The best example of collective intelligence in nature is given by honeybees. Working as a group and without the influence of the queen b
ee, the bee colony is able to identify the very best home site at least 80% of the time (see the research of Thomas Seeley at Cornell University) comparing the places that every single bee visits individually and taking the final decision on a consensus-based process.
The study showing a “commonality in the decision making processes between a human brain and a bee swarm”, we could take example on bees and work in the same aggregate way.
But how can we harness collective intelligence and make teams smarter in practice?
The first step to take is to put people from all levels together, to give them a voice, to value their opinions and feedback.
Business leaders should be encouraged to embrace the human-machine relationship because this is a requirement to make the collective intelligence work.
The size of the group can change the CI: the results of the MIT research showed that the large groups (20 people) significantly and systematically outperformed the small groups (4 people) but too large groups could diminish group intelligence.
Collaboration came true as being able to significantly improve the collective intelligence score of groups, no matter the size.
Results revealed that an optimal group size is about 30 for groups with the collaboration tool and 25 for groups without the collaboration tool.
To change an individual’s intelligence is hard, but it’s absolutely possible to have an impact on a group’s intelligence by changing members or motivating for collaboration.
The methodology of Sign&Connect breaks the traditional working and social barriers by creating the conditions for a new way of working together, harnessing sharing and friendly collaboration.