Ten Guiding Ideas About Collective Intelligence
Author: Ken Homer Issue: 2022-09-21
Ten Guiding Ideas About Collective Intelligence
by Ken Homer
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People and organizations have within them the wisdom and intelligence to successfully confront the challenges they’re facing.
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Group intelligence and wisdom can’t simply be summoned on command, because it does not exist in the minds of the individuals who make up the organization. Collective intelligence/wisdom is emergent, it lies (mostly) dormant in the relational spaces between individuals.
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Establishing relationships of trust and mutual respect is a prerequisite to evoking and accessing collective intelligence and wisdom.
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Collective wisdom is accessed, applied, and refined through a process of structured conversations that begin by including all people involved. When voices are excluded, the system suffers from missing intelligence that could be the difference between success and failure.
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Dissent, when welcomed and examined for validity, is a creative force.
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Knowing which process to use for which phase of the conversation is crucial to your success. Different kinds of conversations and different conversational structures or processes, i.e., Collaborative Conversations, World Cafe, Open Space, Future Search, Appreciative Inquiry, Liberating Structures, etc., are required for coping with the complexity of various kinds of predicaments, such as problems, messes, or wicked messes.
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Evoking collective wisdom and developing practical intelligence is hard work; it requires careful planning and facilitation, as well as willingness operate from a genuine space of “not knowing.” However, the effort is worth it. Skillfully coordinated collaboration yields amazing results that people take ownership for.
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The only competitive advantage that is truly sustainable is to work on making ALL of humanity better able to live well on Earth for as far into the future we can imagine.
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The world comes alive with possibility when we can shift from seeing it as “a set of problems out there” to a “set of concerns we all share.”
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People grow in the direction of the questions they ask. Don’t ask what’s wrong and who is to blame, ask: What's important here? and Who cares about these things? (This bit of wisdom is attributed to David Cooperrider, the originator of Appreciative Inquiry.)
What would you change or add to this list?
Related:
- Ken Homer (author)
- 2022 (year)
- Topics: Collective Intelligence, Sensemaking and Collective Intelligence