First, what is collective intelligence?
Combining machine intelligence – AI, data, and so on – with human sensitivities of imagination, instinct, emotion, judgement, reasoning, knowledge, experience and learning, collective intelligence is created when a group of diverse minds works together on a problem, each bringing different information and skills that, when combined, and aided by technology, create a more complete picture of a problem and how to solve it.
These three YouTube clips help to summarise simply the power of this most potent resource for designing a more productive future.
In this clip, Michael Silverman explains that in engaging collective intelligence, its emphasis is on output, with the goal of focusing a community lens being to build the emergent property of thinking at a scale whose results cannot reside within any single individual’s brain.
Nesta, the UK’s innovation agency for social good, describes the four key principles that can help to design an effective intelligence project to enhance the collective intelligence of a group, by beginning with the need to engage diverse perspectives.
Here, Geoff Mulgan, author on this subject, and of Big Mind, says that to realise the ultimate premise of tapping into a “bigger mind,” there is waiting to be created the new discipline and profession needed to manage the systemic design of collective intelligence, which, as its problems evolve or new challenges emerge, addresses the “triple loops of learning” he describes as essential for any organisation or group to be recognisably intelligent.