Collective intelligence refers to the enhanced capacity that emerges from the collaboration, collective efforts, and competition of multiple individuals. Collective intelligence (CI) emerges when the contributions of teams or groups of people become more than the sum of their individual parts. Indeed, Harvard Business review suggests collective intelligence refers to “the ability of a group to self-organize and to demonstrate a global behavior that demonstrates a greater cognitive ability than that of any individuals who comprise the group.”
While the concept of collective intelligence has existed for a long time, technological advancements enabling millions of people to share knowledge have redefined what is possible.
Today, modern equivalent Wikipedia receives almost two edits per second with 6 million pages created monthly.
CI encompasses many participatory methods such as prediction markets, citizen science, deliberative democracy, open innovation, and crowdsourcing.
Principles of collective intelligence
According to theorists Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams, the group behavior characteristic of collective intelligence is based on four principles:
Openness
In a group context, collective intelligence suggests intellectual property take a back seat to the open and collaborative sharing of ideas.
When more people are encouraged to share their ideas, there is a greater depth of scrutiny.
In business, leveraging the diverse creative capacities of others facilitates new use cases and allows for the ecology of complementary products to expand.
Peering
This means projects are based on a foundation of equality, where people can champion personal ideas and pursue their own projects without having to seek approval from someone else.
These projects are still open for peer review, but collective intelligence gives contributors greater freedom in choosing how they will achieve goals.
Sharing
Knowledge is freely shared throughout the group and individuals share new insights with original group members and any new members.
Sharing is critical to the fluid exchange and critique of ideas.
Acting globally
With technology allowing people to join increasingly larger networks, collective intelligence transcends borders, countries, markets, and cultures in favor of diversity of input.
Examples of creative intelligence
Aside from the example of Wikipedia and the Oxford English Dictionary, here are some other examples demonstrating the power of collective intelligence:
Search engines
Companies such as Google perhaps best exemplify modern collective intelligence.
Google’s technology indexes the knowledge created by millions of people and then uses this information to serve relevant search results.
Smallpox eradication
A World Health Organisation (WHO) campaign to eradicate the disease in Africa and Asia began in 1967. Since smallpox had a mortality rate of 20-40%, the WHO set out to vaccinate as many people as possible.
Outbreaks in Nigeria, where there was a shortage of vaccines, were controlled by containing the disease in certain villages.
The strategy only worked because health workers on the ground knew what type of exposure could be handled without adequate vaccine supply.
Complex problem collaboration
Arizona State University’s Decision Theatre organizes researchers, policymakers, and the business community to better understand and explore solutions to complex societal issues.
Here, collective intelligence is based on software-integrated models and big data provided by transdisciplinary partners.
Some of Decision Theatre’s recent work addressed complex challenges in health care, energy, water policy, smart cities, trade agreements, and humanitarian operations.
Key takeaways
Collective intelligence refers to the enhanced capacity that emerges from the collaboration, collective efforts, and competition of multiple individuals. Collective intelligence describes many participatory methods such as citizen science, deliberative democracy, and crowdsourcing
Collective intelligence is based on four characteristics of group behavior: openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally.
Collective intelligence can be seen in the way search companies such as Google utilize the collective knowledge of internet users. Collective intelligence has also played a part in smallpox eradication and is used to tackle many of the world’s most complex problems.
Convergent thinking occurs when the solution to a problem can be found by applying established rules and logical reasoning. Whereas divergent thinking is an unstructured problem-solving method where participants are encouraged to develop many innovative ideas or solutions to a given problem. Where convergent thinking might work for larger, mature organizations where divergent thinking is more suited for startups and innovative companies.
Systems thinking is a holistic means of investigating the factors and interactions that could contribute to a potential outcome. It is about thinking non-linearly, and understanding the second-order consequences of actions and input into the system.
Vertical thinking, on the other hand, is a problem-solving approach that favors a selective, analytical, structured, and sequential mindset. The focus of vertical thinking is to arrive at a reasoned, defined solution.
Maslow’s Hammer, otherwise known as the law of the instrument or the Einstellung effect, is a cognitive bias causing an over-reliance on a familiar tool. This can be expressed as the tendency to overuse a known tool (perhaps a hammer) to solve issues that might require a different tool. This problem is persistent in the business world where perhaps known tools or frameworks might be used in the wrong context (like business plans used as planning tools instead of only investors’ pitches).
The Peter Principle was first described by Canadian sociologist Lawrence J. Peter in his 1969 book The Peter Principle. The Peter Principle states that people are continually promoted within an organization until they reach their level of incompetence.
The straw man fallacy describes an argument that misrepresents an opponent’s stance to make rebuttal more convenient. The straw man fallacy is a type of informal logical fallacy, defined as a flaw in the structure of an argument that renders it invalid.
The Streisand Effect is a paradoxical phenomenon where the act of suppressing information to reduce visibility causes it to become more visible. In 2003, Streisand attempted to suppress aerial photographs of her Californian home by suing photographer Kenneth Adelman for an invasion of privacy. Adelman, who Streisand assumed was paparazzi, was instead taking photographs to document and study coastal erosion. In her quest for more privacy, Streisand’s efforts had the opposite effect.
As highlighted by German psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer in the paper “Heuristic Decision Making,” the term heuristic is of Greek origin, meaning “serving to find out or discover.” More precisely, a heuristic is a fast and accurate way to make decisions in the real world, which is driven by uncertainty.
The recognition heuristic is a psychological model of judgment and decision making. It is part of a suite of simple and economical heuristics proposed by psychologists Daniel Goldstein and Gerd Gigerenzer. The recognition heuristic argues that inferences are made about an object based on whether it is recognized or not.
The representativeness heuristic was first described by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. The representativeness heuristic judges the probability of an event according to the degree to which that event resembles a broader class. When queried, most will choose the first option because the description of John matches the stereotype we may hold for an archaeologist.
The take-the-best heuristic is a decision-making shortcut that helps an individual choose between several alternatives. The take-the-best (TTB) heuristic decides between two or more alternatives based on a single good attribute, otherwise known as a cue. In the process, less desirable attributes are ignored.
The concept of cognitive biases was introduced and popularized by the work of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in 1972. Biases are seen as systematic errors and flaws that make humans deviate from the standards of rationality, thus making us inept at making good decisions under uncertainty.
The bundling bias is a cognitive bias in e-commerce where a consumer tends not to use all of the products bought as a group, or bundle. Bundling occurs when individual products or services are sold together as a bundle. Common examples are tickets and experiences. The bundling bias dictates that consumers are less likely to use each item in the bundle. This means that the value of the bundle and indeed the value of each item in the bundle is decreased.
The Barnum Effect is a cognitive bias where individuals believe that generic information – which applies to most people – is specifically tailored for themselves.
First-principles thinking – sometimes called reasoning from first principles – is used to reverse-engineer complex problems and encourage creativity. It involves breaking down problems into basic elements and reassembling them from the ground up. Elon Musk is among the strongest proponents of this way of thinking.
The ladder of inference is a conscious or subconscious thinking process where an individual moves from a fact to a decision or action. The ladder of inference was created by academic Chris Argyris to illustrate how people form and then use mental models to make decisions.
The Six Thinking Hats model was created by psychologist Edward de Bono in 1986, who noted that personality type was a key driver of how people approached problem-solving. For example, optimists view situations differently from pessimists. Analytical individuals may generate ideas that a more emotional person would not, and vice versa.
Second-order thinking is a means of assessing the implications of our decisions by considering future consequences. Second-order thinking is a mental model that considers all future possibilities. It encourages individuals to think outside of the box so that they can prepare for every and eventuality. It also discourages the tendency for individuals to default to the most obvious choice.
Lateral thinking is a business strategy that involves approaching a problem from a different direction. The strategy attempts to remove traditionally formulaic and routine approaches to problem-solving by advocating creative thinking, therefore finding unconventional ways to solve a known problem. This sort of non-linear approach to problem-solving, can at times, create a big impact.
Bounded rationality is a concept attributed to Herbert Simon, an economist and political scientist interested in decision-making and how we make decisions in the real world. In fact, he believed that rather than optimizing (which was the mainstream view in the past decades) humans follow what he called satisficing.
The Dunning-Kruger effect describes a cognitive bias where people with low ability in a task overestimate their ability to perform that task well. Consumers or businesses that do not possess the requisite knowledge make bad decisions. What’s more, knowledge gaps prevent the person or business from seeing their mistakes.
Occam’s Razor states that one should not increase (beyond reason) the number of entities required to explain anything. All things being equal, the simplest solution is often the best one. The principle is attributed to 14th-century English theologian William of Ockham.
The Mandela effect is a phenomenon where a large group of people remembers an event differently from how it occurred. The Mandela effect was first described in relation to Fiona Broome, who believed that former South African President Nelson Mandela died in prison during the 1980s. While Mandela was released from prison in 1990 and died 23 years later, Broome remembered news coverage of his death in prison and even a speech from his widow. Of course, neither event occurred in reality. But Broome was later to discover that she was not the only one with the same recollection of events.
The bandwagon effect tells us that the more a belief or idea has been adopted by more people within a group, the more the individual adoption of that idea might increase within the same group. This is the psychological effect that leads to herd mentality. What in marketing can be associated with social proof.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
