Collective Intelligence: The Wisdom Already in Your Organization

Moving from fragmentation to connectedness

In alignment with one of my favorite Albert Einstein quotations,”The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking (consciousness) we were at when we created them” I believe that we must shift our thinking, our consciousness to a different level than we were at when we got into our problems. For years now, I have been intrigued by exploring collective intelligence and how to tap into the intelligence of a circle of people. I have been focused on this exploration for decades, believing in the power of the human capacity for finding solutions for the benefit of humanity, whether in a small enterprise or in global organizations. In the past I have witnessed organizations failing to thrive because the people worked in silos, lacking the organizational capacity to make use of collective intelligence. The intelligence was there. I knew that the intelligence was there because when people were out of their silos, for example in the local pub after work, the solutions flowed as easily as the beer, usually begun with phrases like “if they would only listen to me…; you won’t believe what they did now…; if we had our way, we would be able to work more efficiently but instead they have sent some expert trying to figure it out and they still aren’t listening to us…”.

I am focusing on this exploration of collective intelligence in the coming posts in this series. I am also interested in what you know about working with collective intelligence. If you believe working with collective intelligence is an important key to finding solutions, I would love to hear your thoughts. If you are interested in learning more about how to tap into the collective intelligence of your organization, explore our work with participatory methods at Dalar International.