Many minds make light work
Why we need to get smarter about collective intelligence
Despite its name, it’s well known that the discovery of the Higgs boson was actually the result of decades of work by thousands of scientists and engineers at CERN. In fact, behind pretty much any ‘lone genius’ you can think of is some kind of collective intelligence wondering when Walter Isaacson is going to get around to writing its biography.
But it’s not just quantity that matters when it comes to smart collectives. It’s the diversity of the group that really holds the key to driving creativity and innovation.
In this issue we’re exploring why it can be so challenging to create and maintain a diverse set of brains; and why success might lie in shifting the way we think about leadership, incentives and even the concept of intelligence itself.
But first, a quick update from the Brink universe…
Last week over 80 innovators joined us for our online panel discussion: Innovation Carve-Outs: Curating the Space for Innovation.
Along with Clio Dintilhac from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Steven Hunt from the FCDO, Suha Tutunji from Jusoor, and Eunice Gatama from I&M Bank, we discussed how to create the kinds of environments that give people the space, resources and support they need to explore and test new ideas.
If you couldn’t make it to the event itself you can find a recording of the discussion here, and there’s a copy of the slides that were used here.
We’ve also published a new whitepaper that explores how the Carve-Out method draws on the behavioural sciences and organisational psychology to create the kind of dynamic culture that thrives on creativity. The paper offers actionable steps and strategies for anyone looking to empower their teams and evolve their organisations or institutions, and create genuinely transformational breakthroughs.
Many minds make light work
We know that collective intelligence can play a huge role in creating fresh approaches to complex challenges like climate change, social inequality and the global health crisis. And that the real breakthroughs come when varied perspectives are brought together to challenge assumptions.
Put simply, when teams are diversified in their experience, background and thinking styles, they open up new avenues for problem-solving, and those avenues generally lead to more impactful outcomes. But, despite our best intentions, we often fall short of creating environments where collective intelligence can thrive because our natural tendency is to surround ourselves with those who are similar to us. Even when we consciously aim for inclusivity, unconscious biases can skew our behaviours.
These biases don’t just affect who’s in the room, they also impact whose voices are heard. Unequal power dynamics mean people feel silenced and afraid to share their thoughts openly. Even in teams with diverse members, valuable ideas get left on the table because the people behind them aren't empowered to contribute fully, aren’t recognised for their input or are literally ignored.
Getting around these challenges takes more than a tokenistic diversity. It involves a mindset shift at the very least and at best an entire paradigm shift - in how we define leadership, how we design incentives, and in the concept of intelligence itself.
Rethinking leadership
One of the trickiest challenges to creating genuinely diverse teams is managing the power dynamics that often lurk just beneath the surface. Subtle biases can influence who gets to speak up, whose ideas gain traction, and who feels left out of the conversation.
Creating and harnessing diversity means breaking free from entrenched hierarchies and asking ourselves what it really means to be a leader. Is it about one person at the front, or can leadership be more fluid or situational than that?
In her book, Joined-Up Thinking: The Science of Collective Intelligence and Its Power to Change Our Lives, neuroscientist Hannah Critchlow suggests that we might find inspiration for this new paradigm of leadership by looking to the roles of parents or informal community leaders, i.e. to those who guide without dominating and who recognise when to hand off their role to the next, better-suited person. Critchlow argues that when we share leadership, we can begin to dismantle rigid hierarchies, invite in fresh perspectives and foster a more equitable distribution of influence, which helps teams move from prioritising status to focusing on information and ability.
And if fluid leadership sounds like a recipe for instability to you, bear in mind that, according to research, instability can actually benefit diverse teams, as “fluidity helps members bolster their position and standing by demonstrating their expertise and unique value”; and shared leadership can be particularly effective for teams that “rapidly assemble from across disciplines or areas of expertise”.
Rethinking incentives
It's often tempting to encourage collaboration and idea generation with traditional incentives, because they often seem to work in the short term. Eventually though they lead to conformity and ultimately result in poorer collective outcomes. This is especially true in environments where some individuals might not feel empowered to speak up, where dissenting opinions get lost and the room defaults to ‘groupthink’.
A 2019 study into the motivations involved in collective decision making showed that, when people who were rewarded for the accuracy of their individual responses in a group task (e.g. guessing where certain events happened on a map of London), they tended to converge to the group mean, “reducing diversity and thereby diminishing their group wisdom”. But when they were rewarded for their collective performance, “diversity of opinions and the group wisdom increased”.
Thankfully new models of more effective incentives to surface the best ideas are emerging. In their paper, Optimal incentives for collective intelligence, Richard P. Mann and Dirk Helbing offer one potential solution to this challenge in the form of ‘minority rewards’. In this model, individuals are rewarded for making correct predictions or sharing valuable insights - especially when those insights go against the grain.
This shift to rewarding “accurate minority predictions” not only reduces groupthink but also fosters a culture where diverse voices are valued and have real influence. As a result, teams become more open to innovative ideas regardless of who contributes them and members are more inclined to listen to perspectives that would otherwise be likely overlooked.
Rethinking our idea of ‘collective intelligence’
Human intelligence has many facets - from language, reasoning and analysis to visual, spatial, embodied and beyond. Blending and remixing these can yield beautiful and powerful results. But intelligence doesn’t stop there.
Of course, artificial intelligence is the dominant player in this expanded view of intelligence, but it’s becoming increasingly obvious that the true power lies not in AI alone (which is increasingly being talked about as an amplifier of groupthink), but in the synergy between human and machine intelligence, and the hybrid systems that can leverage the strengths of both. But beyond human and artificial intelligence, it’s also worth considering those forms of intelligence that have had millenia to evolve
Biological intelligence points to the idea that natural systems can provide intelligent solutions to complex problems. For example, the regenerative agriculture practices championed by figures like Yvon Chouinard look to tap into the collective intelligence of natural systems that have evolved over millions of years and help us mimic the diversity found in natural habitats with greater effect than man-made systems.
Similarly, indigenous intelligence, also known as Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), is rooted in centuries of traditional knowledge and sustainable practices, and offers valuable insights into harmonious coexistence with natural systems. Indigenous communities possess profound knowledge of ecological balance and sustainable resource management, and this knowledge provides insights into the delicate interplay among land, sea, and sky, which can be invaluable for developing sustainable practices in various fields, including space exploration and environmental management.
By integrating these diverse forms of intelligence - human, artificial, biological, and indigenous we can tap into a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of collective intelligence and deliver more holistic and sustainable solutions to the challenges ahead of us.
Your Cognitive Booster Shot 💉
Each issue we ask a member of the Brink team to select some articles, book recommendations and other nuggets of wisdom that have recently inspired them or changed their practice in some way.
Making the selection this week is Rob, our Comms Lead, who is based in London.
One of the winners at this year’s Ig Nobel awards (which are handed out annually to scientific research that “makes people laugh, and then think”) was Dr Saul Justin Newman, who’s research revealed that so-called ‘Blue Zone’ regions of exceptional lifespans were actually evidence of clerical errors and pension fraud.
Tipping Point is a three-part podcast on The Limits to Growth, the 1970s book that predicted the collapse of civilization somewhere around 2050, based on early systems dynamics modelling done at MIT, and how the message of the book was ignored and discredited.
The Pudding is a online publication that “explains ideas debated in culture with visual essays”. Recently they worked alongside an AI to make a new data-driven, visual story; to see what it would actually do and how well it would do it. The results are really interesting (and beautifully presented).
And while we’re talking of working together… A new study of “hunting packs” made up of single octopus and several kinds of fish, has discovered that “the fish scout out potential prey and then call the octopus to flush them out of crevices that they can’t reach.” Even better, the octopus will “punch away fish that are just hanging around the pack hoping to catch something, rather than actively helping to find prey.”
Dive deeper
More on what it takes to harness the wisdom of the masses:
In this talk, recorded at Jesus College, Cambridge, Hannah Critchlow talks about how to work best collectively, how to cope with differing opinions, balance biases, and exercising our intuitive ability for the most effective outcomes.
Earlier this year, Dr. Vivienne Ming spoke at The Energy Disruptors UNITE Summit about dismantling biases, fostering inclusivity, and the link between disruptive thinking and the allure of safe answers,
Nesta’s Collective Intelligence Design Playbook is full of tools, tactics and methods for designing and delivering a collective intelligence project.
We’ve talked about Matthew Syed’s book Rebel Ideas elsewhere, but it’s worth mentioning it again, as it’s a great introduction to the the power of ‘cognitive diversity’ and how to pool our collective intelligence in order to tackle big challenges.
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If you’ve got an idea for a future issue of this newsletter, or a story about when you have leveraged collective wisdom in your own work, then you can email us on editor@hellobrink.co.
See you next month!