Why you can't police collective intelligence
How to create coherence without choreography
This week, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales published a book called The Seven Rules of Trust. It’s about how Wikipedia became one of the world’s most trusted sources of information, and how strangers on the internet learned to collaborate without someone telling them how.
Avid readers of this newsletter will know we’ve also been thinking a lot lately (i.e. in the last issue) about that kind of trust, how to make it tangible, and how to treat it like infrastructure. As Wales puts it, “Wikipedia’s greatest challenge was getting strangers on the Internet to trust each other… to trust that people had good intentions.” Somehow, they did, and at astonishing scale.
That same spirit of collective intelligence shaped our latest report, Towards a Future We Won’t Regret: A Dispatch from 2035, which we launched earlier this month at a global online event that brought together people from across disciplines, sectors, and countries.
The report presents five potential routes which we believe can help secure a radically better future. At the end of the launch event, our co-founder Lea observed, “The thread through all of this is people; how we come together, how we surface our collective intelligence, and how we co-create something better together.”
That thread is what we’re pulling on in this issue: creating the conditions where people can come together and truly co-create, and how ‘emergent innovation’ arises from interactions, not instructions.
Be more starling (or more locust)
Swarm intelligence researcher Arthur Kordon defines emergence as “coherence without choreography,” complex behaviours emerging from simple local rules without central control.
In a murmuration of starlings no bird is leading. Each follows simple rules about staying close to its neighbours, matching their speed and avoiding collisions. Locust swarms aren’t quite as beautiful but they’re equally instructive. Research has shown that locusts use noise, not top-down control, to maintain swarm cohesion and “individual locusts appear to increase the randomness of their movements in response to a loss of alignment by the group”.
Whether you’re Jimmy Wales or a locust, emergence is a valuable way of developing, generating and scaling collective intelligence. Wikipedia was only able to achieve the rapid success and impact it did because it didn’t have any centralised control dictating every edit, article and decision. And, as we said in last year’s issue on collective intelligence, even if you have a room full of people with diverse experiences and backgrounds, unequal power dynamics often means those with the most valuable perspectives can’t contribute fully. Emergence offers a way of cutting through those unhelpful but stubborn dynamics.
So why, when humans attempt to solve complex problems, do we instinctively turn to org charts, multi-year roadmaps, scheduling coordination meetings and appointed project leads?
The smarter we get, the harder it becomes
The more intelligent, experienced, and capable we become as individuals, the harder it is to step back and let collective intelligence emerge. As humans we’re wired to overthink. We compete for status. We protect our turf. We want credit for our contribution. We struggle to trust that the swarm knows what it’s doing.
Maybe that’s why, as Haroon Yasin of Taleemabad said during our launch event, society seems intent on teaching kids to compete when the future needs them to collaborate.
Swarm research shows that complex, intelligent behaviour emerges from messy local interactions - yet we keep trying to structure away that very messiness in human organisations. We poll everyone for their opinion and average the results. We have brainstorming sessions and then pick the CEO’s idea. We run participatory processes and then centralise decision-making.
We say we want collective intelligence but we keep trying to put someone in charge of that intelligence.
What it takes to let emergence happen
Emergence asks something most of us are hard-wired to find uncomfortable: relinquishing control.
As Jimmy Wales put it recently, “One of the most important things about trust is deliberately being a bit vulnerable. In other words, if I’m trusting you, then I’m not policing everything you’re doing.” For most leaders, cultivating that kind of vulnerability means doing things that makes them twitch: creating spaces without fixed purpose, letting conversations wander, tolerating a bit of “who’s actually responsible for this?” and backing ideas that don’t yet make sense on paper.
That’s how the five routes in our Dispatch from 2035 came about. They grew out of unhurried conversations with more than a hundred people around the world over dinners, coffees, and the odd side chat, with not a PowerPoint deck in sight. Because we were focused on connecting over coordinating we were able to give people the space to speculate and find threads worth pulling.
Swarm intelligence thrives because there’s no single point of failure. But to get that resilience, we have to stop being the single point of control.
Which, let’s be honest, is the hardest habit of all to break.
🛠️ Conditions for emergence
Map your coordination instinct
Next time you’re tempted to ‘drive alignment’ or ‘ensure coordination’, pause. Ask instead, ‘What would happen if I didn’t try to choreograph what should emerge?’ or ‘What conditions can I create that would allow this to self-organise?’.
Trust the noise
Emergence looks messy from the outside. Conversations meander. Ideas collide. Not everything makes immediate sense. That’s not a bug. Much like the locusts rely on noise to help maintain collective alignment, we can rely on randomness to create robustness.
Measure the conditions, not the outcomes
Instead of tracking deliverables, track psychological safety. Connection density. Information flow. Trust levels. Those are the conditions that allow emergence.
📚 Brain Food
📖 Read: Jimmy Wales’ The Seven Rules of Trust: A Blueprint for Building Things That Last. A call for creating positive loops of accountability and creativity at a time when the public’s trust in institutions is at an all-time low.
📺 Watch: A 45 minute interview with Wales in which he expounds on the themes of the book, and also talks about the potential impact of AI on the Wikipedia model.
📖 Read: “Leaderless, tribeless, classless and fearless.” That was the tagline for the #RejectFinanceBill protests in Kenya which “Shunned traditional political affiliations and adopted a spontaneous, decentralised model.” This article from Hivos looks at how doing away with a clear hierarchy, allowed the protests to continue and grow.
📊 Explore: Our full Dispatch from 2035 includes the recording from the launch event and interviews with practitioners already carving out the five routes we have identified.
This month’s mystery links
Your reward for reading down this far…
There are currently 1,639 people receiving this newsletter. In the year 1639, the fresco Allegory of Divine Providence and Barberini Power (Wikipedia link, obviously) was completed, filling the ceiling of the grand salon of the Palazzo Barberini in Rome. The fresco includes “a swarm of heraldic giant golden bees” which represent industriousness, fidelity, and union, and were part of the emblem of the Barberini family.
If you’d like to help us add to the size of our swarm, then click the button to send this issue to a friend or colleague: