When collaboration creates more than the sum of its parts

When I was a strategic planner in 2008, I joined the City of Melbourne and was lucky to work on the Future Melbourne plan making program. Future Melbourne was the community’s 10 year vision for the growing city. It was formulated with extensive stakeholder engagement that included a purpose built wiki that enabled the drafting of the plan to take the form of a living document anyone could edit. Think Wikipedia, but for a city plan.

In addition to over 500 registered users –representing internal staff and other government organisations– during the open editing process over 100 members of the general public made edits, from adding sentences or paragraphs to correcting typos. Edits by the public often came with lively debate in the wiki discussion forum. There was not a single instance of vandalism, which was a major concern prior to launching the wiki.

This was a world first application of collaborative governance and the facilitation of collective intelligence.

Tina

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Collective intelligence

Collective intelligence is shared or group intelligence that emerges from collaboration, integration, competition and differentiation among many individuals.

It encompasses a wide range of participatory methods that leverage both human input and technological tools to solve complex problems and generate innovative solutions. NESTA, the UK innovation agency, explains (Ryan, Gambrell & Noveck 2020): 

“When groups of people work together online, they can mobilise a wider range of information, ideas and insights. When such collaboration results in more than the sum of its parts, that is collective intelligence.”

NESTA’s definition of collective intelligence, and this Skills Brief, focuses on its meaning in the context of computer science, design, network science and organisational science. Other fields such as biology, sociology, political science and psychology do not necessarily include the utilisation of technology as being central to the creation of collective intelligence (Malone & Bernstein eds 2015). In any case, it plays a central role in platforms like Wikipedia and Google, where collective input on online platforms leads to the creation of vast repositories of knowledge. In addition to adding legitimacy to the results, the pursuit of collective intelligence can facilitate more diverse perspectives as well as overcome 'groupthink' and individual biases.

Douglas Engelbart, a pioneer in human-computer interaction, predicted in 1962 that three people working together working in this mode could be more than three times as effective in solving complex problems as one person. He coined the term ‘collective IQ’ and advocated its development in business and society to benefit from the multiplier effect provided by collective intelligence in problem solving.

Since its initial recognition, researchers have attempted to quantify gains of collective intelligence. For example, psychologists have found that the collective intelligence of human groups outperforms average individual and maximum individual intelligence of group members (Woolley et al 2010).

 

  Performance of groups vs individuals (Woolley et al 2010)

 

Recent developments in the conceptualisation of collective intelligence incorporate the potential of artificial intelligence to amplify collective intelligence capabilities. MIT researcher Thomas W. Malone calls this emerging augmented collective intelligence ‘Superminds.’   

 

 Augmented collective intelligence (Giacomelli 2023)

 

In the context of organisations, augmented collective intelligence powered by novel smart technologies has the potential to transform organisational architectures into highly networked, adaptive collectively intelligent systems. Through the interoperation of large networks composed of both human and machine nodes enterprise innovation teams can harness the internal and external knowledge ecosystems as an extension of their own cognitive capacities. This new organisation design comprising large numbers of people and machines can already be adopted (Giacomelli 2023).