Thinking Differently with Rod Collins

In this final episode of our second season, we explore a way that business leaders can access the richest and most untapped resource in their organizations: the collective intelligence of their own people. We describe the sequence of activities for leading a Collective Intelligence Workshop, which is a large group process for achieving consensus on how to handle complex problems by rapidly uncovering the common ground and insights needed to craft breakthrough solutions. 

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Transformation is about moving from a caterpillar to a butterfly. The typical human response to fear is usually not transformative. Instead we tend to avoid risk, focus on the short-term, and turn everything into a zero-sum game where we find it hard to trust each other. John Hagel shares insights from his new book, The Journey Beyond Fear, on how we can escape from the hazards of fear and draw on positive emotions to truly transform our lives and businesses in dramatic ways.

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What’s most fascinating about collective intelligence is that it inherently corrects for the human biases that plague individual thinking. Even experts have biases, which explains why the best intelligence doesn’t come from the best individual thinkers, but rather from the cogent aggregation of multiple perspectives.

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How is it that sometimes, when we come together in groups, we are extraordinarily brilliant and, at other times, we are incredibly dumb? Whether a group is extraordinarily intelligent often depends upon whether or not four conditions are present. If even one of these four conditions is missing, the opportunity for collective intelligence is lost and the danger of groupthink—or worse yet, a mob–is very real.

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In the coming decade, two transformative events will dramatically change how healthcare works. The connection of all humans and things via a common digital network will accelerate both the quantity and quality of healthcare data. And the proliferation of human collective intelligence via sophisticated artificial intelligence systems will revolutionize how intelligence works in the healthcare system.

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Because efficient practices are often barriers to adaptability, leaders need to become more agile if they are to respond to the challenges of a rapidly changing world. This means abandoning centuries of conventional wisdom and adopting new rules for building and leading organizations.

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If business leaders want to effectively solve complex problems, they will need to learn to think differently. They will need to understand that, while experts are valuable voices in discovering solutions, they are not the only voices that matter. Complex problems are best solved by aggregating the collective intelligence of multiple perspectives and avoiding the hazards of experts.

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The human brain is a paradox. While it is capable of producing highly developed analytical and creative intelligence, it is also prone to make apparently senseless errors. Why is this so? The answer is that people are nowhere near as rational as they think and are incredibly susceptible to unconscious biases that influence human decision-making to a far greater extent than we realize.

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Collective intelligence is a powerful tool because it brings together the knowledge of both experts and nonexperts and moves a group to a higher level of intelligence where they can identify creative solutions that no one of us could ever achieve alone.

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It’s not easy to detach from outcome, especially if you are absolutely convinced that you know the answer. However, if your goal is to move beyond endless and unproductive debate and get something done that would make a difference in people’s lives, detaching from outcome, understanding different points of view, scaling collective intelligence, and building an emergent shared understanding is far more likely to accomplish the work that needs to be done.

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