Collective intelligence: Definition

Collective intelligence refers to the community’s capacity to combine intelligence and knowledge in order to reach a common goal, resulting from the quality of interactions between its members.

We go faster alone, we go further together

A local and limited information: each member only has a partial knowledge of the situation and isn’t aware of all the elements influencing the group.
A set of simple rules: each member obey a limited set of simple rules relative to the overall system’s performance.
Multiple social interactions: each member of the group is interacting with one or more other members of the group.
An emergent structure useful to the community: each member will benefit from working together (sometimes instinctively) and his or her own performance within a group is better than if he or she worked alone.

Collective intelligence within a working group

Collective intelligence is a “state of maturity of a team in which the level of collective performance is very high”.

Collective performance gathers two factors: productivity (ressources quality, decision-making process) and positivity.

You need to know how to build a group made of members with complementary skills, who trust each other, share common goals in order to enable the development of collective intelligence.

This group must be led and managed to promote:
1. Effective cooperation
2. The motivation and involvement of the participants
3. Different tasks that are understood and accepted by all
4. Everybody’s voice
5. Recognition of members’ contribution
The collective intelligence concept in management is more and more often discussed in companies and it has succeeded in becoming an effective method that generates concrete results.

Ants and collective intelligence

The collective intelligence concept is familiar to animals and especially to ants. Ants are social insects living in colonies or anthills made up of several thousand ants. This community is a super self-organized organism, it is a collective intelligence that comes from the combination of a large number of individuals and environment.

When an ant discovers a ressource, it returns to the nest, leaving a pheromone mark. This mark tends to attract other ants which will follow it to the food. They will then return to the nest and strengthen the mark themselves.

In this way, it creates a positive feedback loop (“snowball effect”).

To conclude

The collective intelligence can be said to be omnipresent in our society as long as a group of people work together to achieve a common project by putting their personal knowledge at the service of the group.

Now you have all the means to better understand the concept of collective intelligence. Thank you for reading this article.

Collective IntelligenceCollective intelligence, what is it?

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