The Distance Between Us: Turning Individual Intelligence into Collective Intelligence

Imagine you’re a student in the Pythagorean School in 500 BC. When you’re not frolicking in the waves of the Ionian Sea, enjoying some ouzo and dolma for dinner, or carefully tracing a diagram of a lyre to calculate its exact volume and resonance, you come upon a profound discovery: the world is round.

That is, it’s not flat. It’s definitely not flat. Based on everything you know about geometry, trigonometry, and physics, whatever else the world may be or was that day, it’s definitely not and wasn’t flat. Pretty exciting stuff! For one, you can collect on your longstanding bet with Skepticles and maybe rub his nose in it a little bit. Two, you have established a new fact in the world, which doesn’t happen very often when you think about it.

But wait… did you really establish a fact?

Perception and facts are tricky things. They are not mutually exclusive, but they are philosophically and conceptually distinct. I can see a red stop sign where you may see a gray stop sign. Who has the facts? As an individual, it’s hard enough to come to grips with your own experience of reality. When we transition that process into larger and larger groups of people and inject social, political, and financial pressures into the equation, the effort multiplies exponentially.

I’ll suggest a hypothesis to underscore this point: when in conflict, the effort required to convert an individual fact to a collective fact is proportional to the number of people in the room multiplied by one minus the level of trust (expressed as a decimal) throughout that population. How confusing is that?

Let’s see it another way:

E = p(1-t)

For example, when you ran up to Pythagoras, showed him your work, and said, “Guess what, dude, the world is flat.” He said, “Yep, seems like it.” He took your fact on faith, credit, and the validity of your work. Two people, 100% trust - very little effort to convert. Based on our formula, that gives us: E = 2(1-1) or E = 0.

Based on Pythagoras’s response, the rest of the school followed suit. About a hundred people, 90% trust, still a pretty doable effort to convert. Based on our formula: E = 100(1-.9) or E = 10.

Then the Romans caught on. Thousands of people, 30-50% trust at best, and now it’s getting harder. Again, through our formula: E = 100,000(1-.3) or E = 70,000.

Then, ever so gradually, the rest of the world recognized it as true, but not without hiccups. As the perception circulated to larger and larger groups with lower and lower quotients of trust, the effort to translate the perception to a fact increased. It continues to be a challenge today.

This is on something as simple, well documented, and supported by scientific, photographic, videographic, mathematical, and first-hand evidence as the earth being round. Can you imagine what it’s like to go through an entire month, quarter, or year of building a nebulous product enhancement that requires 2 or 3 business teams and 9 or 10 technology teams? How many perceptions did those individuals have? How many facts? It’s amazing we could agree on anything about the experience, how it went, or what came out of it.

What if you could translate your individual intelligence - the perceptions you have validated into fact - into collective intelligence with the least amount of effort? What if we all knew the earth was round in 500 BC? How much further might we have come as a civilization? Here are some things that may help in improving trust, focusing efforts and attention, and facilitating group conversation that will lower your overall level of effort and improve fact-building consensus:

• Retrospectives, if nothing else, are about building our collective intelligence through shared understanding of shared experiences. Yes, you may get to celebrate success, complain ad nauseum, and plan for improvement, but you’ll also be smarter. Guaranteed. The simple act of participating, listening, and actively and honestly engaging in the process will improve your ability to respond to your environment after the fact.
• Explore ways to increase psychological safety. Increased trust means decreased TAT on collective learning. Remember the formula: E = p(1-t). As t approaches 100%, E approaches 0, regardless of how many people are involved. Trust has the most dramatic impact of any number in the equation.
• Listen and share with an open mind and a willingness to try.
• Demonstrate and advocate for the value of sharing your time with people in service of your collective intelligence. It’s an investment for both of you, and one that has incredible returns. Act and speak in ways that represent your investment and your respect for theirs.
• Let everything be your teacher (wisdom courtesy of Jon Kabat Zinn). Assume there may be more facts, or more to your facts, than just what you know right now.
• Build a story together. We both know something new. How can we best express or live out that knowledge as we go back out into the world as individuals?
• … I’m confident there are many, many more, and I would love to hear them. What would you suggest to make turning individual intelligence into collective intelligence as easy as possible for all of us?

Now let’s take a look at the other side…

In 1835, James Bowman Lindsay held a public demonstration of an incandescent light bulb 40 years before Thomas Edison would begin his experiments with electric light. That’s right, turns out Edison did not invent the light bulb. Yet, how have we come nearly 200 years without really knowing who Lindsay was or his contribution to what is nearly the only man-made object easily seen from space?

Lindsay didn’t work on the light bulb for very long after he successfully demonstrated it, but he also didn’t do much more to share his understanding or invention. He didn’t even attempt to claim it as intellectual property. Within our environment today, we may not realize how many similarities abound in the activities and behaviors that hamper our ability to convert individual intelligence into collective intelligence:

• Unilateral communication. When we are always telling, it’s hard to hear ourselves or others clearly enough to take in new viewpoints and expand our understanding.
• “What” without “Why”. If we share only what we want or what cannot happen, we lose out on knowing what is important to each of us, what drives us, what we’re really wanting to align on, and very possibly what the best solution is for our customers and ourselves.
• Keeping quiet. Had Lindsay not done a public demonstration of his invention, we may never have known about it and we may never have built upon the advances it represented. Overcome that shyness!
• Indulging competition. If we only obtain knowledge for us to “win” as individuals or departments, we engender a culture that values individual successes more than collective success and possibly individual achievements at the sacrifice of collective achievement.
• Overvaluing being busy. It’s easy to see value in doing what we do everyday - the same work, ideas, tangible tasks and activities that we see as inherently valuable because they can be captured on paper or show up in reviews. But, one thing we may have learned in school is that getting an A on the test or turning in every assignment on time did not translate into learning or understanding. You can do all of the work with none of the education! It wasn’t the busy work that made the difference. It was the time and effort spent in attention to the new information, consciously trying to assimilate it into what we know, and intentionally discussing it with our peers, teachers, family, and friends.
• Confusing production for progress. Much the same way we can overvalue being busy, we can mistake completing checklists for innovation or effecting change. Lindsay could have published a template for his light bulb, and many, many more scientists and engineers could have followed suit in building more of the same bulb. Edison’s patent, as it turns out, was for “Improvement in Electric Light” not for “Yet Another Light Bulb”. Production is great and necessary for our present survival. Progress is what brings forward our new future.

In a company with tens, hundreds, or thousands of employees serving hundreds, thousands, or millions of customers, I can only imagine how much greater our challenges may be than those Lindsay and Edison faced. They were pursuing their passions as individuals. We are often charged with improving the lives of those around us by rallying a vast commercial enterprise. How much more important is it that we invest our collective time and effort in becoming smarter? Our mission and our ability to operate comes from our customers, and we are never the only option. Do our customers really want us to be smarter in days or decades?

When you hear a suggestion of spending 4 hours bringing 100 people together to build our collective intelligence around what we’ve experienced, you may think 1 hour is a more reasonable investment. But, at 36 seconds per person, can you really build any shared understanding? What are you really investing in at that point? It’s not hard to see how that might be considered a waste of time. Maybe suggest 8 hours instead, knowing that the collective intelligence you build in hearing just 5 minutes per person may be 8x more time and effort, but it may lead to taking decades off the time it takes for us to know the same things, to leverage that new knowledge in meaningful ways, and to realize progress in ourselves, our communities, and our customers.