Collective intelligence:

From pyramidal to global

Jean-Francois Noubel1

Evolution has provided humankind with specific social skills based on collaboration and mutual support. Today humanity is seeking global wisdom driven organizations.

Abstract

The main stakes for humanity are not hunger, poverty, sustainability, peace, healthcare, education, economy, natural resources or a host of other issues but our capability to build new social organizations to replace those that no longer provide such outcomes. Our main stake is Collective Intelligence.

Today large organizations encounter insurmountable difficulties when dealing with the complexity and the unexpectedness of the world when operating against a global backdrop. They undergo conflicts of interest in many areas-between profitability and sustainability, secrecy and transparency, values and value, individual and collective dynamics, and knowledge fertilizing-that opens-and competition-that closes.

What most medium and large organizations have in common is an infrastructure based on pyramidal hard-coded social maps, command and control, labor division, and a monetary system stimulated by scarcity. Until recently, this social architecture was the only information system at our disposal to pilot and organize complex human edifices. We call it pyramidal collective intelligence. It remains efficient as long as the environment remains stable, but it becomes vulnerable and inefficient in fluctuating contexts, namely when markets, knowledge, culture, technology, external interactions, economy or politics keep changing faster than the capability of the group to respond.

Evolution has provided humankind with specific social skills based on collaboration and mutual support. These skills reach their maximum effectiveness within small groups of ten to twenty people, but no more, where the individual and collective benefit is higher than what would have been obtained if everyone remained alone. We call it original collective intelligence. As individuals, we all know what it is because it is very likely that we have experienced it at some degree in our lives.

Well-trained, small teams have interesting dynamic properties. These include transparency, a gift economy, a collective awareness, a polymorphic social structure, a high learning capacity, a convergence of interest between the individual and collective levels, interactions characterized by human warmth, and, above all, an excellent capability to handle complexity and the unexpected.

Is it possible for large organizations to benefit from the same properties? Can they become as reactive, flexible, transparent, responsive, and innovative as small teams? Can they evolve even further, toward a global Collective Intelligence? Can they conjugate their interests with overriding concerns of humanity such as ethics, sustainability, etc…? The answer today is a resounding yes. It is not only possible, but absolutely necessary for not just the efficiency of these organizations but above all for the well-being of human society.

The aim of this paper is to provide the key concepts underlying collective intelligence and to explore how modern organizations and individuals can concretely learn how to increase their collective intelligence, i.e. their capability to collectively invent the future and reach it in complex contexts. This will draw the guidelines of a universal governance, provide an outline of the next governance paradigms and help us forecast an economy in which competition and collaboration as well as values and value are reconciled.

About collective intelligence

Collective intelligence is neither a new concept nor a discovery. It is what shapes social organizations-groups, tribes, companies, teams, governments, nations, societies, guilds, etc…-where individuals gather together to share and collaborate, and find an individual and collective advantage that is higher than if each participant had remained alone. Collective intelligence is what we term a positive-sum economy.

On a strictly behavioral level and if we exclude the symbolic layer of culture, collective intelligence communities are not exclusively a human prerogative, these are observed within many social animal species, from the ant-hill to the wolf pack and the fish shoal, when the emerging level is manifestly smarter than its individual components.

In human societies, different forms of collective intelligence coexist and mainly coordinate and express themselves in the symbolic space. Let's review them so that we are able to understand the mutation and evolution towards a Collective Intelligence (with capital letters) at the planetary level.

Civilization and collective pyramidal intelligence

Labor division, authority, scarce money, standards and norms

How can the two limits of original collective intelligence-the number of participants and distance separating them-be bypassed? What social machinery could be implemented in order to coordinate and maximize the power of the masses? How could communities of communities be harmonized and synchronized? For tasks such as building, planning, cultivating, transporting or manufacturing and creating such as erecting temples at the glory of the Gods, human works required more and more muscular strength as well as specialization, namely a large number of participants. This was a situation that characterized the beginning of history (defined as the birth of writing) and the early days of large civilizations.

This mutation is absolutely original since it shows almost no perceptible change in our physical constitution, unlike in the animal world. Our brain, our body and our genetic code are the same as they were a few tens of thousand years ago, yet all has changed. The piece is played on another stage, the one of the noosphere-the mind-on which the “invisible” ecology of symbols, myths, knowledge, beliefs, data, is what organizes the social life, visible to our organic senses (biosphere).

With the invention of the writing, man has open the era (area) of the territory. Signs engraved on physical supports were first used for counting, managing, norming, lay down the outlines and the surface of a territory, list, define belongings and exclusions, permissions and restrictions.

For the first time, a message was able to circulate without being physically attached to its issuer, in a different time and space. The qualifier, the fact, the counting, the law, the description… objectivized themselves in the circulating object graven with symbols, and sealed the object-signifier-signified trio.

This symbolic labeling of the world was also applied to humans themselves. Thus name, profession, qualification, wealth, facts, misdemeanors, caste and lineage became important attributes that positioned an individual in the social geography. Writing is, in essence, the core technology of the State.

Equipped with this extraordinary capacity to send signifiers over long distances toward a virtually unlimited number of recipients, pyramidal collective intelligence was launched and gave birth to civilizations and their States.

The four dynamic principles of pyramidal collective intelligence

Four fundamental principles constitute the universal signature of these human edifices, no matter whether these are companies, administrations, governments, armies, religious organizations or empires. These are:

1. Labor division: everyone has to cast himself in a predefined role in order to allow people interchange. An immediate corollary is the division of access to information, which establishes a context opposed to holopticism, i.e. panopticism-controlled and partitioned information-that we will detail later.
2. Authority: from divine right, by filiation, by merit, by expertise, by law, by diplomas… No matter the legitimating principle, authority institutes a pawl effect, an asymmetry in the information transmission between the emitter and the receiver, and sets up a command and control dynamics (C2). Authority determines the rules, assigns rights and prerogatives, organizes the territories (thus labor division), distributes wealth by means of the money.
3. A scarce currency: money is historically a social convention and an information system made to allow the market to function. It serves as a medium of exchange and a store of value. Unlike what many people believe, scarcity is not an inherent quality of money, but an artificially maintained property. Scarcity generates channels of allegiance from those who need toward those who have. It naturally catalyzes the hierarchies of pyramidal collective intelligence. This phenomenon of hierarchization is strongly accelerated by the Pareto effect (the more we have, the more we earn) that we will explore later.
4. Standards and norms: they allow the objectivizing as well as the circulation and the interoperability of knowledge within the community. Language is itself a standard. As for circulating artifacts (electronic components, pieces of machinery, materials, etc…) they all have a 'jointing pattern' made to chain their added value and build more complex functional sets2.

The strength and the stability of organizations built on pyramidal collective intelligence largely stem from the fact its four founding principles mutually reinforce and legitimize themselves. Wealth is distributed by those in authority, hierarchies are catalyzed by scarce money, inclusion-exclusion rules are established by standards and norms, and so on.

Today pyramidal collective intelligence still drives most aspects of human organizations. From the point where the number of participants and the intervening distances exceed that inherent in original collective intelligence, this basic form of such intelligence is no longer possible. By organizing and synchronizing communities based on original collective intelligence, pyramidal collective intelligence has permitted creating and governing of cities and countries, invention of aircraft, launch of satellites into space, establishment of gigantic armies, conducting musical symphonies, discovery of vaccines, etc…. Furthermore, during the past 120 years, the rapid growth of telecommunications has significantly increased the growth in and power of this form of collective intelligence.

The past 120 years, the rapid growth of telecommunications has significantly increased the levers of power of this form of collective intelligence.

The pyramidal intelligence has an Achilles heel: unlike original collective intelligence, it shows a structural incapacity to adapt to the moving and unpredictable grounds of complexity.

In some way these are the weaknesses of its strength:

• Work division: the social architecture (organization charts, job descriptions, information access levels, etc…) is hardcoded. There is no way this structure can self-modify when confronted with changing circumstances, for example as in the case of a sports team. Whatever the efforts made to improve and optimize the flow of information, the intrinsic limits of hierarchized structures will always show up, with their pawl effects and their dynamics made of territories and prerogatives;
• Authority: top management, nearly always reduced to ruling minorities are by nature unable to perceive and process the tremendous flow of information that pours into the large body of the organization they are supposed to manage. This generates reductionist visions that become a source of conflict between the 'head' and the base;
• Scarce money: scarcity breeds competition which minimizes collaboration, that is the capacity to self-adapt;
• Standards and norms: most of the time they are subordinated to a logic of competition. They serve a strategy of territorial occupation and monopolistic control by means of artificially rarefying knowledge (patents, intellectual property, etc…), rather than maximizing the permeability and the interoperability with the external environment. The most obvious example in the computer world is Microsoft Corporation's Windows operating system, the core of most microcomputers. The end user is dependent on the future evolutions of this code, must struggle to evolve into other environments, and must pay for any extra desired services such as licenses, labels, trainings, etc.

Indeed today's organizations are larded with infrastructural and human 'cabling' that are made to counterbalance the weaknesses of strict hierarchical architecture: information systems, intranets, KM, project oriented organization, works councils (that shuffle human relationships), ERP, HR management, etc. But the fundamental structure remains, based on the industrial dynamics of mass transformation via the principle of economies of scale.

Today humanity suffers cruelly from the limits of organizations based on pyramidal collective intelligence. Their deficiency in face of systemic complexity is expressed by a common symptom: the fact they wander into directions that can be opposite to the will of their own participants, either because internal coordination is virtually impossible, or because leaders use de facto opacity-even cultivate and legitimate it-to take advantage of their power.

Toward a global collective intelligence

The human, by nature, is always in search of a higher level of consciousness that allows him to guide and understand his present condition. This quest happens at the individual level and throughout all humanity.

Original collective intelligence transcends and includes the individual. It transcends as a differentiated emerging entity appears; it includes the individual in a harmonious relationship that fosters his/her evolution and provides his/her meaning.

It seems that neither pyramidal collective intelligence nor swarm intelligence have proven to be able to transcend and include original collective intelligence. However, these two forms of large-scale organizations appear like transitory and necessary steps in evolution. Today, everything seems to show that THE transition toward a new level of consciousness at the humanity scale-and not only in small groups-is at work.

Everywhere new social species become observable in humanity. They possess the same characteristics as original collective intelligence (adaptability, direct connection between the individual and the emerging whole…) without its limitations (number of participants and distance between them). What these new communities have in common is social software and a new culture.

Social software-or socialware-consists in online shared software designed for self-governance, self-organization and self-actualization. It offers communities a wide new range of social dynamics and organizational possibilities that were not available in pyramidal collective intelligence. Collective memory, creativity and representation, asynchronous and synchronous spaces for conversation, tools for project management and consensus building, infinite virtual 3D interactive worlds are examples of such new spaces. Wikis, blogs, tagging, social networks, social bookmarking, backlinking, transclusion, Linux, open source and free software are current words and concepts that players in this new world are familiar with.

This paradigm shift is easy to observe at the technological and social levels. It is also observable sociologically as a cultural shift everywhere on the globe, nourished by disenchantment with materialism and hedonism, and stimulated by limitations of pyramidal collective intelligence. Sociologist Paul H. Ray and psychologist Sherry Ruth Anderson coined this new population carrying this shift as cultural creatives. Cultural Creatives develop beyond the current paradigm of Modernists versus Traditionalists or Conservatists3. This culture is growing worldwide4; it is now building its identity and social structures.

Cultural Creatives are now grabbing new technologies for global governance, seeking to develop organizations that operate at a more embracing and encompassing level of awareness, at local and global levels.

Global wisdom driven organizations, and not just vitally driven organizations, might become a possibility in the near future.

Collective intelligence as a new discipline

Invent the tools for a universal governance (global, local, transversal, transcultural, etc…) while developing practical and immediate know-how for today's organizations, through an ethics of collaboration.

The issue of collective intelligence is to discover or invent a hereafter of the writing, a hereafter of the language so that information processing is everywhere distributed and coordinated. It shouldn't be the prerogative of separated social organs, but, on the contrary, it should naturally integrate with all human activities and come back into everyone's hands.

Pierre Lévy-Collective Intelligence

Definition

It is time now to present a short definition of collective intelligence as a phenomenon, whether this is the original form or the global scale version (Collective Intelligence):

Collective intelligence is the capacity for a group of individuals to envision a future and reach it in a complex context.

Certainly Collective Intelligence deserves to become a full discipline, with its formal framework, its empirical approach, its tools, its measuring instruments, its practical applications, and its ethical field?

Field of Collective Intelligence as a discipline

The Cartesian mechanistic thought process has fractioned the universe into three territories that are impervious but not antagonistic to one another: matter, life and mind. Each could only belong to one fief or kingdom, otherwise it would risk contradictions and schizophrenia. Physics doesn't explain poetry; neither does psychoanalysis explain cellular division. If we stay enclosed within this discontinuous space, research into and application of Collective Intelligence is a potpourri composed of mostly social and human sciences including arts, mathematics, theology, spiritual development, metaphysics, etc…

Actually the discipline of Collective Intelligence is fundamentally in keeping with the vast decompartmentalization process that animates the thought of this new millennium. Matter, life, and mind-physiosphere, biosphere and noosphere-are part of the huge evolutionary strides the universe is taking toward ever more complexity and higher consciousness. In this world everything is connected to everything, each thing possesses at the same time an inner dimension (that has to be interpreted), an outer dimension (that we perceive), an individual dimension (the agent) and a social dimension (the population, the society)5.

So the science of collective intelligence has for its object the study and the optimization of the inner-subjective and outer-objective emerging properties of communities. Its aim is to augment their being, evolution and fullness capacities. By doing so, it invents the tools for a universal governance (global, local, transversal, transcultural, etc…) while developing practical and immediate know-how for today's organizations, through an ethics of collaboration.

1 Founder and President of www.TheTransitioner.org, an international research network and think tank of pioneers who are committed to support the emergence of global wisdom driven organizations. Formerly he was one of the co-founders of AOL France and led an assortment of innovative high-tech companies.

2 We are not going to detail the difference between 'norms' and 'standards' here. We could also talk about 'culture,' a larger and more evocative universe, but this concept remains too approximate and subject to contradictory interpretation in which we don't want to enter for now.

3 The concept was presented in 2000 in their book The Cultural Creatives. How 50 Million People Are Changing the World (Harmony Books, NY).

4 Recent surveys prove this is growing in every country, findding from a few % up to a likely 30% in the USA.

5 See Ken Wilber. Integral Naked, at http://in.integralinstitute.org is his current web site. His older personal site is http://wilber.shambhala.com. See also the Wikipedia page, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Wilber.

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