Since we tell each other everything, we can say it to each other : there are ready-made expressions that are so present in speeches that we end up finding them insignificant, even annoying.

The notion of " Collective Intelligence" is today seriously threatened by this scourge of the word which makes such a hit that it ends up ringing hollow. This is very annoying because collective intelligence, real intelligence, which translates into actions, is very much needed in companies. It is urgent to reinvest the concept of collective intelligence with meaning.

 

 

 

If we already knew how to define intelligence...

The first problem with collective intelligence is to define intelligence itself. The question has plagued philosophers and scientists since Antiquity, parents and psychologists for several decades. At the very least, we agree that intelligence is the ability to learn and adapt. But that's a bit short, because in this case, anyone who is able to pick up on signals from their environment and react to them by learning a bit of a lesson from their experience for the next few times could be considered a seed of genius.

 

Some people therefore like to bring to the definition of intelligence a dimension of apprehension of complexity : intelligence would begin when, faced with a diversity of information, possibly disordered, possibly carrying contrary messages, one would be able to implement cognitive skills. Seen like this, intelligence is closer to the process. But it is not certain that we will always find our processes so clever, nor those who follow them obediently, to the letter, so cunning.

 

 

So, we go up a level and we find a definition of intelligence that includes the ability to solve dilemmas. Except that for some, the moral problem is soluble in beliefs, which, without excluding intelligence, are not necessarily the most convincing manifestation of it.

 

So, is intelligence to be found in the ability to conceptualize ? Except that we met more than one intellectual who, how can I put it, lacked intelligence... Uh, emotional intelligence? Being intelligent would also mean having a sense of situations, a bit of empathy, a few soft-skills that are not useless to evolve with agility in a diverse and constantly changing world.

 

 

 

Being " in (good) intelligence " : a relational art

Most contemporary approaches to human intelligence approach the question from the angle of individual qualities. But this is to forget that historically, intelligence means connivance. Those who get along secretly are " in intelligence ". Those who know how to preserve the quality of relations, peacefully, diplomatically and seek compromise, live " in harmony ".

 

From this perspective, intelligence is not so much the expression of each person's abilities as the manifestation of a common balance. In other words, our individual intelligence is above all a matter of our sense of responsibility for what is shared. Relational ecology is at stake: awareness of oneself and its impact on the environment, preservation of the resources of others and the commons, contribution to the creation of value within a chain of interdependencies.

 

 

 

Collaborative intelligence, sophisticated gregariousness

It was entomologists who first became interested in collective intelligence by observing the organization of interdependencies in certain insects. Edward O. Wilson devoted part of his life to studying the way ants communicate with each other and established behavioral rules that the entire colony knew how to change according to the characteristics of the environment.

 

Fascinating ! Fascinating to see these creatures with brains smaller than a pinhead get organized, it's one thing, but above all to adapt.

It's fascinating to see them absorb a traffic jam so efficiently and quickly that it is enough to make all engineers looking for solutions for the ring road green with envy at rush hour.

It is fascinating to observe how the harvesters bring back to the colony foodstuffs that will make up a menu containing all the nutrients necessary to balance the needs of the members of the colony, as if they had checked in the community's pantry what was and what was missing before leaving to do the shopping.

 

On the strength of these observations, Wilson founded a new discipline in the human sciences: sociobiology. It intends to propose a reading of Darwin's evolutionary theories applied to individual and collective behavior. Breaking with the innate distinction between acquired skills, this " behavioural ecology" approach highlights a natural propensity of certain gregarious species (including humans) to work collectively to maintain the biodiversity necessary for the survival of the species, but also to develop intelligent solutions to act faster or more efficiently, and to implement projects that go beyond the immediate usefulness, to free forms of expression (randomly, art...).

 

 

 

Madness or wisdom of the crowds?

Yes, then, in the world of ants or that of kissing bears, okay ; in humans, from time to time perhaps. But more often than not, the collective gives us a worrying picture of abuses : social laziness that makes everyone in a group start to imagine that others will work in their place ; dilution of responsibilities which means that in a collective, no one feels directly concerned by anything ; training effects that see nice guys taken in isolation turn into horrible rascals when they act in a gang... There is a lot to be afraid of crowds !

 

In his 1895 book, Psychology of Crowds, the anthropologist Gustave Le Bon bluntly described them as " crazy ". It highlights a " mental unity" of the group, independent of the mentalities of the individuals who compose it. One of the strong characteristics of this " mental unit" is the extreme sensitivity to beliefs, circumstances, and hazards.

 

In other words, according to Le Bon, the crowd is the favorite breeding ground for biases, immediate reactions, and irrational decisions. With this, collectives are sympathetic organisms (in the biological sense of the term) very conducive to contagions : (potentially false) ideas and rumors, suggestions and movements spread at high speed. Crowds are very difficult to control, the scientist tells us.

 

 

A little more than a century later, the American essayist James Surowiecki responded to Le Bon in a book entitled The Wisdom of Crowds. Since the collective is a " mental entity" in itself on the one hand and is very receptive to its environment on the other, there is nothing a priori to indicate that it is necessarily stupid, unreasonable and excessive. The author goes further by demonstrating that a group of amateurs is at least as capable (if not more) of finding a relevant solution to a problem than a single expert. And to refer to various experiences of simple or complex problems to which a group of individuals with shared experiences or confronting points of view arrive at effective or innovative responses.

 

For example, if we ask 1000 people to estimate the weight of an ordinary object that everyone is used to using (a saucepan, a book, etc.), none of them will give the exact mass, but the average will be close to a few grams of the weight measured by a scale. Another example is self-support groups bringing together people with diseases: by sharing their experience of treatments, their practices for managing side effects, their solutions for pain relief, their experiences for improving their quality of life, patients co-develop care protocols showing rates of improvement in health that are mostly higher than in patients who are only followed by Doctors.

 

And it is not only the psychological effect of the support provided by the group that is at play : the caregivers collect the usual information from these groups to integrate it into their practices... Because this information is relevant !

 

 

 

Giving the collective the means of its intelligence

The collective is perfectly capable of intelligence, it's proven. It remains to be seen how, on the one hand, to prevent him from being unreasonable and, on the other hand, to put him in a position to produce a value that each individual could not create on his or her own.

 

For the first question, that of preventing the risks of group effect drifts, it is on the side of inclusion management that we find a lot of answers. The deviance of a group is mainly the result of frustrations related to the Janis effect. The Janis effect is the tendency of a collective to move towards pseudo-consensus to solve its problems.

 

In reality, the collective that falls into the temptation to rely on the majority opinion, the authority or the most central positions, does not solve any problem : it only avoids conflicts. Concretely : we have 10% extremes on one side, radically opposed to 10% extremes on the other ; Then, we have 10% to 30% of conservative positions (in the sense of wanting to maintain the situation as much as possible) and around it a soft underbelly of undecided people leaning more or less to one side or the other of the most radical positions.

 

The Janis effect will operate when, after having disqualified the points of view identified as the most extreme, the center will agglomerate the floating majority. In a work group confronted with a problem of change : those who want to change everything by projecting themselves into the future (the revolutionaries), those who want a return to a previous situation (the reactionaries) are discarded, after which the central nucleus, silently and passively resistant to change, brings back to itself those who aspire to transformation but agree to temporize, those who are in inner conflict between the desire to change and the comfort of inertia, those who are aware of the need for change while being afraid, etc.

 

In the end, we change nothing or almost nothing... And we terribly frustrate the most radical positions who will tend to brace themselves and react forcefully, dragging into their protest movement those who have falsely rallied to the consensus. To remove this Janis effect, we will first have to refrain from disqualifying divergent opinions : we may not agree with them, but it will be essential to let them express themselves and listen to them. Then it will be necessary to energize the volatile majority so that it acts as a creative assembler of the various ideas proposed.

 

 

For the group to become a creative agent, a producer of new solutions, a certain number of conditions must be met :

 

• Trust : the trust that individuals have within themselves but above all the trust that runs through their relationship. In concrete terms, this implies the possibility of disagreeing without this undermining mutual esteem.

 

• The management of authority relationships: a collective is even more biased than an individual by the statutory or perceived authority of those who speak within it. For example, the " expert " will benefit from a better listening a priori than the average person ; This is not shocking in itself, unless it implies that no explanation will be asked of the expert on what he or she is saying, at the risk of letting him or her say things that are imprecise, incomplete or influenced by his or her own cognitive biases.

It is therefore essential to monitor all the phenomena of self-censorship that are likely to take hold in a group as soon as individuals enter it with specific legitimacy.

• Participation : a dynamic collective must disarm personal postures to leave full room for the participatory posture of each individual. In particular, it is a matter of preventing the group from being made up in public of the strongest personalities who would come to perform there. It is also necessary to allow unexpected contributions (for example, the speaking on a subject by a person who is not at all identified as a connoisseur of it or the expression of emotions in an individual whose status and functions usually lead him to take positions based on reason...). To do this, it will be essential to consider that speaking in a collective is not only the point of view of an individual (and that it could be held against him in other circumstances) but that it is first and foremost an act of participation that reflects the dynamics of exchanges.

• Plasticity : to maintain its intelligence, a collective needs flexibility and modularity. It must be able to integrate new elements by continuously adapting both to the expression of new points of view and to changes in the surrounding context.