About Collective IQ 0

Overview 1

Doug Engelbart coined the term Collective IQ as a measure of how well people can work together on important challenges – how quickly and intelligently they can anticipate or respond to a situation, leveraging their collective perception, memory, insight, vision, planning, reasoning, foresight, and experience into applicable knowledge. Collective IQ is ultimately a measure of effectiveness. 1a

Whether developing a new product or service, researching a topic of interest, seeking a cure for cancer, or improving conditions in underserved communities, a group's Collective IQ is a key determinant of how effectively it will respond to the challenges presented. More specifically, regardless of the end goals, it comes down to how quickly and intelligently the group can identify needs and opportunities, develop and deploy solutions, and incorporate lessons learned, while continuously iterating and adapting to changing conditions until the goals are met. 1b

The more complex and urgent the mission, the more critically a group depends on this Collective IQ capability. Thus it becomes increasingly important to understand what raises or lowers a group's Collective IQ, how to raise it, and how high is high enough to meet the challenges ahead. 1c

What Raises or Lowers Collective IQ? 2

Whereas an individual's IQ is based largely on the brain one is born with, a group's IQ is based almost entirely on (1) a group process for 'concurrently developing, integrating, and applying its knowledge' toward its mission, for which Doug affectionately coined the term CoDIAK, with (2) a shared memory of the knowledge gained, captured, retained, and accessed within a shared 'dynamic knowledge repository', or DKR. Collective IQ can thus be either impaired or boosted to a significant degree, simply by ignoring, obstructing, or proactively enhancing the CoDIAK and DKR process; in fact there is no known limit to how high a group's Collective IQ can be increased. => Learn more about CoDIAK and DKRs. 2a

How to Raise It 3

Organizations with a higher Collective IQ will see the benefit of proactively raising their Collective IQ to its highest potential, and will soon surpass those that don't. 3a

Boosting our Collective IQ begins with employing best practices and tools to facilitate these collective capabilities within a dynamic knowledge ecosystem, and then evolving that ecosystem with better and better tools and practices. 3b

Bootstrapping Brilliance is a powerful five-point strategy you can use for boosting Collective IQ and innovation capacity in your team, community, or organization. 3c

How High is High Enough? 4

As the rate and scale of change around the world increases exponentially, so must our collective ability to increase our Collective IQ in business and society to stay ahead of the curve and thrive. Creating brilliant businesses, initiatives, and institutions, with increasingly brilliant outcomes, will lead to brilliant societies and a brilliant world. 4a

  • The opportunities, problems, challenges we face are increasing exponentially on a global scale, so finding exponentially more powerful ways to collectively address important challenges is critical;

  • This is both a dire threat and a golden opportunity – companies, initiatives, regions, nations that kick into gear on this will likely surpass those that don’t in leaps and bounds.

  • The sooner we reach critical mass as a planet, the better off we all are, and thus there is tremendous value in sharing best practices, and in addressing this collectively as a Grand Challenge.

Further Inquiry 5

    Press Articles 5a

  • Why Some Teams Are Smarter Than Others -in this landmark study researchers measured collective intelligence of groups, by Anita Woolley (Carnegie Mellon), Tom Malone (MIT), and Christopher Chabris (Union College), published in the NY Times, January 2015.
    • 5a1

    From DEI 5b