COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE: THE TOOLS 

We have said it before: developing Collective Intelligence – in other words, making it so that even the most different individuals can work together in complementarity – is a complex yet essential challenge that simple intuition cannot resolve. For example, in their professional lives, everyone will face the following dilemmas at some point:

• How can we create a homogeneous action plan in a company composed of individuals who are by definition different?
• How can we support both collective and personal fulfillment (skills, aspirations, etc.)?
• How can we cohesively bring together both the values of the company and the values of everyone working in it?
• How can we both elaborate the processes and remain sufficiently flexible?
• When should we impose? When should we facilitate?
• How can we demonstrate loyalty toward both the hierarchy and our colleagues?
• And so on.

This negotiation, which is often difficult, requires the mastery of a certain number of tools unique to creating Collective Intelligence. On this point, we have a distinctly different, even disruptive, approach than what is usually offered in this area. For example:

• We do not overemphasize the notions of “world café, “learning tables,” and other group orientations – a kind of “cherry on the cake.”
• We evoke only very little the technological aspects, which for us have more to do with “connective” intelligence.

Why? You can dream up the best collective organizations or the best virtual sites of exchange, but if people do not learn to adopt behaviors and mindsets that are indispensable for Collective Intelligence, then the efficiency of the group will remain fragile, unstable, and inconsistent as time goes by.

With this in mind, we help people to develop:

• A spirit of constructive criticism based on facts, not opinions;
• Control over their emotions so they can remain stable and focused on results in all professional situations;
• A shift from “doing” to “delegating”;
• An ego that is more based on the positive impact that it can have on the collective;
• Increased ease and tolerance in the face of alterity, which is directly beneficial to the wealth of the company’s workforce;
• And so on.

We develop these tools using the following method: tell us what your goal is, and we will help you work on Collective Intelligence to achieve this goal. In other words, our work is anchored on the key issues of the company, which gives our actions a powerfully concrete dimension.

Collective Intelligence remains a pioneering topic that still clings excessively to the “what” or the recommendations. Instead of this, we prefer to concentrate more on the “how” or the implementation that is integrated into the company that allows us to both help people to advance in key areas – leadership, impact, etc. – while helping the company to resolve its unique issues and challenges.