Collective Intelligence and New Business Opportunities

Ralph Tathaagata

The role of experts in several areas of human endeavour is coming under intense scrutiny and criticism. A tiny but significant school of thought argues that large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant, better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions and even predicting the future.
“Experts own the world!” they say. No other classification of human mental output holds more sway over our lives than this.
Experts appear with predictable regularity in courtrooms, at congressional and parliamentary hearings, corporate retreats, and academic symposia as well as in personal lives in the persons of doctors, lawyers, financial planners/analysts, spiritual advisors and a plethora of others.
Presumably, experts in a particular subject area enjoy considerable consensus among themselves. Meanwhile, recent research indicates that in a number of fields, experts fall below 50 percent. These fields include stock-picking, livestock judging and clinical psychology.
Interestingly, the subject of collective intelligence is garnering interest in the corporate world. How is it possible that input from random aggregations of people can often outdo a galaxy of PhDs in choosing the best course of action in an undertaking? Someone might ask and argue.
Many companies are organized like a machine. They are made up of various moving parts that predetermine the general nature of outcomes. Each part has a designated function and the role of management is to see that each part is doing what it is supposed to do, and to keep the parts working in harmony. These hierarchical social structures, more often than not, do not permit collective intelligence to develop and thrive. People called CEOs, COOs, CFOs, CMOs and the like are a company’s in-house experts and egg-heads. Lowlifes on the front lines have neither the knowledge nor the thinking skills needed to forge wise decisions.
But there is a better way to organize and operate a company. Instead of organizing a company artificially like a clock-work mechanism, organizing it more naturally as a complex adaptive system permits the wisdom of the crowd to form and express itself.
Like the self-correcting, self-organizing characteristics of Wikipedia, companies that are organized and operate along the lines of a complex adaptive system have an ability to make course changes much faster than mechanically organized companies. They are also quicker to spot and exploit new business opportunities.
Many agree that the scale and pace of change that companies face today are unprecedented. Surviving and thriving have never been more challenging. On the other hand, the opportunities are also unprecedented. And research has shown that companies that are most successful in developing new business opportunities tend to be those that operate as complex adaptive systems that tap the wisdom of the crowd that flows from the operation of collective intelligence.
Finally, for any company to enjoy the greatest success in adapting to the changes and challenges of today’s business, it is necessary it becomes less of mechanical
in organization and operators but more of a complex adaptive systems organism. Hierarchical, command and control organizations are highly incompatible with the free-flowing, open source nature of modern day businesses that position for the 21st century. Companies should therefore strive to tap the wisdom of the crowd: to enlist the collective intelligence in their organizations in problem solving.