Collective intelligence

What we’re starting to see is that collaboration is both an aspect of our transforming media landscape that we need to understand as communication scholars, and a skill that professional communicators require in order to thrive in the face of these transformations.

But if collaboration is a skill and a practice, what does good collaboration look like? Does it hinge on personal attributes, like honesty, or work habits like good time management? Is it more about relational qualities, like empathy? Does it require leadership? How can we collaborate effectively – what sort of qualities, attributes, mindsets, or conditions support collaboration… and what impedes it?

Google can provide us with an answer to these questions – but not necessarily through a Google search (the phrase “effective collaboration” produced 640,000,000 results when I typed it into Google, indicating that a collaboration between myself and Google’s search engine would not, in this instance, be productive without additional resources and a lot of time, or at least a more thoughtful set of search terms).

In 2012, Google launched an initiative to discover the secret ingredients of a perfect team. For two years, a group of researchers studied real teams of people, conducting interviews and surveys, analysing data, in search of the key indicators of successful collaboration. The initiative was code-named Project Aristotle, a tribute to the philosopher Aristotle’s maxim that “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”.

These researchers found that psychological safety was the most important element of successful collaboration. Coined by Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, psychological safety is a term that refers to a “shared belief” that risks can be taken, ideas expressed, and mistakes made without fear of the consequences (Gallo 2023). A sense of shared meaning and impact was also identified as a key ingredient of successful teamwork, alongside dependability, structure and clarity (Duhigg 2016).

In undertaking this project, Google was responding to workplace trends that saw workers across all sectors engaging more frequently than ever before in collaborative activities. But despite this trend towards collaborative work, we often – particularly in Western cultures – tend to value individual achievement more highly than collective achievement. For example, when you hear the words “knowledge” and “intelligence”, what springs to mind? For many, these words conjure examples of individual great thinkers (Einstein, Bill Gates, or maybe even Aristotle himself). There is an equally strong perception that it’s harder to achieve goals in a team than individually. This is why many of us tend to feel nervous or daunted about group projects.

Photo by Antoni Shkraba from Pexels. Is this what collaboration looks like?

What is collective intelligence?

Pierre Lévy’s research on collective intelligence gives us a reason to be less daunted and more optimistic about the outcome of group projects. Lévy is a French cultural theorist and media scholar who first wrote about “collective intelligence” in 1994. Challenging the traditional notion that intelligence is an individual attribute, Lévy argued that as individuals there are limits to our knowledge and expertise, but as communities we can pool our resources, work collaboratively towards a common goal, and produce an output or achieve an outcome beyond our individual limits (Lévy 1997, 2013).

You’ve probably experienced this phenomenon yourself. As individuals, we participate in many communities – as family members, citizens, workers, fans, members of social networks, members of cultural groups – through which knowledge may be shared and complex problems tackled by tapping into the collective wisdom of many.

Importantly, collective intelligence doesn’t mean that individual knowledge and expertise do not matter. On the contrary, collective intelligence requires that individuals develop their own voice and expertise so that they can contribute meaningfully to the shared production of knowledge and culture.

Nor does the term imply or require a future-focus at the expense of historical perspectives. Indeed, when writing about collective intelligence Lévy reflects on the way we as individuals inherit and benefit from the wisdom of those who have come before us in the societies and communities to which we belong. Knowledge, he says, is “accumulated and developed” through “long intergenerational chains of transmission” (2013: 100). Collective intelligence therefore involves collaborative communication across temporal and generational as well as geographic and cultural boundaries.

Think about the various ways you might collaborate with those who have come before you. In academia, this is very pertinent: when we write academic essays, we engage with and interpret the ideas of writers and thinkers from the past as well as scholars of the present. When academic work is published in the form of a journal article, book, or chapter, the author participates in a peer-review process where their own ideas are extended and the quality of their work assured. As students, you draw from these peer-reviewed published works. You respond to and interpret existing ideas, and develop your own voice and arguments in order to productively contribute to existing research on the topics that interest you. In other words, as academic communicators we place ourselves in dialogue with a scholarly community, drawing from and also contributing to the collective intelligence through which ideas come to matter.

Wikipedia and collaboration

What’s so interesting about collective intelligence is that it is not new: as far as we know, humans have worked in collaborative groups to solve problems across the many thousands of years that constitute our history – and yet the notion of collective intelligence is also one with emerging relevance.

For an example of the way collective intelligence flourishes in the digital age, we need look no further than Wikipedia. Created by a community of knowledge experts, Wikipedia describes itself as “a free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit” consisting of “freely editable content” that is “written collaboratively by largely anonymous volunteers”. The digital resource was created in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, who were trying to publish a free encyclopedia – when their project failed, they shared the content online using “wiki” technology, which allows content to be collaboratively stored and modified. Users began to add to and edit the content, and there was exponential growth in the site (see Lih 2004 for an interesting account of the site’s early development).

Lévy himself points out that Wikipedia exemplifies the concept of collective intelligence in that “authors, readers and editors exchange roles to further the dissemination of knowledge” (2013: 100), while Jenkins (2007) describes Wikipedia as less a product than an “ongoing process by which its community pools information, debates what knowledge matters, and vets competing truth claims”.

If you’ve used Wikipedia before – no doubt you have – consider how you have used it and why it has been valuable to you. Perhaps you use it because it’s easily accessible, a fast way to access knowledge. Maybe you’ve been told not to use it in an academic context, because it is not a scholarly, peer reviewed resource – in which case, perhaps you consider it to be a first port of call in your search for knowledge, or a means of verifying information and collecting ideas that you’ll research further in more formal academic ways.

It may be that you find Wikipedia useful precisely because it’s collaboratively created and therefore contains a perspective that transcends individual bias. As digital literacy expert Mike Caulfield points out in his book on fact-checking:

Of course, the collaborative nature of Wikipedia as an unfolding text may also give you reason to feel wary of the information you find there, which is fluid enough to change very rapidly and can be manipulated by others to suit particular agendas. You may employ your digital literacy – the set of knowledge and competencies that allows you to use digital tools to access, share, and create information – in order to engage effectively with this particular resource.

Collaborative futures?

Wikipedia has been part of communication and culture for over two decades now. And while it remains an important example of collective intelligence in action, we can also turn our attention to the emerging forms that collaboration takes as human/digital interfaces evolve.

For example: what does collective intelligence mean in the age of AI?

Consider what happens when you ask an AI tool like ChatGPT to help you solve a problem or create a product. When you collaborate with the AI, you’re employing your prompt engineering skills – that is, you’re crafting a message that can be interpreted effectively and productively by a generative AI model. If you’re a skilled communicator and if you’re adept at such human/non-human collaboration, you’ll be more likely to achieve the results you want. But what kind of collective intelligence are you creating, drawing from, or participating in?

Researchers at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence would see your interaction with the AI as a form of “augmented collective intelligence”, which they define as networks of people collaborating with AI-powered machines (Supermind.design 2022). These networks are already part of our everyday lives: Wikipedia itself is one, as are YouTube, Reddit, and Bitcoin. Arguably, they’ll become all the more important in the future – perhaps such “augmented collective intelligence” and networked collaboration across human/machine boundaries will come to replace more traditional forms of top-down communication.