Getting Clever Together » group IQ

Going Back to Basics Helps Sometimes : What IS Social Media?

mary — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 22:07:20 +0000

Sharing Knowledge and Staying Safe

mary — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 20:16:40 +0000

What does ‘safe’ mean these days ? – none of us really know the direction that social media will take next and where our identity will appear. But the same sort of anxiety is being felt across the corporate world in terms of how can we share information quickly and effectively but maintain a boundry or ‘membrane’ with the outside world.

The purpose of a membrane is to allow ‘information’ to travel in both directions. In other words the question we need to ask is “How can we stay in intimate connection with the larger field of knowledge and maintain an ‘identity’ and ‘brand’ with respect to our own corpus of knowledge.

Bertrand Duperrin poses the question “Does enterprise 2.0 threaten your security ? ”

This is a core question – or should be – for people working in the field of knowledge management. Of course we should also be mindful that wherever we are going , we are going to get there sooner than we think.

Collaborative Intelligence & Groups: The Secret Weapon of the Social Web

Stephen — Fri, 01 May 2009 13:51:54 +0000

Social interaction online is not very sophisticated. The newsfeed model of conversation has taken over the social web, from Facebook to Twitter to FriendFeed to MySpace, but by itself it doesn’t serve us very well.

That’s where the creation of groups of sources comes in. Various services have different ways for users to separate their “friends” into different groups, viewable by topic, category or type of connection. Facebook is making changes today to make it easier to break your Facebook Newsfeed into groups. That’s going to be very important. The best Twitter applications offer group functionality that the site itself doesn’t. MySpace offers no such feature, yet. The Facebook news prompted us to try to articulate the value of group creation online. By better understanding the value that groups can deliver, we can better strategize our creation of groups.

Communities of Practice & Collaboration

Stephen — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 00:51:41 +0000

Communities of Practice: are defined as : ‘the process of social learning that occurs and shared sociocultural practices that emerge and evolve when people who have common goals interact as they strive towards those goals’. (Wikipedia)

There does not seem be in any doubt – our economy and that of the entire globe is going through pretty strange times. One of the features of this ‘global crisis’ is the amount nations are trying to collaborate. The penny has finally dropped, political and business leaders seem to be realizing that we are all in this together. When it comes to ‘throwing’ there isn’t an ‘away’ anymore. Everything that is thrown lands somewhere, usually in another nations backyard.This applies just as much to economics as it does to refuse.

At the same time enlightened employees of business organizations are realizing that if their company is going to make it through the tough times ahead, then everyone is going to have to get engaged. But this is more than “everybody get behind and push” – as Jonas Salk pointed out – “Our future evolution will not decided by the survival of the strongest but by the survival of the wisest” .

And this brings me to my real point – to be the ‘wisest’ we have to start tapping into our collective capacity and this is why I say it is time we started ‘Getting Clever Together’. Communities of Practice (often called CoP) are a brilliant social invention whose time has come.They existed long before we named them – bacteria have been using use the principles behind CoP for over 3 billion years, so I guess the model has held up to the test of time. When I am speaking to business audiences I often make the point that it’s time we got as collaboratively smart as bacteria – but we do have a lot of ground to cover.

Never have we needed each other more (considering all the systemic threats facing us) and never has our ingenuity and resilience been more tested. CoPs enable us to craft deep wisdom around important competencies in a dynamic and adaptive fashion. There is literally no end to where they could take our larger social structures.

Companies that embrace the CoP model and are willing to support them with the necessary resources now, will be those that are able to emerge on the other side of this planetary challenge smarter and stronger.

Collaborative Intelligence: Google Exercising Its ‘CQ’

Stephen — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 18:27:23 +0000

If you think the concept of collaborative intelligence is irrelevant – check out this video that mixes history with speculation about arguably the most collaboratively intelligent business on earth – Google.

Collaborative Intelligence: Conflict and Failures

Stephen — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 01:05:37 +0000

‘We live in a era of intense conflict and massive institutional failures, a time of painful endings and of hopeful beginnings. It is a time that feels as if something profound is shifting and dying while something else, as the playwright and Czech president, Vaclav Havel, put it, wants to be born: “I think there are good reasons for suggesting that the modern age has ended. Today, many things indicate that we are going through a transitional period, when it seems that something is on the way out and something else is painfully being born. It is as if something were crumbling, decaying, and exhausting itself – while something else, still indistinct, were rising from the rubble.”‘

[From C. Otto Scharmer: 'Theory U']

Daily we can find more and more evidence that our age is becoming less predictable and change continues to accelerate. Yet there are things to be optimistic about -http://www.ted.com/is a wonderful site with a massive collection of videos, articles and audio recordings designed to be of interest to the thoughtful, purposeful mind. I particularly like this posting in the TED Blog about reasons to be optimistic – beats the broadcast news any day.

If you still need a ‘shot in the arm’ maybe Robert Wrights 18 minute talk will do it for you?

Collaborative Intelligence: Where’s Our Global Brain?

Stephen — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 15:02:58 +0000

‘Several researchers testing bacterial adaptivity have tormented colonies with problems so overwhelming that they dwarf any individual bacterium’s solo computational powers. For example, experimenters have taken a community of the intestine-dwelling bacteria Escherichia coli away from the cuisine it normally eats and offered it only salicin – a pain-reliever squeezed from the bark of willow trees which, to the E.coli bacterium, is inedible as pitch.

An individual bacterium can crank nourishment out of this unpalatable medication only if it undergoes a step-by-step sequence of two genetic breakthroughs, one of which entails taking a giant step backward. The odds of pulling this off through random mutations are less than 1 in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 – or, to put it in English, more than 10 billion trillion against one. Yet E.coli consistently manage it. How? The answer, Ben-Jacob hypothesized, lies in networking. A “creative net” of bacteria, unlike a man-made machine, it can invent a new instruction set with which to beat an unfamiliar challenge.’

Taken from Howard Bloom’s ‘Global Brain‘.

Ecoli reinvents itself in order to adapt to a new set of circumstances. Human beings and businesses for that matter are adept at reinvention. But we could still learn a trick or two from this modest little bacteria and its rags-to-riches story. The secret behind Ecoli’s success is their ability to share information. There are no patent lawyers inside a colony of Ecoli.

Ecoli and it’s bacterial cousins, are presently quite easily winning the war waged against them, by our own pharmaceutical and medical communities. Last year there were estimated to be 20,000 deaths attributed to the ‘super-bug’ in N. America. What is it that these bugs know that we don’t?

They have developed their collaborative intelligence beyond ours which is why they are able to out-fox us. We need to find more efficient ways to convey information through networks of people. That is going to require greater levels of collaboration. It also demands we make personal changes too. This is where CQ comes in.

Collaborative Intelligence: Team Enablement

Stephen — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 14:56:54 +0000

‘Competitive Success Depends on Enablement‘ doesn’t specifically mention Collaborative Intelligence but the concept of spreading ‘enablement’ throughout the team structure certainly could also be a description of how CQ is developed within business.

(from the article) ‘Among the conclusions the study reaches are:

The more a company empowers its employees to make decisions, the more likely it is to perform better financially and competitively.
True enablers use technology to improve collaboration, encourage risk-taking, and optimize decision-making.
Companies categorizing themselves as “true enablers” are three times more likely to be more profitable than their competitors.
Compared with other types of firms, companies described as “true enablers” have a higher proportion that are more profitable than their competitors.’ Read on….

Thanks to Ty Franks for this reference.

Collaborative Intelligence, Democracy & Web 2.0

Stephen — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 15:15:12 +0000

When we think of Collaborative Intelligence in action one of the things that comes to mind is Wikipedia. With a reliability that compares favorably with the Encyclopedia Britannica, Wikipedia is championed as the intelligence of the crowd, made available to the crowd. An interesting post by Chris Wilson at ‘Slate’ takes a slightly different view:

‘Social-media sites like Wikipedia and Digg are celebrated as shining examples of Web democracy, places built by millions of Web users who all act as writers, editors, and voters. In reality, a small number of people are running the show. According to researchers in Palo Alto, 1 percent of Wikipedia users are responsible for about half of the site’s edits. The site also deploys bots—supervised by a special caste of devoted users—that help standardize format, prevent vandalism, and root out folks who flood the site with obscenities. This is not the wisdom of the crowd. This is the wisdom of the chaperones.’

That 1% sounds suspiciously like the small number of individuals in a beehive that act as ‘diversity generators’. Diversity generators are a small % of the hives work force and their task is to go and forage for new sources of honey. While the majority of the hive take off on their daily commute to known locations of honey, diversity generators plug away at the new and novel ultimately producing the locations of new nectar deposits. If you are curious about how we know bees operate in this way you might like to check out Howard Blooms ‘Global Brain’.

Collaborative Intelligence & Assumptions

Stephen — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 18:37:09 +0000

The sea quirt provides a cautionary tale – when it is born, it floats through the open oceans seeking a place to make its home. Once the sea quirt finds a solid piece of ocean floor to attach itself to, it does a peculiar thing. The sea squirt eats its brain. Having achieved its objective, a firm anchor within the ocean; it no longer needs its brain. You may know people like this. They have a firm anchor in life or at work and, apparently, have long since consumed their brains. Zoologists say that the sea squirt shares 80% of our DNA. Some people probably share more than that. The sea squirt is assuming that nothing is going to change in its environment and that it will no longer need to make significant adjustments. This may work for the sea squirt, but human beings can’t afford to follow suit.

The Collaborative Intelligence Paradigm

Our society is changing rapidly. Intellectual intelligence (IQ) and emotional intelligence (EQ) are necessary but not sufficient in order to thrive in this world. Increasingly, we are expected to be able to harness the power of the group or network to achieve things. Collaborative intelligence or C.Q. has become increasingly important. The term ‘collaborative intelligence’ was coined by William Isaacs in his book ‘Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together’, C.Q. is defined here as the ability to build, contribute to and manage the power found in networks of people.

The development of our collaborative intelligence (CQ) requires us to embrace a new paradigm. This new paradigm involves viewing all living things as deeply connected – an idea called “entanglement” in quantum mechanics. It follows then that there exists a collective intelligence to which we all contribute and potentially all have access. Here is an example of what I mean: a room with 30 people in it, whose average age is 35, represents a total of over 1,000 years of life experience. Processes that are designed to tap into the ‘collective life experience’ of this group can develop the team’s collaborative intelligence.