From the Wright Brothers and Ada Lovelace, to Elon Musk and Steve Jobs, when we consider who is behind the most celebrated innovations and industry transformations, we often think about individual bright thinkers and disruptors. However, over the years, studies have shown that the greatest potential lies in the “power of many," fostered by a shift in how new generations work (n.b. James Surowiecki’s "The Wisdom of Crowds" is a great read on this topic).
Collective intelligence is the ability to harness the power of a group to solve problems or achieve goals that an individual could not accomplish alone. The concept itself isn’t new. But in the Age of Intelligence, where individuals’ knowledge and experience are augmented by data insights, working collectively – as groups of people and machines – will be one of the most powerful tools to drive innovation and growth.
That is why collaboration, facilitated by collectively-sourced intelligence, is an integral part of our vision for Active Intelligence.
In this blog post, I will make the case for collective intelligence and explain how we will enable our users to harness the “power of many.”
Collective Intelligence Accelerates Informed Actions
Think about a business problem, any problem. Now, how do you start to tackle it? Alone? Or do you consult data, colleagues and experts?
No matter how big or small, we need data and analytics to understand the challenge, calculate its risks, find alternative solutions, have discussions, bring in inputs from multiple stakeholders. All this before we can finally take an informed action.
Making decisions as a group, forming a consensus, getting ideas from different sources, and motivating people through ownership to drive actions, are all components of collective intelligence.
These needs were the main drivers for our new, soon-to-be-delivered collaboration capability, Collaborative Notes. We have designed this new feature to enable multi-user collaboration on multiple dashboards, with multiple data sets. Our goal is to close the current gaps in BI and analytics solutions that result in fragmented pieces of tacit knowledge held by people in different roles across an organization.
Better Decisions Are Made Up of Many “Aha” Moments
For the past couple of years, we've seen a growing use in machine learning and AI-assisted insight generation to augment information consumers. These capabilities accelerate a user’s ability to detect an outlier, make classifications, identify a trend and understand correlations. But these hidden patterns surfaced as information can only become an insight when they trigger an “aha” moment for a given user at a given time.
The human element remains vital when information is transformed into insight. Yet, organizations face the challenge of capturing and bringing together these “aha” moments.
That is why collaboration, giving rise to collective intelligence, is one of the important accelerators of Active Intelligence. Knowledge workers must be empowered to share and explain their perspectives, aggregating their knowledge and insights to inform the right actions.
Unleash the Real Potential of Intelligence
I truly believe that the power of collective intelligence knows no bounds.
Just take this picture – it was taken on October 1927 at the Solvay Conference, where the world’s most notable physicists met to discuss the newly formulated quantum theory. In my opinion, this is the most intelligent picture ever taken – although that’s not to say they couldn’t have benefited from a few more diverse thinkers!
(Photo credit: Benjamin Couprie, Institut International de Physique de Solvay)
We can all be guilty at overlooking our own intelligence, thinking of it as something possessed by a few greater thinkers and innovators.
But we must move away from considering intelligence as a measure of an individual’s ability. Collective intelligence shows us that its true power lies in bringing together the different knowledge, experience and insights of groups of people.
I believe there is a big gap in today’s BI and analytics solutions to harness the potential of organizations’ collective intelligence. People haven’t been empowered to come together to discuss, debate and collaborate with the data to solve business problems.
That’s why I cannot wait to share with you our new Collaborative Notes capability and help you unleash the true power of collective intelligence in your organization.
