How We Get Smarter Together

On Regis Philbin's TV show, "Who Wants to be a Millionnaire?" a contestant couldcall his smartest friend or ask the audience for help with the answer. Contestants are more apt to get the right answer when they ask the audience. The insight? Calling on the collective intelligence can get you smarter support, and often sooner.

Cultural critic and cofounder of the Web zine Feed, Steve Johnson came to the same conclusion in his book Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software (Scribner, 2001).

He found that intelligence resides at the street level, whether you are observing harvester ants - capable of great coordination or quick improvisational response to attack, despite their limited cognitive skills - or workers in the primitive factories of 19th-century England. Johnson found that groups could achieve extraordinary feats through decentralized thinking or what is often called emergent behavior. More bluntly, that means that even simple agents following simple rules can create sophisticated structures. In the Digital Age, this is a powerful concept because of the Webís capacity for facilitating far-reaching group intelligence.

As massive proof of this theory consider the most popular e-commerce site, E-Bay. The E-Bay community rewards people who play by the rules, and banishes those who do not. In fact, the collective intelligence of the E-Bay users has raised the level of their collective game over time, to the benefit of all players. Some participants have build an entire business for themselves that could not have existed before the emergent intelligence of the E-Bay model.

This finding is especially important in our post-7/11 world, when we want to live a life that matters. More that self-styled solo star performers, we seek out those who want to create opportunity and community together. We want to find healthier ways to communicate to connect.

Pods are another way for people to feel more connected and capable, even in a larger group, and to reap the benefits of their collective intelligence. Transform a larger organization such as a company, college student body, synagogue or civic club into 8 to 10 person pods of diverse people with specific goals and Rules of Conduct. Like the ants, we can accomplish much together. We are more nimble in changing direction when weíve established one in the first place. People in pods tend to feel a deeper affinity with each other and for their common purpose.

Further they are more likely to demonstrate more confident, higher-performing behavior. The University of California campus at Santa Cruz, was created around pods of students who are then part of colleges within the larger campus. Compared to the other UC campuses their students have fewer reported health problems and accidents, and a higher sense of well-being.

In the early 1990s, George Colony began organizing his company into pods of 8 or 10 people from different disciplines. Colony is chairman and CEO of Forrester Research, Inc., one of the largest Internet research firms. Says Colony, ìThe pods are a way to mitigate the alienation of size as our company grows. Itís like being in a squad of people in the military. You get so that you are willing to die for the guy next to you.î

In his book The Tipping Point, author Malcom Gladwell writes that the human brain is wired to have no more than 150 relationships. The deeper the affinity and rewards people feel in those relationships, the more optimistic they feel about their participation.

The more optimistic one feels, the better one performs. Thus the group creates a reinforcing upward spiral of smarter mutal support. That ís probably why people are more likely to excel, not in solo tasks, but when they are part of a small group with a specific goal and deadline, be it a product launch or a team game.

In this time of turmoil and greater uncertainty, when people are more likely to seek affinity, we have grand opportunities to test these ideas. We desire camraderie more than competition. Want to make a difference with others? Find or form a pod around your greatest passion or talent and see emergent intelligence in action.

Want to learn more? Here's some good books that cover different aspects of working smarter together:
~ Living a Life That Matters: Resolving the Conflict Between Conscience and Success by Harold S. Kushner (Knopf, 2001)

Kushner writes of the two worlds in which many of us live, that of commerce where competition prevails and there are more losers than winners, and the world of faith where compassion is paramount and you win through sacrifice and assistance. In that world, there are more winners than losers. He offers a path of faith for living in both worlds.

~ What Really Matters: Searching for Wisdom in America by Tony Schwartz
(Bantam Books, 1966)

~ The Psychology of Attitude Change and Social Influence by Philip Zimbardo, Michael Leippe, (McGraw-Hill Higher Education,1991). Zimbardo is the current president of the American Psychological Association who warned in a San Francisco Chronicle guest editorial this week that the continuous high volume coverage of terrorism may be playing in to the hands of ther terrorists, ì Emotion-arousing communications create anxiety, learned helplessness, and an inability to function effectively in everyday activities - unless the target population is also given specific, concrete channels of action that can be performed to cope with the implied threat.î His book offers ways to ìmaintain your resiliency, personal courage and self efficacy.î I think it can also help you remain more conscious about your choices in these stressful times.

~ Irrational Exuberance by the Yale economist Robert J. Shiller (Broadway Books, 2001). Shiller offers the dotcom bubble and the April 4, 2001 market drop as examples that our economic decisions are not, as often presumed, rational but deeply emotional. It' all about the context. The group feeling about a situation - pessimistic or optimistic- not a change or lack of change in the situation determines the group;s buy or sell behavior. You can apply Shillerís insights to most any decisionmaking situation in your life.

~ Spin This!: All the Ways We Don't Tell the Truth by Bill Press (Pocket Books, 2001).
Before he went to work as co-host of CNN's Cross-Fire, Bill Press lived here on the coast of Marin County, just above the Golden Gate Bridge, and worked for a California state Senator Peter Behr, for whom I later worked. In November Press came out with an engrossing book, for which he was interviewed for my local newspaper, The Pacific Sun: "Spin isn't flat-out lying because it contains an element of truth, no matter how tiny. Spin is more like a white lie or plain old B.S." Bill traces spin from the Illiad through the Old Testament and up to the personal ads in The Washington Post. "There's even a master spinner on TV who claims his program is a spin-free zone. Now that is past spinning. Its just plain lying." This humorous book skewers all sides.

One chapter offers his spin translations. Example: Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill on nuclear power: "If you set aside Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, the safety record of nuclear power is really very good." (translation: "If you set aside the mountains, Switzerland is really like New Jersey").

~ Conversation by Theodore Zeldin (HiddenSpring Books, 2000). Zeldin is an Oxford University historian, philosopher and revered BBC radio personality. Here is an excerpt, with permission from his essay, "United Kingdom Questions"*:

"How shall I know that, just as this bridge was built by people who wished to stop ancient enemies hating and fighting each other, you find it rewarding to be a bridge yourself, between individuals who fail to recognise what they have in common, and what they could do better together than alone?

How shall I know that you do not judge people by their religion, or even by their beliefs, and that you are much more impressed by how they put their beliefs into practice, whether with dogmatism, or humility, or compassion?

How shall I know that you applaud people not for their victories over others, but for the thought they have given to their failures, for the courage with which they handle their disappointments, for their ability to continue to laugh and hope?"