Collective genius

I think we are headed into an era of collective genius. While we might still see plenty of acts of individual genius — inventions, concepts, perspectives that come from individuals doing the hard lonely work; I think the future belongs to those who can collaborate, not just to solve problems but to rise to unprecedented levels of excellence, addressing the most pressing problems of the future.

While I had been playing with this idea for the last month or so, it became most clear to me after listening to TED's Chris Anderson last night. Anderson calls attention to how web video is revolutionizing the way people connect and collaborate. Beyond YouTube, Facebook, Blogging, Twitter have led to significant volumes of online social interaction. This is resulting in not just information exchange but growth and collaboration. The LXD, Legion of Extraordinary Dancers created by Jon Chu brings together extraordinary dancers from around the world. Some of these dancers had been involved in a "game" or sorts through online videos. One dancer would post a video of cool, challenging dance moves. A dancer across the world would see the video, learn, improvise, raise the ante and post a reciprocal video back to the originator. That is how the collaboration or what is called in Hindi the "jugalbandi" began — each expert improvising on the work of another, posting back, challenges-and-response, here we go! Right there, in that collaboration lies evidence of collective genius — two or more people together inventing and creating, through individual and ether-level collective action.

Web video provides an unparalled medium for collaboration. But what's more important today and will likely be in the future is that we have the problems and the people that need the medium. With the population likely to approach 9 billion by 2050, the environment under distress, vast amount of information available to a vast number of people and technological advances cutting lose the human potential and demand for creativity, we are just going to have to collaborate to solve our problems. We will invent, create and have Eureka moments together … not alone. We will together, collectively, connect at a level and in senses that lie beyond the tangible into being geniuses together.

Education in our schools needs to start accounting for this collaboration that is the mainstay of the future. Like it or not, individual success will be less important and even less impressive in the new era of what Anderson calls Crowd Accelerated Innovation.