Evidence for “Collective Genius”

When I taught at PSCS one of my favorite weekly events was the Staff meeting. I looked forward to it. When I stopped working at PSCS, I asked if I could continue attending the staff meeting. I attended it for a whole year after I was done teaching formally as a full-time staff member. I loved PSCS staff meetings (I still do). I loved them for the "high" they gave me. We used a term to describe the experience we had together each week. We would walk into the meeting with many students on our minds, simple and complex questions, all without an answer. We trusted that our collective thinking would lead to contemplations, learning and solutions. We called our collective intelligence "the hive mind".

A few years later in conducting research on 21st century education, I came to crystallize an idea for myself, one that many have talked about. My crystallization: That we no longer live in the era of individual achievement. We are ever more increasingly headed into the era of the Collective Genius. While my original blog post draws evidence from the world of online networking and collaboration, the idea applies to any setting.

MIT researchers studied this very concept. An article in MIT News states:

A new study co-authored by MIT researchers documents the existence of collective intelligence among groups of people who cooperate well, showing that such intelligence extends beyond the cognitive abilities of the groups’ individual members, and that the tendency to cooperate effectively is linked to the number of women in a group.

The article goes on to elaborate on social sensitivity as being essential for collective intelligence and that groups with women carry greater collective genius than others. It is affirming to know that the phenomenon has been studied. Now the question is — How are we going to foster such collective intelligence in our schools and workplaces?