No matter how well you execute, you will only succeed if you execute on the right thing.
The Twenty Five Percent Difference
Most companies leave twenty-five percent of their smarts on the table. They not only don’t use it, they don’t even know that it is available. They are paying for good minds and then wasting twenty-five percent of the resource. Waste of any kind, of course, degrades the bottom line. And when the economy is in the tank, no company can afford waste.
But waste of intellect ... waste of the ability to quickly reset and seize opportunities that competitors miss? That can be debilitating.
The secret to that additional twenty-five percent lies in creating inspired collective intelligence. Inspired collective intelligence is, to the way people think together, what lean is to the processes the Japanese instituted for manufacturing. Anyone who is familiar with lean manufacturing methods understands the exponential increase in cost that is exacted as defects move through a manufacturing line. They also understand the revolution in quality that Toyota and Honda have unleashed as a result. The Japanese invested in process improvement when they were regarded as non-competitive in the world auto market. At the very moment when their backs were to the wall, they invested rather than retrenching.
As in the case of lean manufacturing, “defects” in collective intelligence are easily missed. And defects in a thinking process can be far more devastating to a company’s viability than one that simply requires the replacement of a part.
Inspired collective intelligence closes the twenty-five percent gap. It enables companies to access the entire diversity of aptitude, intelligence, acumen, experience and just plain smarts that now exists throughout their company and mine it continuously. The result is a quality of collective intelligence that far exceeds what anyone could have produced alone. Because of that twenty-five percent they are joined ... when they most need it ... by people who have the very diversity of ideas that enable them to get it right the first time.
In order to squeeze out that extra twenty-five percent, people get so practiced at creating inspired collective intelligence that they are able to apply it to anything that matters from strategy to simple decisions. The twenty-five percent difference enables companies to continuously create subtle pivots in strategy that keep them on course no matter what happens to the economy.
Invaluable? We agree. Impossible? Not true. Read on.
There are two types of experiments that help to explain what it is that creates inspired collective intelligence. The first is Jack Treynor’s jelly-beans-in-the-jar experiment. The second, we will call the trivial pursuit experiment.
Start With the Power of Collective Intelligence
Jack Treynor, the investment guru, conducted a now famous experiment in which he asked his class to estimate how many jelly beans there were in a jar. When added together and averaged, the group's estimate was 871. There were actually 850 beans contained within the jar. Only one student had made a better guess. The now famous jelly-beans-in-the-jar experiment has been replicated countless times with similar results. Invariably collective intelligence is superior to that of all but the occasional rogue genius.
Add the Power of Competence Triggers
The second experiment was conducted by Dutch social scientists. Forty six of the hardest Trivial Pursuit questions were asked of two different groups of students. One group was asked to think about the idea of a college professor for a few moments before starting the game. The second group focused on soccer hooligans before starting the game. Those who focused on a college professor got over 57% right. Those who focused on soccer hooligans got just over 42% right. That’s a 26% difference in outcome caused by nothing but a difference in focus!
The students did not even know they were being triggered. They had no idea that their performance was affected by their focus. Such is the power of triggers to affect collective intelligence. We continuously send these triggers to each other and to ourselves through the thoughts that we process.
Focus Those Triggers on People’s Best Instincts
What distinguishes an inspired social network is that people trigger each others’ best instincts. What are best instincts? They are our most optimal version of our selves – pure and simple. That is the secret to inspired collective intelligence. It starts with triggers ... those flashes of thought that sometimes connect us to the best in ourselves ... sometimes the worst ... and often to something in between. Both competence and best instinct triggers play a huge part in our individual and joint capacity to solve problems and to render inspired outcomes.
Inspired collective intelligence is simply the product of a group of people interacting in a way that enables them to leverage the best that each of them brings to the conversation. When people trigger the both the competence and the best instincts of each other they create collective outcomes that are always superior to anything that any of them could have produced alone.