Group Genius, Not Group Think

First published March 1, 2012

Of course by definition leaders have always been visionary and smart. Recently leaders’ roles have evolved to include leading intelligence and talent development. Though the term “learning organization” has been around for decades, it is taking on new meaning, especially since innovation (arguably the hottest competency and organizational capability today) springs from learning new ideas and approaches. So how do leaders cultivate “group genius” (where together people know more than the sum of their parts) instead of “group think” (where people acquiesce to a weak approach without consensus or engagement).

Jay Gordon Cone from Interaction Associates blogs about “the capacity of a group of individuals to tap into the power of collaboration in a way that produces outcomes that surprise even themselves. The key word here is ‘surprise’ — a team that successfully leverages its combined wisdom can generate genuinely new solutions that aren't traceable back to any one individual…[to] produce fresh ideas that the group is passionate about, resulting in a dramatic performance improvement.” Do your teams have this innovation capability? And how do you measure this capability to offer predictive analytics on results?

Professors Thomas W. Malone, at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and Jeremy Gray from Yale, who co-authored, Putting Heads Together: Groups demonstrate distinctive ‘collective intelligence’ when facing difficult tasks, say, “Having a bunch of smart people in a group doesn’t necessarily make the group smart….but features of the group can be more important than features of the individuals that makeup the group for determining outcomes. In groups where one person dominated, the group was less intelligent than in groups where the conversational turns were more evenly distributed. It’s possible to improve the intelligence of a group, by either changing the members of a group, or teaching them better ways of interacting.” The key finding is there is a general effectiveness, a group collective intelligence, which predicts a group’s performance in a lot of situations.

Peeling the onion on “group genius” to discover its prerequisites also includes using a facilitative leadership style with groups. How can we engage others in a robust process of inquiry? Online discussions have jump-started this capability. As a leader do you stimulate and participate in selected online discussions? And do you seek out face-to-face conversations, asking more questions that lead to answers, rather than give all answers which may close down the inquiry?

IBM’s Institute for Business Value report, Collective Intelligence, Capitalizing on the Crowd, points out that leaders can:

• Address sources of resistance, including operational challenges, conflict with existing charters, perceived loss of control (including their own), and shift roles and responsibilities to work across silos. 
• Rely on technology and develop cultural norms to integrate collective intelligence into the work environment. Moreover, if leaders deliberately remove barriers to collective intelligence they can achieve idea contagion.
• Honor breakthroughs, recognize and act on what is discovered, communicating value and outcomes to both the organization and the individual.

Whether you’re leading teams or an organization, Jay Gordon Cone adds, "Two characteristics are important-- openness and interlocking success, where everyone’s success depends on the achievement of others." So as leaders, do you lead by example with openness by inviting different points of view? Do you facilitate internal partnerships among people with the competencies to achieve more than each person could on their own?

As business leaders we can take a lesson from community organizing where people’s overlapping and compatible ideas build shared vision and capability. I was reminded of this dynamic recently attending Town Meeting Day, where across Vermont and New Hampshire citizens meet to discuss the issues important to their town prior to voting on budgets and leaders running for office. In his book Creative Community Organizing Si Kahn brings out some principles business leaders can apply in their organizations:

• Figure out people’s common self-interest, the glue that binds organizations and movements.
• Believe that human beings can somehow find some common connection (that means leading by example to transcend stereotyping)
• Frame and ask questions in ways that make people not only want to answer them, but also to think deeply, and in unexpected ways, about what the answers might be.

How are you moving the needle from group think to group genius in your organization? Drop me a line to share your thoughts.

photo courtesy of angrywayne