Abstract
The main stakes for humanity are not hunger, poverty, sustainability, peace, healthcare, education,
economy, natural resources or a host of other issues but our capability to build new social
organizations that no longer create such outcomes. Our main stake is Collective Intelligence.
Today large organizations encounter insurmountable difficulties when dealing with the complexity
and the unexpectedness of the world when operating against a global backdrop. They undergo
conflicts of interest in many areas – between profitability and sustainability, secrecy and
transparency, values and value, individual and collective dynamics, and knowledge fertilizing – that
opens – and competition – that closes.
What most medium and large organizations have in common is an infrastructure based on
pyramidal hard-coded social maps, command and control, labor division, and a monetary system
stimulated by scarcity. Until recently, this social architecture was the only information system at our
disposal to pilot and organize complex human edifices. We call it pyramidal collective intelligence.
It remains efficient as long as the environment remains stable, but it becomes vulnerable and
inefficient in fluctuating contexts, namely when markets, knowledge, culture, technology, external
interactions, economy or politics keep changing faster than the capability of the group to respond.
Evolution has provided humankind with specific social skills based on collaboration and mutual
support. These skills reach their maximum effectiveness within small groups of 10 to 20 people,
but no more, where the individual and collective benefit is higher than what would have been
obtained if everyone remained alone. We call it original collective intelligence. As individuals, we all
know what it is because it is very likely that we have experienced it at some degree in our lives.
Well-trained, small teams have interesting dynamic properties. These include transparency, a gift
economy, a collective awareness, a polymorphic social structure, a high learning capacity, a
convergence of interest between the individual and collective levels, interactions characterized by
human warmth, and, above all, an excellent capability to handle complexity and the unexpected.
Is it possible for large organizations to benefit from the same properties? Can they become as
reactive, flexible, transparent, responsive, and innovative as small teams? Can they evolve even
further, toward a global Collective Intelligence? Can they conjugate their interests with overriding
concerns of humanity such as ethics, sustainability, etc…? The answer today is a resounding yes.
It is not only possible, but absolutely necessary for not just the efficiency of these organizations but
above all for the well-being of human society.
The aim of this paper is to provide the key concepts underlying collective intelligence and to
explore how modern organizations and individuals can concretely learn how to increase their
collective intelligence, i.e. their capability to collectively invent the future and reach it in
complex contexts. This will draw the guidelines of a universal governance, provide an outline of
the next governance paradigms and help us forecast an economy in which competition and
collaboration as well as values and value are reconciled.
Copyleft 2004 - Jean-François Noubel – jf TheTransitioner.org page 2
Collective_Intelligence_Invisible_Revolution_JFNoubel.odt
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