I was recently reviewing some academic articles from MIT, and I found a book in the bibliography that caught my attention.
It is about “Supermind”, a work by Thomas W. Malone, in which he shows that most of the problems we face daily are solved in groups of people, hence the collective intelligence takes a greater preponderance over artificial intelligence, for example.
A supermind is a group of individual minds that work effectively and collectively to achieve goals. The Groups do not always make better decisions than individuals, especially when it comes to work teams, however, the interesting thing about this is that within a group the different perspectives, skills and knowledge of its members are combined.
Malone’s research, described in the book, claims that the groups in which the members were more socially perceptive had developed their collective intelligence more, since they could work together more effectively.
Women, on the other hand, have a better social perception than men, and this may be the reason why groups with women are collectively more intelligent. Even, according to the author, today’s most advanced artificial intelligence systems only have specialized intelligence, that is, they have the ability to perform particular tasks. A human being has the ability to perform a wide range of tasks, than most advanced computers.
We tend to believe that a super effective work team is determined by the level of effectiveness of its members, or their individual intelligence, but what is revealing from this research is that the average and maximum intelligence of the group members correlates with collective intelligence of the group, this correlation being moderately strong. This makes perfect sense when we translate theory into the realm of organizational practice. At the UPC, for example, we have great collaborators in all our areas and levels. The key is teamwork, and achieving cohesion that allows us to obtain results. In fact, areas such as marketing and employability have much to contribute to us today to incorporate and develop competencies in academic curricula that lead to the strengthening of collective intelligence in our students.
All of this should lead us to reflect on how important it is for us to reach our goals together as a team. Are we capable of developing our collective intelligence and taking it to the next level? Are we capable of developing our collective intelligence and taking it to the next level?
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