Evolutionary activist, founder and research director of the non-profit Institute for Co-Intelligence, Tom Atlee (b. 1949) has focused since the mid-1990s on developing society's capacity to function as a wise democracy. Since 2005, he has focused on the dynamics of "conscious evolution" - especially the evolution of social systems. Atlee's holistic vision of social change is based on a new understanding of the wholeness and co-evolutionary creativity of the cosmos; his theory of co-intelligence recognizes the many facets of intelligence, wisdom, and higher forms of consciousness. Atlee summarized his findings in the books The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World that Works for All (The Tao of Democracy: How to Use Cointelligence to Create a World That Works for Everyone – 2003) and Reflection on Evolutionary Activism (Reflections on evolutionary activism, 2011). See www.co-intelligence.org, www.taoofdemocracy.com, www.evolutionaryactivism.com. The text was translated by Jiří Zemánek. Published in Space Review No. 90, June 2011, pp. 125-135.
In this essay, I provide an overview of what “co-intelligence” is, simplified into two parts – collective intelligence and cooperative intelligence – and show that together they suggest a new vision of cultural transformation.
The word “intelligence” is commonly used to describe an individual’s ability to learn, solve problems, plan for the future, and make sense of our inner and outer worlds. As a species, we pride ourselves on this intelligence that seems to set us apart from most other species.
What we call intelligence, however, is not limited to individuals. Every human collective – a group, an organization, or a society – exhibits at least some capacity to learn, to solve its problems, to plan for its future, and to make sense of the circumstances within and around it. If it did not do this, it would not survive. So we can speak of individual intelligence as well as collective intelligence. We can further distinguish different types of collective intelligence – the intelligence of a group, organization, or community, as well as the intelligence of entire societies or species intelligence, to name just a few.
While this idea may be new to you, I want to assure you that there is nothing esoteric about it. After all, I am not talking about collective consciousness, but rather collective intelligence, which is an observable, demonstrable, and perhaps even measurable capability. From local sports clubs to the United Nations, groups of people are engaged in solving their problems, planning new activities, and formulating stories about what is happening around them; in other words, they use their intelligence in much the same way that individuals do. And just like individuals, some groups and societies are smarter than others; and all are smarter at certain times than at others.
I often encourage people to think back to their own encounters and relationships, to the organizations and gatherings they participated in, and to consider whether the groups of people they met were more or less intelligent than the individuals who made them up. Some of the stupidest groups or gatherings are often made up of really smart people. And sometimes, on the contrary, completely ordinary people come up with great ideas when they work well together.
It's interesting that when I tell people about co-intelligence, they usually look at me with a puzzled look. But when I ask them if they've ever encountered collective stupidity - they start giggling! How indicative of the state of our culture: people who have never heard either of these words cannot imagine collective intelligence, but are already well acquainted with collective stupidity.
By now you may be beginning to see why I think it is important to establish a new field of study that would allow us to learn more about this phenomenon. Obviously, this could help us bring peace to our homes and make our collective activities and businesses more efficient. But even more importantly, social and species intelligence in particular would enhance our ability to deal effectively with social, economic, and environmental problems. Our collective intelligence – and we always have it to a greater or lesser extent – therefore has a profound impact on our individual lives and our collective prospects. In a time of collective crisis like today, this is a matter of paramount importance.
Indeed, I believe that nurturing collective intelligence is a key moment that is neglected in most civic and political activities. All around us, we encounter people and groups that come up with insightful insights and offer remarkable solutions to social and environmental problems, and yet these problems persist and often worsen. But we do not have to continue down this path. Given the right conditions—which have already been created on various occasions in different parts of the world—communities and societies can collectively reflect on their problems and their possibilities, and collectively choose and implement effective, even brilliant, solutions. Understanding collective intelligence can help us realize the original dream of democracy: to decide our collective destiny through participation. Today, we already have many tools to do this.
Collective intelligence involves more than collective problem solving. We are faced with the challenge of a complex future that we all co-create, for better or for worse. If we could develop more collective intelligence, we might be better able to co-create the future we really want. This would go a long way in solving our social, economic, and environmental problems, and in creating truly vibrant communities and new cultures.
The ultimate outcome of all social and environmental challenges, and all the hopes and dreams we have for our families, communities, nations, and the world, depends in fact on the extent to which we can embrace and harness collective intelligence. This is true whether we are aware of collective intelligence or not. Developing our capacity for collective intelligence may be a sine qua non for achieving sustainable social change and collective prosperity. Many other issues take on new significance precisely because of the role they play in its context. For example, as fewer and fewer corporations own more and more of the media, it becomes increasingly difficult for society to collectively reflect on what is happening to it and adequately consider the wide range of options for where to direct its future. The impact of such a situation on society’s collective intelligence can be (and is) devastating.
Collective intelligence can be created on many levels
Small and large groups
An individual intelligence test compares an individual’s problem-solving skills with those of other individuals of the same age. Similarly, we could demonstrate the existence of group intelligence by comparing how different groups solve certain problems. Similar research once presented how a group of executives could deal with a hypothetical wilderness survival problem. The female teams came up with better solutions than the male teams. The women’s ability to solve problems collectively enhanced their cooperative lifestyle, while the men’s efforts to enforce their own solutions at all costs usually led them to each take a different, separate path. The important thing is that the resulting difference in group intelligence was not due to individual women being smarter than individual men; rather, it was due to differences in the group dynamics of the two sexes.
Problem-solving skills can be practiced in groups of hundreds. When more than four hundred of us marched across Colorado in the summer of 1986 during the Great Peace March, some of us wanted to walk together in orderly lines, while others insisted that we walk at our own pace so that we could be more aware of nature and talk to people along the way. This conflict literally split the entire peace march in two when, out of nowhere, a violent summer storm forced us to take shelter under the shelter of a fertilizer factory. Crowded together under the corrugated metal roof (which was quite noisy in the rain), we spent several hours taking turns discussing this burning issue, using portable microphones and giving each of us two minutes to speak. The full hearing of all relevant perspectives and information created a tangible collective intelligence and deep mutual understanding that shaped the collective behavior of our march for the remaining six months of its existence – without any pressure or formal decision-making. When we finally saw this solution, it was completely obvious to all of us: marching together only makes sense in the cities (where there is media and transportation), while in the countryside (where there is nature and farmers) it is appropriate to freely divide. The storm passed, and we were amazed by what had just happened.
Organizations and municipalities
Can the entire organization be intelligent? In November 1997, seven hundred and fifty forest service employees, sitting together in a room, arrived in just three days at a shared vision for change that encompassed all aspects of forest service operations, including action plans developed by people who were passionate about implementing them. It was a one-time act with a lasting impact. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Center for Organizational Learning and other institutes are researching and supporting the ability of corporations to continually develop their organizational intelligence through a culture of continuous, high-quality dialogue about the dynamics of the entire system, both within the organization and in its interactions with its surroundings. Just as group intelligence depends on things like group process, organizational intelligence depends on factors like an organizational culture that supports dialogue, such as its memory systems (files, records, databases, “minute notes,” etc.) and systems that collect and use feedback (both from within the organization and from outside). When all these things are together, an organization can begin to create, collect, and use ways of understanding and solutions that transcend the ownership of individual employees and leaders and become part of itself. In other words, an organization learns and then tests and applies its intelligence in life in the same way that an individual does. And what might community intelligence look like? One such example can be seen in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which in the early 1980s was struggling with a local recession, a crumbling education system, and rising racial tensions. A few dozen citizens there formed the Chattanooga Venture, an organization that transcended class and race, and over the next decade brought hundreds together to jointly set and achieve community goals. Of the thirty-four specific big goals that the Chattanooga Venture set in 1984, twenty-nine had been completed by 1992; hundreds of citizens were then called together to jointly create new community goals. One of the goals that has been realized in this process is the creation of the Chattanooga Neighborhood Network, which has connected dozens of neighborhood associations to help people co-create their shared future right where they live, taking their community intelligence to the next level. The Chattanooga Alliance offers us a glimpse into the ever-evolving collective intelligence that we could create to solve our problems, to educate together, and to shape a better life right here at home.
States and entire societies
An example of collective intelligence on a statewide scale can be seen in the efforts of the nonprofit Oregon Health Decisions, which engaged thousands of diverse Oregonians in deep discussions about how to best use limited health care resources. Hundreds of such meetings, held in the 1980s, eventually led to the Oregon state legislature in 1990 mandating that these community meetings be used to identify values that could be used in state health care decisions. With the help of experts who provided insights from specialized health care, citizens considered different options (encompassing more than seven hundred approaches) for how to proceed with specific medical conditions and decided which of these medical procedures should be prioritized. Approaches that were inexpensive, highly effective, and/or needed by many people (which included a lot of preventive measures) were usually preferred over those that were expensive, less effective, and possibly needed by only a few. Although some people would likely not get the care they needed under this system, it was emphasized that some people were not getting the care they needed under the current health care system. The difference was that in the old health care system, it was the poor who fell through the cracks of unpaid debts. In the newly designed health care system, Oregonians sought to make these difficult decisions in a more conscious, open, and equitable way. So they tapped into the collective intelligence of their entire state and, through the collaboration of citizens and experts, began to weave together a wisdom greater than any individual or group could have created on their own.
Most excitingly, it appears possible to create a powerful and socially pervasive intelligence. One approach to doing this is to study a population for its characteristic diversity and then help representative groups learn together, dream together, and explore their problems and possibilities while the rest of society watches. These so-called proxy conversations—which could be particularly productively conducted with the help of professional facilitators—could be used to stimulate ordinary conversations among people in homes, schools, churches, and coffee shops across the country. This could dramatically change our political landscape, as subsequent government decisions would be made in a context of greater wisdom and sophistication, and within a broader public consensus.
This approach has been tried in many countries. Consider one such Canadian experiment: On a June weekend in 1991, a dozen Canadians gathered in a resort north of Toronto under the auspices of Maclean's, Canada's leading weekly newspaper. They had been selected scientifically to represent all the major sectors of public opinion in their deeply divided country. Yet, despite their deeply held beliefs, each of them was interested in the possibility of dialogue with people whose views differed from their own. The dialogue was moderated by the "conflict resolution guru," Harvard law professor Roger Fisher, co-author of the well-known book Getting to Yes, and two of his colleagues. Despite never really listening to the opinions and experiences of others, despite being under immense time pressure (they had only three days to create a shared vision for Canada), and despite being constantly watched by a CTV film crew (who were filming the event for a special public affairs program), they ultimately succeeded in their mission. Maclean’s reported in detail on their debates and recommendations, urging that a similar process “be expanded to other issues.”
What impact do you think the widespread practice of such dialogues could have on a country's politics – especially if they were conducted regularly, say once a year?
Democracy as an inclusive path of collective intelligence politics
When you include other relevant factors in your studies, your decisions, and your solutions, their results will improve. Your understanding will be more relevant to the current state of affairs and will tend to work better when applied in the real world.
We could say, then, that intelligence presupposes the exclusion of factors that are not essential and, on the other hand, the inclusion of as many relevant factors as we can accommodate in our reasoning. We do not take into account factors that are obviously unimportant, but we do not in any case exclude factors that are obviously or even hypothetically essential. For if we did, it would hinder our understanding.
Collective intelligence grows when it creatively incorporates relevant opinions, people, information, etc. into collective thinking. Although it is rarely desirable (or even feasible) to incorporate every person’s opinion into the decision-making process, the history of collective decision-making and collective problem-solving reveals a tendency to incorporate increasingly diverse and numerous voices into the process. Authoritarian systems include few voices and give the people who control them the power to enforce their decisions, ensuring that the intelligence of the entire system reflects only the intelligence of the leaders—i.e., lacks collective, system-wide intelligence. In contrast, democracy incorporates more voices, ideally the voices of all, with no one voice dominating, and thus creates much greater possibilities for collective intelligence. However, practical considerations require that each person can only be heard within small groups, such as town hall meetings. Hence, representative democracy was created, in which the voices of the entire population are channeled through small groups. However, over time, the powers and, consequently, the accountability of our legislatures, our executive branches, and our courts have been significantly reduced. This situation has led many of us to rethink our political and governmental arrangements. We have lost a significant amount of the inclusive, collective intelligence that we managed to gain in the early days of democracy.
But there is good news: in parallel with these developments, humanity is developing powerful tools to address these problems. Consider, for example, the use of representative dialogues, such as the Canadian dialogue mentioned above, combined with sophisticated use of media—especially telecommunications—and powerful group processes that creatively exploit diversity. And this is just one of hundreds of possible approaches “that are sweeping the world.” These developments suggest that we may be teetering on the edge of our next evolutionary leap into democracy as an inclusive path of collective intelligence politics.
On the relationship between collective and cooperative intelligence
We have seen that collective intelligence is a more inclusive form of intelligence that can be generated by people in groups, organizations, and communities. Cooperative intelligence is a completely different type of intelligence, but no less important. It is the ability to use intelligence in a spirit of partnership, rather than for control, defense, or escape.
Cooperative intelligence is an important part of collective intelligence. As we have seen in wilderness survival experiments, when people pool their individual intelligences in a shared exploration or enterprise—rather than using their intelligences to undermine each other and pursue individual victory—they are much more likely to create collective intelligence. Cooperative intelligence can exist among collectives. Some people say that the information age will create an economy based on the sharing of information and opportunities. When Widgets, Inc. and Blodgetts Corp. post links to each other on their websites, both companies (and their customers) win. There is even talk of “business ecosystems,” in which groups of hardware manufacturers, software producers, suppliers, distributors, and corporate and individual users form a business alliance that benefits all involved. Neighborhood groups, environmentalists, and fair trade organizations sometimes form similar alliances to protect their neighborhoods from toxic devices. Any intelligence that is used to support such alliances – or the growing number of public, private, and municipal partnerships or other such arrangements – is cooperative intelligence.
We can also cooperate with the circumstances we find ourselves in and use our intelligence to set in motion the natural tendencies that are at work in a given situation, or to learn from them. Masters of aikido and judo do not defend themselves by attacking their opponents, but by getting them to move and further supporting their own energy; for example, by moving the attacking opponent out of the way and by gently nudging him, sending him literally flying in the direction he was running. Some people say that every problem is also an opportunity, and that we need cooperative intelligence to recognize and seize these opportunities.
We are also called upon, individually and collectively, to work with nature. Rather than spreading toxic pesticides on vast fields of just one crop, we can plant crops together to support each other, and to include some species of animals that eat the insects we want to get rid of on our land. And we can fertilize our farms and gardens with compost produced from our waste, which is the natural way that natural systems feed. The way a house is oriented to the sun, the way its walls and windows are made, its soil insulation… all of these can provide us with opportunities to work with nature to heat or cool our homes without having to add any additional energy. To do this requires intelligence—cooperative intelligence—or we are wasting unnecessary strength, energy, and effort.
Some people say that working with nature and circumstances is really working with a Higher Intelligence, a universal plan or pattern. They believe that we can often—in a fruitful sense—relinquish control and let things unfold naturally. Most twelve-step addiction treatment programs, such as Alcoholics Anonymous, involve an intelligent shift away from stubbornness and selfishness, allowing the healing tendencies of life and community to carry us forward. This view and approach is shared by many indigenous and traditional cultures, as well as by many holistic healing practices.
The first challenge in any collaboration is to learn to creatively utilize diversity. One form of such diversity is different types of cognition, or, as some call it, multiple intelligences. We discover within ourselves and with each other analytical intellectual intelligence and emotional intelligence, verbal intelligence and musical intelligence, kinesthetic bodily intelligence and transcendental intelligence, and many others. How can analytically, intuitively, and kinesthetically oriented people use their multiple intelligences cooperatively to create a more powerful and complete collective intelligence?
Towards a general theory of co-intelligence
We can create intelligent communities, groups, organizations, and societies that work together, both with each other and with the fullness of life within and around us. We have hundreds of theories, approaches, and practices at our disposal that can help us realize this dream. We can explore the underlying reality from which all these theories, approaches, and practices emerge and embody, and come to understand the dynamics that are common to them all and make them all work.
Many of the insights we need will emerge from examining the nature of wholeness, interconnectedness, and co-creation. If we think of intelligence as a way for individuals to gain mastery over the world, we have lost sight of something extremely important. Instead, I suggest that intelligence is essentially concerned with creating and recreating wholeness, coherence, and appropriateness. We use our intelligence to make things right, good, or beautiful, to discover truth and reality, to make sense of things, to promote our health or our happiness. These are all forms of wholeness, coherence, and harmony.
Sometimes this harmony is disrupted by doubt, challenge, or change. At such times, our intelligence searches for a higher degree of coherence that might give new meaning to our experience. Healthy and intelligent individuals do this all the time. Likewise, in society, old ideas and patterns are challenged and transformed. Science, art, higher education, politics, and social change movements are just a few of the options available to us for institutionalizing the social learning process.
With this understanding of intelligence as our capacity to discover and create coherence, the rebirth and healing of our intelligence begins. It continues by exploring what intelligence would look like if we took wholeness, interconnectedness, and shared creativity seriously. Whenever I find another answer to this question, I will put it in a box called “co-intelligence.” In that box is collective intelligence, cooperative intelligence, and plenty of room for whatever else we can discover or create together as we explore our journey toward a world of fully co-intelligent cultures capable of solving our collective problems and evolving creatively in the millennium we stand on the threshold of.