Do you have a complex challenge that you are looking to solve? Use our resources and expertise to unlock the potential in teams.

Collective Intelligence Resources

<a href="mailto:philip.runsten@hhs.se">philip.runsten@hhs.se</a> 
 
Researcher 
PhD, Stockholm School of Economics
Senior Consultant, Founder 
<a href="https://www.influence.se">Influence</a>

Philip Runsten

The underlying change driving an increased use of groups and teams for coordination is the increasing specialization, and the number of experts and specialists needing to come together and coordinate. This, in turn, drives complexity, and the only way for organizations to deal with complexity in the long run is by intelligence, that is intelligent coordination. Essential in this intelligent coordination of organizations will be the group level. Teams or micro-systems is the operational unit in which the organization’s need of coordination becomes dependent of the intelligence, behavior, emotional and social skills of individuals. These factors create a variance in collective intelligence. Average collective intelligence at micro-system level is therefore a fairly new way of describing organizational performance. The purpose of this report, which is a literature review, is to give an overview of how collective intelligence at micro-system level has been defined, how it relates to organizational performance, what factors have been identified as causing variance and what types of interventions at team level have been discussed. A total of 92 articles and two dissertations were selected based on a search of EBSCO/Business Source Premier.

Team Intelligence: The foundations of intelligent organizations

CI Publication

Team intelligence: The foundations of intelligent organizations

CI Model Research
Developing Collective Intelligence is an approach to share and integrate knowledge using self-navigation and reflection to achieve commonly defined goals.

Influence Labs

The main takeaway from this chapter is that you, as an individual team member, can choose to help your team in becoming high performing. In particular, there are three behaviors that can aid you in achieving high performance for your team:

1) Continuously developing your understanding of the team’s purpose, context and situation
2) Being heedful – acting with attention and care towards the team, the situation and yourself
3) Taking responsibility for the team’s mood

The members define a team

Why the Members Define a Team

Since a group’s collective intelligence and performance to a large extent is determined by the quality of the team debriefs, or reflections, within the group, improving the quality of debriefs is essential. By conducting team debriefs using a digital tool, a team can benefit from the anonymous mode – to avoid social processes – and from parallelism – to secure that all perspectives are included in the discussion.

A digital tool to increase performance

Why do we need an app for collaboration?

The reflection capability is about a team'ability to reflect and learn from their work to gradually improve the problem formulation and solution of the task. Depending on the quality of the reflections, the dynamics in these differences can result in either valuable discussions which take the team forward, or, cause misunderstandings, irritations and conflicts. It is about merging minds. If you are skilled in the art of reflection, you can have large teams thinking large thoughts together.

The group's ability to reflect and learn from their work 

The reflection capability

The integration capability concerns how individuals go about to dynamically and adaptably coordinate their knowledge resources and maintain their knowledge processes. It is about the team members’ ability to act as a coordinated unit based on their supportive behavior, with attention and care for the shared task and each other.


The group's ability to act as a coordinated unit based on supportive behavior

The integration capability

In conclusion, the relationship capability is about building trusting relationships within a group to increase psychological safety. Strong relationship capability can be seen in group norms and behaviors characterized by openness, both in terms of openness towards differences among individuals and openness to knowledge-based risk taking. Openness is important since it allows people to use knowledge that they feel uncertain about – it provides a feeling of safety, assuring that what one say will not be used against oneself. If a group has high confidence in all member’s knowledge, one can also expect that the desire to try to understand each other is higher.

The group's ability to create an open social climate where member's trust each other

The relation capability

The representation capability is about a team’s ability to formulate an adequate shared picture of the task and the setting. It is about being able to create and maintain a sufficient consensus of the task and team, and to appropriately allocate available resources to address the task. Thus, the representation capability is a prerequisite for both the cognitive specialization and the integration of this specialized knowledge in teams.

The group’s ability to formulate an adequate shared picture of the task and its setting

The representation capability

There are some clear characteristics of high performing teams. What is fascinating, is that these different behaviors are not exceptional, but commonplace behaviors that most people have practiced in some situation and are capable of. The behaviors can also be trained: if a team wants to, it can choose to practice certain behaviors to improve performance.

Characteristics of high performing teams

CI Publication 

What are the Secrets of High Performing Teams?

The skill of sharing and integrating knowledge within teams to gain leverage of all group members can be referred to as Collective Intelligence. For a team to be effective, it must develop its capacity to create both effective task processes and social processes. These are also the challenges that the CI-model addresses.

The four capabilities of the CI-model:

Representation
The team’s ability to formulate an adequate shared picture (mental model)
of the task and its setting, that can guide their everyday actions.

Reflection
The team’s ability to learn from shared work and to improve the understanding
of the task.

Relation
The team’s ability to create an open and safe social climate where team members
have trust in each other’s capabilities and intentions.

Integration
The team members’ ability to act as a coordinated unit based on their supportive
behaviour, with attention and care for the shared task and each other.

Collective Intelligence Resources

Team intelligence: The foundations of intelligent organizations

CI Publication

Why the Members Define a Team

CI Publication

Why do we need an app for collaboration?

CI Publication

The reflection capability

CI Publication

The integration capability

CI Publication

The relation capability

CI Publication

The representation capability

CI Publication

What are the Secrets of High Performing Teams?

CI Publication

The CI Model

CI Publication

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