The Collective Intelligence of the (Connected) Organizational Crowd – Take 2

I am taking the liberty of re-publishing this piece, which I first wrote in January 2007.  It still seems pertinent to me, and i thought I’d see if anyone else also thought so.

The Wisdom of Crowds, by James Surowiecki.  He delivered the keynote presentation at last November’s KMWorld 2007 (a conference about knowledge management and improving the effectiveness of knowledge work).

Yes, everyone gets the concept stated by the title.  Regardless of whether they agree with Surowiecki or not, there’s a fundamental attraction, and empirical evidence, to the concept.  A crowd, faced with a question or a problem, or an idea, is made up of a wide range of different diverse people with as many perspectives as there are people.  Yet there often seems to be a wisdom, a coalescing of sense, that can be deduced or extracted, or “consensed” from the crowd using a range of known processes.  In a given process, the crowd takes on a consciousness, and adopts a perspective or a position on an issue, which represents its ‘wisdom”.

The workforce in any given organization is a crowd of sorts (a crowd that is likely to be more homogenous than a general crowd, to be sure, and the constraint of some homogeneity plays into the rest of my thinking, as I hope will be evident).  Organizations have cultures, and can even be said to have personalities that flow from or are representative of that culture, as individuals in the organization act outwards towards customer, suppliers, vendors and other external stakeholders.

Indeed, many organizations go to significant lengths to ensure that their workforces are aligned, on the same page, hold a shared vision, speak as one .. you get the picture (or the vision, so to speak ;-).

And the inspiration, the catalyst, the creator  enabling the construction of that shared vision, the alignment, the culture in which the vision takes shape and is made manifest, is the job of the leader or (more common today) the leadership team.

But .. and here is where it gets interesting for me .. there is a significant tension in this process between structurally-induced learned behaviours and the sense people have of engaging and channeling the energy of a culture.

For quite a few years now there have been sustained and often clarion-like calls for the development of learning organizations, for changes to fundamental assumptions and models of leadership and effective management .. and hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars spent on culture change initiatives, coaching, increased effectiveness at internal communications .. you know it, I know it and employees all over North America and western Europe know it.

There have been scads of organizational development and organization change books trumpeting the need and one way or another that this is accomplished under a great leader or a magnificent leadership team.  There are competency models galore, climate and culture surveys, and a wide range of other assessment, diagnostic and developmental tools and processes aimed at “harnessing the employees’ and the organization’s potential“.

The structure of most organizations of any size is still clearly hierarchical, and it is the rare “authentic” or natural leader that possesses, finds or grows in him or herself the wisdom to bring humility, purpose, values, clarity and inclusive decision-making to the challenging role of creating  and leading a responsive, adaptable and effective organization.  Jim Collins codified these rare qualities in a concept and articles about “Level Five Leadership“, which was a featured central article in the Harvard Business Review’s Breakthrough Leadership issue. 

When going back into that literature or that field, the fundamentals I have always returned to  are the key points of humility and listening.

And I think that there’s the rub, and the lesson on offer with the possibilities of acknowledging and working to access the wisdom “collective intelligence” of the organizational crowd.

Most leaders, executives and senior managers are still of an age where they have been steeped in industrial-era management science assumptions, and they have reached the levels of senior decision-making and leadership with the help of the models of leadership and management effectiveness that preceded this digital and hyperlinked environment that includes the Internet and wide, deep and rapid access to information and other people.

They are to inspire culture, shape and direct the organization’s personality (expressed through its service and execution) and use power, access knowledge and acumen wisely.  But most still (and it may only be semi-consciously) know best how to operate top-down, even if their personal leadership or management style is not coercive or directive (note:  leadership & management styles and the related competency models come today mainly from David McLelland’s seminal work at Harvard in the ’60’s on Power (P), Achievement (Ach) and Affiliation (Aff), said to be the three motivational drivers common to all people in a workplace setting).

By and large, the people in today’s organizational structures charged with the accountability for leading to results, still like and know how to use the power of hierarchy … and let’s please remember that regardless of the relatively rapid changes in the fields of leadership development (viz. Level Five Leadership and Breakthrough Leadership, noted above .. or even Buckingham’s “First, Break All The Rules”), not so very much has changed. 

Notwithstanding Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence work and more recently, more from him on Social Intelligence ( derived from the basic constructs developed by David Mclelland, noted above), there remains in my opinion fundamental dissonance between these critical human attributes, the actual dynamics that demonstrate their use, and the social architecture in which they are used (the organization’s structure).  

The concepts and the words in the latest and greatest competency models may have changed, the coaches and professional leadership developers will have trotted them out, and you can’t get onto an airplane and look at the magazines without some article about the “new leadership”, but the banal reality is that most compensation philosophies and methods and performance management scheme objectives have not changed.  Yes, these leaders and managers will have performance objective related to the new competency models, and yes, there will be invoices from consultants to show that the leaders and senior managers have been trained during the last twelve months, but … the basic dominant organizational structure of today still mitigates against the use of these relatively new concepts.

Enter social software .. blogs, wikis and various widgets (like IM interfaces that help people connect, converse, swap ways of doing things and feedback from colleagues and customers … giant, wide always-coursing feedback loops that will not be stopped.

What of the wisdom collective intelligence of the interconnected of the organizational crowd ?

Well, in spite of more than a decade
of much work by many organizations that have involved themselves in much more inclusive, organizational democracy-oriented initiatives, it only takes a little bit of perceived ambiguity, loss of perceived control, shifts in markets or constituents … and control-oriented hierarchy usually reasserts itself very quickly.

Don’t believe me ?  Read The Economist’s The New Organization, published 24 months ago (damn, it’s now behind a pay wall.  I must have linked to it one too many times 

We’ve probably all worked in jobs in sizeable hierarchical organizations.  We know that many, if not most, people who work want to do a good job and also know a lot about what’s really going on – in the company, in its industry, in its markets, in the world out there and in the world they inhabit daily.

We also know that there is indeed something … something tangible, observable, useful and able to be developed and put to use … to the notion of the wisdom collective intelligence contained in and offered up by crowds when faced with an issue.

I and many others have maintained for a long time now that the adroit, open and sincere use of social software in an organization, and the listening and the tapping into wisdom … the wisdom of a given organization’s crowd … will help leaders and managers develop and grow as quickly, or more so, into leaders who do not rely on charisma or positional power or coercion or dishonest political manipulation, but rather face and embrace the crowd they are part of with humility. 

The job of a leader in today’s hyperlinked and transparent organizational world is to instantiate the crowd’s wisdom with a clearly-stated and purposeful mission and objective, and then listen .. and this is where social software can shine, can replace or augment even the most sophisticated culture or internal communications surveys and diagnostics. 

It can help leaders and managers learn to really listen, and to respond in intelligent and mature ways to the conversations that will carry the wisdomcollective intelligence of the organizational crowd. It can help them engage with that wisdom intelligence through leading and managing by blogging around (blogging around being the virtual electronic equivalent of “walking around” from the famous MBWA meme).

These days (and certainly “tomorrow”) it’s less and less about charisma, command and control, and more and more about conversations and championing, catalyzing and coordinating the wisdom collective intelligence of any given organizational crowd (and increasingly that crowd includes the customers, the suppliers, the vendors .. the whole shebang).