Sergio Vergara Venegas - Building Collective Intelligence in the Organization

Communicating is a one-way process that is often vertical and top-down. Generating understanding is a two-way process that requires the development of skills other than just the ability to express one’s self. It involves the ability to substantiate, debate, make one’s reality visible, build bridges between parties and connect seemingly distant dots. Many leaders communicate little because they fear that people will want to take more control once they are more informed. For this reason, communication is avoided and this results in even less shared understanding and therefore less contribution and commitment. In our experience with the Partners & Success consulting team, we have often been surprised by the low level of shared understanding that the executive group has of their own business model. It is not uncommon to find a significant gap between the understanding that top management has in relation to its their group of managers and assistant managers. An executive team that does not have a good understanding of the key levers that generate growth and profitability in the company does not propose good ideas in strategic planning, which discourages senior management from involving the team in the creation of the plan, which in turn maintains and widens the understanding gap.

Generating shared understanding goes hand in hand with the process of role maturity. A team leader or manager who does not share information for fear that people will want to take control is not learning how to exercise their authority and therefore is not teaching their team how to exercise their role constructively. Doing this is not easy. At the beginning, it is common for the parties to move in extremes, in what we can call the “pendulum” effect. For example, people either don’t take responsibility or want to redefine everything. Other times, the team leader, who up to now has been involved in all the details, declares that they will no longer participate. It is normal, and expected in any learning process, that the development of these true collective “muscles” takes time.

On many occasions, generating a shared purpose requires starting from what we are capable of doing collectively right now; although it is not perfect, it is what is possible. This is more advisable than proposing to achieve the best, if it is not possible for the whole system to achieve or learn at that particular time. This is the essence of the evolutionary concept that underpins this author’s climate model: you have to learn to walk before you can run.

The evolutionary model has been built on the basis of the factors for creating collective intelligence, which has applications in various subjects that involve collective learning. We will now explore the principles of the evolutionary model for organizational climate management.

Figure 1.1

Key concepts from Chapter 1: Collective Intelligence

We understand the process of creating collective intelligence as getting a significant number of people from the organization to:

1. Have a shared understanding of what the challenges are and the ways to address them.

2. Be clear about what their role is within this challenge and acquire individual or collective skills to perform it.

3. Have an emotional commitment to a shared purpose throughout the team.

4. In human-related issues, unlike technical ones, knowing the solution is not the same as solving the problem.

5. Communicating and achieving understanding are not the same. The latter implies different and more complex skills and actions.

6. Generating collective intelligence is a maturing process, and it is advisable to advance in successive steps that are possible for the group to achieve, while remaining challenging.

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