Below is a snippet from the Prologue of my upcoming book. Every week another portion of the book will arrive in your inbox until I complete the self-publishing process.
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Supporting groups in generating genius greater than the sum of their parts is not rocket science, it’s human science - a science far more mysterious than landing a ship on Mars. The art and science of fostering co-creative spaces for your people to collaborate authentically, and be better together, requires us to think differently about how we spend our time thinking and working in groups and organizations.
In the West, we tend to overly rely on two ways to think and express thoughts: linguistic and logical/mathematical. Leveraging these two intelligences has done the world well during the industrial and digital age, as we’ve unlocked amazing engineering and communication tools, and scaled them globally. And, as with any overleveraged strength, they have a shadow - less desirable impacts. Having spent much of the last century elevating and celebrating the more linear forms of intelligence, we find ourselves at a fascinating point in time where the thinking that got us to this point is not the thinking that can get us beyond here, and to the next peak.
By accessing and expressing the brilliance of all our thought centers (head, heart & gut), we can think wider, deeper and more powerfully than by just leveraging one of our centers of cognition. Add your powerful grouping of head, heart and gut genius to a gaggle of others doing the same and, viola, innovation, impact, rapid iteration, improved performance and increased quality result.
As we look into the ever growing chaotic future, it becomes more and more evident that we must solve our challenges in short order. Doing so will require us to access many layers of our intelligence and animate our innate brilliance - sharing our thoughts, feelings and intuitions freely. As leaders of teams and organizations, we have the power to influence and invite how our people show up, connect and collaborate. By creating collaborative spaces (e.g. meetings, retreats, experiences) where our people express their brilliance and are able to effectively blend it with the others, they begin to create something better than the sum of the parts. When we do this consistently, we begin to evolve toward more participatory, creative, trusting and impactful cultures..
When our people are only thinking with one of their cognitive centers, struggle to collaborate with their colleagues, and default to the existing power structures, we end up with group think. Group think brought us such solutions as the Great Chinese Famine, Jim Crow Laws, Concentration Camps (both Japanese & Jewish), McCarthy Hearings, the Iraq War and the Federal Reserve Bank (which is not a Federal body. holds no reserves and does provide banking services). I’m sure you’ll agree that that’s not a confidence inspiring list.
Groupthink is the antithesis of group genius. When you hear the words, “Design by committee,” what comes to mind? Yeah, not a program, place or position you want to occupy. Group think has us repeating past patterns, and recycling antiquated belief systems.
Given your organization is made of up people who are likely aligned (e.g. they love making widgets, they are passionate about environmental justice, they believe education is the key to turning youth into successful adults), it should be little wonder that so many teams, causes, and organizations gets caught in the groupthink vortex. The only way to buck this trend is to practice counter-cultural patterns of being, and doing together.
