Collective intelligence is not an abstraction. It is a real-world emergent phenomenon — a phenomenon that ranges from collective stupidity to collective brilliance. It arises from interactions among entities in shared situations. Collective intelligence — of any quality — can just happen, or it can be consciously enhanced or undermined. The diversity of the entities involved and the free flow (and absorption and consideration) of relevant information among them can facilitate higher levels of collective intelligence. But regardless of what is happening, some level of collective intelligence is always present wherever interacting entities share fate in shared circumstances.
Many people think collective intelligence only applies to groups of people or, perhaps also, to groups of primates and social insects. But we as individuals are actually intelligent collectives. One aspect of this can be seen when a therapist helps a patients sort out different “voices” inside them — and then has those voices talk to each other — sometimes with the patient physically moving to different chairs assigned to each voice. In therapy, these bickering “voices” are helped to come up with some coherent decisions or more conscious relationships among themselves that make the patient more functional and feel more whole. As it gets its act together, this little internal community acting as one person usually seems to work quite well!
Accenture isn’t “top of mind” when we think of Enterprise Risk Management (ERM)…for now. I recall a Senior Director at consulting firm I worked for (it's no longer in business) tell an auditorium of about 1000 consultants “I'm not afraid of Accenture. They don't scare me.” Ah huh.
I thought: “That's because you haven't come up against them in the market.” Look, this Risk Report is more than a compilation of statistics and trends, it tells us a lot about Accenture's corporate culture and what's important to them. But first, go get the App!
The App – They ought to charge you for it. A couple of clicks and you’re got customized and mobile knowledge management. Works on your iPhone, iPad, Android device or laptop. The only way they could have made it better is to have tossed in Key Board Cat for good measure. Accenture wants to be your E-Buddy and they'll go through a lot of expense to spoon feed you great info.
It’s a weird culture that mashes Chekhov into the same week with Optimus Prime, but we followed an experience of Uncle Vanya (with terrific performances by Rob Matney and Liz Fisher, and staging that puts you right there on the farm) with a 3D romp through the Transformers universe, and somehow I’m trying to connect the dots. In Chekhov’s play, you could see trouble brewing – Rob says “that Vanya is about the moment before an epochal and cataclysmic culture shift as a culture and these lives look into a future that appears to promise little.” Sound familiar? Transformers, on the other hand, offers a world where one set of massive robotic aliens wants to enslave the human race, and another set – against all logic – are sworn to protect us. A massive battle levels Chicago; at the end, humanity is free from Decepticon enslavement (but not necessarily from our own particularly human enslavements, not addressed in the film, though the nastiest character on board is the human accountant, played by Patrick Dempsey, who makes a devil’s deal with the Decepticons).
While I experienced fanboy delight at the expert use of 3D and exquisitely choreographed robotic battles in the Transformers film, the very real tensions within Uncle Vanya were more real and more compelling. No Decepticons there, but the sense of a subtler, willing enslavement – hard-working farmers exploited by a spoiled elite, and everyone miserable except perhaps the character Sonya, who ends the play with these words: “We shall hear the angels, we shall see the whole sky all diamonds, we shall see how all earthly evil, all our sufferings, are drowned in the mercy that will fill the whole world. And our life will grow peaceful, tender, sweet as a caress. . . . In your life you haven’t known what joy was; but wait, Uncle Vanya, wait. . . . We shall rest.” (This makes me think of the idea of grace in Malick’s Tree of Life, which is probably a reference to the concept of “actual grace”: a supernatural gift of God to intellectual creatures (men, angels) for their eternal salvation, whether the latter be furthered and attained through salutary acts or a state of holiness.)
After Vanya and Transformers, we had a muted 4th of July – in the midst of drought, no fireworks, surely a metaphor for our times.
People have come before us, failed, learned, written it down. Scientists have figured out what works, and proven it. Economists have gained significant understanding about the long-term impacts of short-term decisions. And historians have seen it all before.
How dare we, then, decide to just wing it? To skip class. To make up history. To imagine that science is a matter of opinion, something optional, a diversion for the leisure classes… How can we work in the marketing tech field, for example, without knowing about David Ogilvy and Lester Wunderman and Claude Hopkins? Or Kaushik and Shirky?
If you're doing important work (and I'm hoping you are), then you owe it to your audience or your customers or your co-workers to learn everything you can. Feel free to ignore what you learn, but at least learn it.
Phi Beta Iota: Willful ignorance is a form of corruption or lack of integrity.
It is so good to celebrate INdependence Days in the United States and the many other countries that have successfully gained and defended their independence from colonial rule.
For countries as well as individuals, independence is a dramatic move from dependence into a more self-defined, self-created life.
The next developmental step takes us into greater INTERdependence – bringing ourselves into increasingly mutual, peer, give-and-take relationships with others.
The great part about starting out small, simple, and a little cheesy is that it can only get better from there. Using that logic, my friends and I have launched a wiki called Miiu (pronounced me-you). Miiu is a visual wiki. Essentially, a catalogue of things (products, tools, etc.) and places (homes, businesses, gov't buildings, etc.).
To start off, our goal is to do what lots of people have asked me to create: a wiki that catalogues everything related to resilient communities. We'd like to create a visual catelogue of the things (from DIY solar stills to an inventory of homes, farms, businesses in your community) that will be useful in the development of resilient communities.
Lulzsec has some claims to being an open source insurgency. It operated as a foco by generating a plausible promise: its hacks were high profile and successful, proving that it's possible to successfully attack/damage all big organizations despite the billions they spend on computer security. This promise has also generated copycats/clones around the world. Finally, it is now disbanding (forgoing any formal leadership role). If they can disband in a way that lets them escape unscathed, that only adds to the promise. Quote from their website:
“For the past 50 days we've been disrupting and exposing corporations, governments, often the general population itself, and quite possibly everything in between, just because we could. We hope, wish, even beg, that the movement manifests itself into a revolution that can continue on without us. The support we've gathered for it in such a short space of time is truly overwhelming, and not to mention humbling. Please don't stop. Together, united, we can stomp down our common oppressors and imbue ourselves with the power and freedom we deserve.”
