Category Archives: CI Basics

The following fields of study and practice have an emergent, leading edge quality to them and, at the same time, seem to be overlapping more and more, and even converging into an increasingly coherent understanding of the intelligence of whole systems, and of Life as a whole.
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One of the most intriguing aspects of collective intelligence is its relative independence from individual intelligence. It is clear to most students of the field that a group of intelligent people will not necessarily manifest group intelligence. Nor will a coalition of intelligent groups necessarily add up to an intelligent coalition. Nor will making all organizations intelligent, by itself, produce a collectively intelligent society. The intelligence of the parts/individuals varies independently with the intelligence of the whole/collective.
However, if wisdom [as defined in these notes] is present at the individual level, or in the environment where the individuals are relating to each other, then it tends to expand their individuality into the “higher” (collective) levels where all those individualities can then manifest collectively as positive, intelligently coherent functioning.
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This is yet another essential blog entry by Tom Atlee. He wrote: “There are probably hundreds of factors we could identify as important for the generation of collective intelligence in different types of human system. We find these factors wherever we see collective intelligence being exercised, and when we support them (especially in combination) we often find collective intelligence increasing.
From my work with reflective forms of CI in groups, communities and societies, I find that about fifteen factors stand out most vividly, and I’ve listed them with brief descriptions here.”
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Here is a list of human systems which Tom Atlee thinks of as “being capable of collective intelligence — from individual through organizations and societies up to global. It is, of course, only one possible list of this kind. Note that these are HUMAN systems. Other organisms, social species and ecosystems — at least — are also capable of collective intelligence.
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This is a germinal CI taxonomy fromTom Atlee. He wrote: “I have lately been receiving a lot of information on forms of and approaches to collective intelligence that do not fit within models I’ve been working with for the last fifteen years (that are largely deliberative). I am no expert on these other approaches, but encountering them has led me to brainstorm an annotated list of different forms to cover what I’ve seen so far.
I feel certain my list is not complete and that there are other ways of differentiating forms of collective intelligence, which I’d love to hear about. I intend this initial listing to be temporarily clarifying and stimulating and, hopefully, to trigger people to come up with new ways to map this terrain that better lay the groundwork for an evolving general theory of collective intelligence that embraces all variations.
My list includes reflective CI, structural CI, evolutionary CI, informational CI, noetic CI, flow CI, statistical CI and relevational CI.”
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