This post was written by Tom Atlee and published originally in the previous incarnation of this blog.

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.

Usually the difference is described in terms of cooperation. If the individuals cooperate, they can generate collective intelligence. Often the importance of collective resources or structures, like various forms of group memory (databases), are noted. These, and other analyses, are quite valid.

I sense something underlying them all, though. That is the presence of “the whole” in the life and functioning of “the parts.” For example:

• If workers in an organization share a common vision and/or an understanding of the functioning of the entire organization, they tend to self-organize in more collectively intelligent ways.
• People who collaborate are doing so either because they believe in their shared work (the larger whole that embraces them all) or because there is a collaborative group ethic which lives in or among them strongly enough to structure their interactions.
• In decision-making bodies, having diverse information from all stakeholders which paints a more complex big-picture reality than any member came in with, and/or having a process that can help them deal with their diverse perspectives creatively so that they “encounter more of the whole” creatively, facilitates the emergence of collective intelligence.
• People who are collectively attuned to more inclusive, less fragmented realities — including Quakers and certain practitioners of ego-transcendence — tend to be able to more readily find high-quality common ground and shared energy, often in ways that feel more like the Whole is working THROUGH them or AS them.

For many years, I’ve felt that the essence of wisdom is wholeness. Wisdom, in all its forms, helps us deal creatively with more of the whole of life, of situations, of the people who sit across from us — engaging more of their complexity, nuance, aliveness and fullness. It recently occurred to me that wisdom may be a concept within which to collect all the different factors that enable individual intelligence to manifest as collective intelligence. If wisdom 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.

This may be too abstract to be useful to others, but I expect to be exploring it further for my own purposes in the future. For what it’s worth, here are some notes that summarize this thesis….

1. For my purposes in these notes, I propose that wisdom characterizes
any factor [a]
that facilitates greater positive engagement [b]
with more of the whole [c]

a. Specifically, any factor that has the potential to influence our interface with the world — such as a worldview; a piece of insight, information, knowledge, understanding or advice (or source of these, such as a person, book, article, experience, database or website); a way of thinking, feeling or behaving; a dimension of our character; a protocol, ritual or habit; a cultural expectation, assumption or narrative; a group or organizational process; a social or political institution; a law or policy; a physical structure or design; and so on. Any of these can shape our engagement with the world in holistic ways and thus be wise.

b. “Engagement” here can be active or passive. It includes perceiving, reflecting on and understanding, as well as being with, responding to, influencing and changing reality, as well as being influenced or changed by it. Engagement here implies interbeing and interactivity.

c. The “whole” here refers to the deeper, fuller, more comprehensive reality of something — a person, a group or community, a situation, an idea, the world, or anything else.

In other words, a viewpoint, a person, a book, a policy, etc., can be called wise if it helps us engage better with the full reality we face than most other approaches, especially “foolish” ones which focus our attention and awareness on only very small (often self-centered) pieces of reality.

2. The presence of individual intelligence [a]
will facilitate collective intelligence in the group [b]
to the extent that wisdom is present [c].
a. For my purposes here, an “individual” is any single entity at any holonic level, as: an individual person, an individual organization, an individual country, etc.

b. “Group” is used here to refer to any more inclusive holon, i.e., one that is made up of “individuals” (as defined above). In these notes, the term “group” may be a community, a network, a federation, a society, etc. — either of individual people or of individual groups, organizations, etc. The term “group” here could refer to both a corporation made up of individual employees and to a society made up of individual citizens and organizations.

c. Wisdom can be present in a number of ways and reside in different sources. Specifically, we may find wisdom (that which leads us towards greater engagement with the whole)

• existing within a given individual
• existing within a given group
• embedded in a group’s interactions and collective behaviors
• manifested in the group’s internal guiding structures [d]
• operating through trans-group factors that are part of the group’s context — e.g., laws and regulations, energy fields, situational realities, power-holders, and other entities or forces that shape group behavior

d. “Guiding structures” includes such things as the group’s INTERNAL decision-making processes, cultural norms, physical infrastructure, reward systems, group narratives, etc.

SUMMARY
So intelligence can (and does!) exist AT a given holonic level without significant wisdom. But wisdom is needed AT THAT LEVEL for that intelligence to manifest as collective intelligence at higher holonic (i.e., collective) levels. Wisdom — the force behind increasing wholeness — allows intelligences existing at lower holonic levels to operate and integrate at higher holonic levels.