Nowadays no one needs to prove that cognitive diversity is an important factor that enables groups to act intelligently as a collective. James Surowiecki took the trouble of explaining it in his “Wisdom of Crowds”; so today I am not going to talk about how good diversity is for collective intelligence but about a less covered aspect, that is, to question if there are degrees of diversity that, under certain circumstances, could end up being detrimental.

Some time ago I discovered that diversity is a factor that, at a certain level, creates noise punishing group intelligence. I have seen this in a few projects so I set out to find argumentation to help me confirm my observations. A book I finished this weekend has been handy, and it is well worth a blog post of its own, “Too big to know”, by David Weinberger.

Based on the experience of Beth Noveck (an academic that worked a few years on Obama’s Open Government initiative), Weinberger explains that in environments where there is pressure to get things done, where apart from cogitation action is needed, the point where diversity becomes a problem, rather than part of the solution, must be pinned down.

“We enjoy diversity until we discover what it really means”, and this is completely valid when managing high impact projects, where there are clear expectations about results. So it seems that there is a “correct degree of diversity”, after which we start getting into trouble, because the cost of reaching consensus or aggregating opinions exceeds the benefits of having different points of view. At the tipping point feasibility begins to be more important than diversity. Read more ›

I bring here a version of an article published on the website of Emotools almost a year ago: “¿Qué factores predicen que un grupo sea más inteligente?”. Perhaps it seems an old article, but it is worth because it fits the main object of this blog and complements other entries. It was one of the issues most cited in Collective Intelligence MIT Conference 2012 held in Cambridge (Boston) two years ago. This research was done by a team formed by Anita Woolley (Carnegie Mellon) and Christopher Chabris (Union College/MIT), among others, whose results were published in the journal Science with a significant media impact.

By explain in a few words, the challenge was to find out if there are any factors that measure and explain the “intelligence of a group” as an ability to solve tasks by a group in the same way that there is an “Intelligence Quotient” (IQ) that estimates the degree of individual intelligence. Hence was born the so-called “C-factor“, which is the counterpart of the IQ coefficient but at a group level. Read more ›