Collective Intelligence: Include The Disabled for Success

Hello everyone,

Want to be more productive at solving complex problems in groups? Work better in teams? Utilize all of your resources at their fullest potential, no matter how different some individuals might be perceived to be? Maybe you should study the way some ants bury their dead, ways fireflies in some parts of the world light up in synchronization, or the way field honey bees fly from flower to flower, collecting pollen and sweet juices, or nectar to produce honey. Read on; I am serious!

Have you ever been in a meeting and hardly anyone talked? Maybe the few outgoing people were the only ones voicing their opinions. As you might be sitting back in the meeting and listening and thinking to yourself, my thought is not valuable because it is quite different than all the other ideas that are being brought up; so I do not speak up in fear of being different.

I’ll bet you do not know how much your different point of view helps to make the outcome better for all! Without your different perspective the complete group may fail because you followed the opinions of only a few in the group; right or wrong.

If you have a disability or other unique viewpoints on the topic in discussion, or project, or program you are working on, it makes your input even more crucial to produce the very best output possible. I might even argue that if you are disabled, or have other challenges your thoughts are more important, since others do not have your unique viewpoint to offer such help or guidance.

This is true with software or hardware development as well. You would not want to develop inferior software or hardware products that are not accessible or usable by all people. In this highly competitive global market it is best to not limit your customer base to only a portion of the world’s population allowing your competitors to gain an advantage in which you may never have the opportunity to catch up. Include people with disabilities, we are brimming with innovative ideas!

With so much room for improvements in the current approach to working together, some groups and organizations have started to look at nature for resolutions and new ideas. Nature has done well when many members interact with each other with no one person directing, like the ants, fireflies and bees I mentioned

Do you wonder how such positive collaboration can happen?

Have you ever heard of swarm, or collective intelligence?

Swarm, or collective intelligence in one definition; is interacting as one large, self-organized group of computers or groups of people with all individuals fully participating, without infrastructure limitations. This is an emergent behavior, where complex group actions arise from simple local rules.

From Stephen Strogatz: Who Cares About Fireflies? We see fantastic examples of synchrony in the natural world all around us. To give an example, there were persistent reports when the first Western travelers went to South East Asia, back to the time of Sir Francis Drake in the 1500s, of spectacular scenes along riverbanks, where thousands upon thousands of fireflies in the trees would all light up and go off simultaneously. These kinds of reports kept coming back to the West, and were published in scientific journals, and people who hadn't seen it couldn't believe it. Scientists said that this is a case of human misperception, that we're seeing patterns that don't exist, or that it's an optical illusion. How could the fireflies, which are not very intelligent creatures, manage to coordinate their flashings in such a spectacular and vast way?

The answer on how this can happen is swarm, or collective intelligence.

In the May 1, 2001, Harvard Business Review, Swarm Intelligence: A Whole New Way to Think about Business by Eric Bonabeau and Christopher Meyer talks about the following.

What do ants and bees have to do with business? A great deal, it turns out. Individually, social insects are only minimally intelligent, and their work together is largely self-organized and unsupervised. Yet collectively they're capable of finding highly efficient solutions to difficult problems and can adapt automatically to changing environments. Over the past 20 years, the authors and other researchers have developed rigorous mathematical models to describe this phenomenon, which has been dubbed "swarm intelligence," and they are now applying them to business. Their research has already helped several companies develop more efficient ways to schedule factory equipment, divide tasks among workers, organize people, and even plot strategy. Emulating the way ants find the shortest path to a new food supply, for example, has led researchers at Hewlett-Packard to develop software programs that can find the most efficient way to route phone traffic over a telecommunications network. Southwest Airlines has used a similar model to efficiently route cargo. To allocate labor, honeybees appear to follow one simple but powerful rule--they seem to specialize in a particular activity unless they perceive an important need to perform another function. Using that model, researchers at Northwestern University have devised a system for painting trucks that can automatically adapt to changing conditions. In the future, the authors speculate, a company might structure its entire business using the principles of swarm intelligence. The result, they believe, would be the ultimate self-organizing enterprise--one that could adapt quickly and instinctively to fast-changing markets.

Listen to NPR: How Ants Bury Their Dead by John Nielsen - All Things Considered, December 9, 2006, the weekly Science Out of the Box segment considers the well-ordered world of ants. Their knack for carefully stacking their dead has sent researchers scurrying to see if humans can learn lessons in efficiency from them.

Ants work together in large groups performing very complicated task with no one leader. They fight battles find food and stack their dead in intricate precise patterns; and re-stack them sorting them as they do so. This research is helping to build robots that have intelligence like ants, among many other very exciting projects.

At the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence they are bringing together faculty from across MIT to conduct research on how new communications technologies are changing the way people work together. They are collaborating with other educational institutions, organizations and individuals to better understand and find new ways to leverage collective intelligence.

Just a few of the factors that facilitate collective intelligence from MIT’s Handbook of Collective Intelligence.

•  Diversity
•  Shared vocabulary and other infrastructure
•  Awareness

Some of the factors that inhibit collective intelligence from MIT’s handbook.

•  Biases
•  Implementation issues

As you have read or listened, swarm or collective intelligence can be interactions between computer to computer, computer to people or people to people just to name a few of the possible interactions. I would like to focus our discussion on improving collective intelligence between people to people and people to computer.

Collective intelligence can facilitate increased productivity in community, global (multiple organizations and individuals) and corporate project, or program teams. Can aid if you do work in Diversity, looking to leverage all employees uniqueness’s effectively or work in Human Resources and you desire your highly skilled and valued workforce to be agile to allow your employees to use their talents when and where best needed at any particular moment. Explaining why it is essential to develop, maintain and procure accessible and usable applications with universal design following such standards as the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and leveraging resources like the ones at Trace Research and Development Center and Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) special Interest Group on Accessible Computing to facilitate and allow all people to contribute equally and effectively. Such standards can leverage IT investments, save time, money and reduce duplication of efforts. It is best to leverage what nature has already perfected. People are just starting to understand and utilize techniques to improve outdated processes. Focus your efforts on actions that will facilitate collective intelligence and resolve any barriers which will inhibit your positive results!

If all people cannot equally participate fully with accessible and usable tools you are inhibiting collective intelligence. You need to create ways to facilitate collective intelligence so you can more easily find highly efficient solutions to your most difficult problems. Then you can adapt automatically to changing markets and environments with agility and grace. Make sure the disabled, or others with challenges can fully participate like all others efficiently. These individuals are your most valued path to your success in fully utilizing the benefits of collective intelligence.

Is anyone seeing results with swarm, or collective intelligence? Are you having implementation issues? What parts of your personal or professional life is this helping with? Do you see how it can help the disabled or others with special needs in their personal or professional life?

I look forward to hearing from you.

Bill Tipton
Contributing Author,
Global Dialogue Center
http://www.globaldialoguecenter.com

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/wdtipton

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bill.tipton.39

Twitter: http://twitter.com/wdtipton

Comments

[Gayle Moss]

Dear Bill...this is wonderful! There is so much great information in here, you should write a book. I'm serious!

Thanks and keep these great posts coming! And let me know when your book launch is scheduled :)

Gayle

[steve torok]

Have you heared of the "going to Abigleen" concept of management science? Briefly it is a story where a group in a car wants to go for dinner. Someone suggests Abigleen, Texas. No-one objects so they end up in Abigleen . When they are there they find no-one wanted to go there... One example of collective intelligence, the other is the legendary leemings all following their leader over a cliff and drawning below...
Steve Torok

[Bill Tipton - Life and Work with a Disability BLOG]

Hello everyone,

Steve, thank you for sharing "going to Abilene" concept of management. I had not read about this concept and your comment sounded intrusting so I looked it up and found: Abilene paradox.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abilene_paradox

From Wikipedia: “The Abilene paradox is a paradox in which a group of people collectively decide on a course of action that is counter to the preferences of any of the individuals in the group. It involves a common breakdown of group communication in which each member mistakenly believes that their own preferences are counter to the group's and do not raise objections.”

I think this fits great into the true collective intelligence conversation. We need all members of the group to have an equal voice without fear of having different viewpoints or ideas to truly produce positive results.
This is why you need a very diverse group of people who are not afraid of their differences and are valued for their uniqueness. All members need to be allowed to fully participate without restrictions to fully benefit.

If we did not have a diverse group of people who are fully valued for their differences working on programs, projects or issues in our communities or organizations we would get results like the Abilene paradox describes.

Does anyone else have positive examples of the benefits of collective intelligence? Any stories that help explain what happens when we do not have true collective intelligence with everyone being allowed to fully participate without external restrictions? One restriction is tools that are not usable or accessible and do not let the disabled fully engage and participate, like some of what I described in message above.

We all look forward to hearing your comments, thoughts and suggestions to help us all take advantage of collective intelligence.

Bill Tipton
Contributing Author
Global Dialogue Center
http://www.globaldialoguecenter.com/

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