Business Week Online posted an edited transcript of a conversation with author Stephen Joyce who wrote Teaching an Anthill to Fetch: Developing Collaboration @ Work. According to Joyce, collaborative intelligence can be understood as such:
Observe firemen fighting fires, platoons of soldiers in combat situations, sports teams playing at their best. They refer to times when they felt they were tapping into something much larger than themselves. Their description sounds as if they were talking about a field of intelligence that has been created by the group and that they can all tap into. I refer to this as “collaborative intelligence,” or CQ: the ability to harness the energy and intelligence of groups or teams.“
With the open-source movement and the prevalence of Wiki’s, we’re clearly sitting amid a marketplace thriving on CQ; Joyce says, though, that the problem is bringing the human element up to speed with technology.
You can buy Joyce’s books to read his tools for enhancing CQ within your team, you can skim BNET’s resources on collaboration for a refresher course in fostering synergy, or, if you’re trying to cultivate collaboration across divisions, you can take these few suggestions from BU Corporate Education Center.
(Collaboration Image by Larsz)
