Tom Malone

What if you could measure the intelligence of a group? And predict which teams will perform better than others? You can, says Thomas Malone – and doing so is critical for business success. Citing findings from years of comprehensive research, he discusses three significant factors that impact group effectiveness, including: social intelligence, the balance of contributions and proportion of women to men. Malone emphasizes that interpersonal skills are more valuable than we might think, and just because you have really smart people in a group doesn’t mean you have a really smart group. But most importantly, collective intelligence can be influenced and changed, and he offers prescriptive steps for doing so – ultimately, changing how leaders structure their enterprises to achieve their goals and create smarter organizations.

Since its launch in the early 1990s, the Internet has changed the way we communicate, share information and work. More recently, it’s dramatically changing how we think about and resolve collective issues. And according to Thomas Malone, the Internet – and our use of collective intelligence – will truly transform how we solve big, global problems. Drawing from his work with the Sloan Center for Collective Intelligence (CCI), Malone examines how collective intelligence and new technologies are impacting the way people work together – for the better. The Internet, he says, gives more people access to an increasing amount of information that allows them to make larger contributions to their work and the world. Malone discusses new crowdsourcing resources like InnoCentive and CCI’s own Climate CoLab, their benefits, and how they’re already helping foster solutions to complex challenges – from specific workplace issues to global problems like climate change. Collective intelligence, Malone believes, is set to become an increasingly essential factor in companies’ capacity to achieve long-term competitiveness.

Throughout human history, progress has almost never been made by individuals acting alone, but rather by the power of groups. Thomas Malone calls these groups “superminds” – entities like hierarchies, communities, markets, and democracies that can accomplish far more by drawing upon their collective abilities to create, learn, and make decisions together. In this talk based on his book, “Superminds,” Malone uses striking examples and case studies to show how computers can help create much more intelligent superminds, not just with artificial intelligence, but perhaps even more importantly with hyperconnectivity: connecting people to one another at massive scales and in rich, new ways.  These new kinds of human-machine collective intelligence can help us address some of our most important problems in business, government, and other parts of society by, for example, creating jobs, enhancing innovation, and increasing the competitiveness of companies, regions and nations. Malone’s presentation is a practical guide to how groups that use computers to leverage their human intelligence can optimize their new power without losing sight of their human goals.