Chapter 1
A DIFFERENT KIND OF KNOWING
It's July 2003, and fifteen top telecom executives have gathered at a small island retreat off
the coast of Maine. Tensions are high as they head into a
three-day summit to discuss the future of the industry. Since
the advent of wireless service and the web, companies have been
scrambling to stay ahead of the technological curve, and amid
growing market competition, it has become clear that some new
thinking
is needed.
For the first two days, the talks are frustrating.
Experts take turns trading theories and speculations, but
everyone remains guarded. Finally, at the suggestion of one
executive, on the third morning a “dialogue
facilitator” is flown in to try to bring the group
together. After giving a brief introduction about the importance
of listening and suspending assumptions, and a plea to remember
the common goal that brought them together, the meeting begins.
Already, there is a different quality in the room. Around the
circle, people seem more relaxed and more attentive to one
another. A few minutes into the discussion, the CEO of one of
the large wireless providers shares his vision: “I think
we need to stop thinking of our work in purely business
terms,” he states, pausing, groping for words. “What
if we began to see one another not simply as competitors for
market share, but as partners in uniting the world through
technology? If you really think about it, in a sense, isn't our
larger mission to create the infrastructure that will make it
possible for the Global Village to become a real
community?” His openness seems to catch everyone off
guard, and for the first time all weekend, there is a brief
silence. In this silence, an almost imperceptible, vibrant
energy begins to grow in the room. “I'm glad you had the
guts to say it,” another executive offers. “I think
we've all grown tired of just chasing the bottom line.”
“I agree,” a third adds. “If there's anything
this industry needs right now, it's vision.”
The shift in the group is now becoming palpable,
and several people comment on it. There is an electricity in the
air and a sense of space that seems to envelop everyone. More
members join in, and as each individual speaks, it seems to pull
the group deeper into a unity, not only of interest but of
vision. Several people try to speak at once, only to burst into
laughter upon discovering that they all spontaneously had the
same idea. A creativity seems to swirl in the room, carrying
everyone with it, and a mysterious recognition begins to dawn in
the group that they are no longer operating as separate
individuals but are actually thinking together. Hours pass, but
nobody wants to stop. Eventually, the meeting comes to a natural
close, and everyone sits together in silence for a few minutes.
Nobody knows what has happened. But they all know it was
important.
In a world where many of us are still apt to think that
there is nothing genuinely new under the sun, something seems to
be emerging on our collective frontier. Around the country and
across the globe, from corporate boardrooms to social change
think tanks, people are responding to an impulse to come
together in shared exploration. And in their midst, something
miraculous is being born. “When the group reaches a
certain level of coherence, generally there's some higher level
of order that comes into the room and it's very noticeable to
people,” explains organizational consultant Robert Kenny.
“It's like something has shifted. People stop fighting for
airspace and there's a kind of group intuition that develops.
It's almost like the group as a whole becomes a tuning fork for
the inflow of wisdom.”
Call it collective consciousness, team synergy,
co-intelligence, or group mind—a growing number of people
are discovering through their own experience that wholes are
indeed far more than the sum of their parts; that when
individuals come together with a shared intention, in a
conducive environment, something mysterious can come into being,
with capacities and intelligences that far transcend those of
the individuals involved.
“In these group experiences, people have access to a
kind of knowing that's bigger than what we normally experience
with each other,” describes author and researcher Carol
Frenier. “You feel the presence of the sacred, and you
sense that everybody else in the group is also feeling that.
There's a sense of openness and awareness of something larger
than yourself. Your ability to communicate seems broader. What
is astounding to people is how much creativity comes forth in a
setting like that. You have a sense that the whole group is
creating together, and you don't quite exactly know how.”
As Frenier, Kenny, and a growing cadre of other researchers
in this new field are finding, it seems that in the spaces
between us, unexpected higher-order collective potentials can
emerge that make even our greatest individual capacities look
insignificant by comparison. And the implications for the way we
understand ourselves and the way we work together are as
startling as they are profound. Juanita Brown, author of the
forthcoming The World Café: Bringing Conversation to
Life, observes, “What's happening in these settings
is that you're actually bringing up the new. That's
what makes it so exciting for people to be a part of. You're
bringing up the next level—whether it's deeper or higher
or broader—and people sense that there's something there
of immense value. Sometimes it shows up in the inner experience,
either individually or collectively, as an 'Aha!' Other times,
everybody will go silent, because they're all reflecting on what
has just been revealed. It's almost like a revelation of some
sort makes itself visible.”
If you've never read a book about this “collective
intelligence,” you're not alone. Despite its widespread
emergence, it's a phenomenon that until recently has almost
escaped the lens of the social sciences. For the past decade or
so, this nascent social dynamic has been quietly simmering on
the cultural back burners, slowly building up steam for the
moment when it would burst forth into full boil—a moment
that may have just arrived. Thanks to the strong voices of a few
key movers and shakers, this newly recognized potential is
rapidly catching the attention of a growing number of innovators
intrigued by the possibility of harnessing the creative power of
collectives toward the resolution of our most complex
problems.
Google “collective consciousness” and you'll get
over 64,000 results. “Collective intelligence”
brings 30,000; “group mind,” 20,000. A visit to some
of the sites listed reveals a host of new organizations with
names like the Co-Intelligence Institute, the Collective Wisdom
Initiative, and community-intelligence.com, all dedicated to
chronicling and furthering our understanding of higher-order
group functioning. Peppered throughout the latest literature on
leading-edge organizational development are an ever-growing
number of references to concepts like “developing group
synergy,” “tapping the group mind,”
“unleashing collective creativity,” and
“developing team coordination.” In increasingly
diverse fields of endeavor, it seems, the power of the
collective is coming to the fore.
The fact that coordinated teams faced with a common task can
access higher levels of functioning is, of course, not a new
revelation. Ask a sampling of soldiers who faced combat in a
platoon whether they ever experienced a heightened awareness of
the whole, or even a “group mind,” and you might be
surprised to find how many will have a sense of what you're
talking about. Indeed, rescue crews, sports teams, dance
troupes, and music ensembles have for years been reporting
remarkable experiences of team synergy or group flow that have
lifted them to undreamt-of heights of coordination and
effectiveness. Add to that several millennia of group worship
and other shared religious practice, and you might be inclined
to ask what the fuss is all about. From a certain point of view,
it could be argued, experiences of communion are as old as the
tribe. However, what seems to be new about what's happening
today is that this phenomenon is not only arising spontaneously
in increasingly diverse groups throughout the world but,
according to Otto Scharmer, cofounder of the MIT Leadership Lab,
“more and more people are having this type of experience
in the context of everyday work and professional settings.
What's interesting today is that this kind of experience is
something that no longer occurs in retreat from doing your real
work, but in the midst of doing your real
work—particularly when the work is related to profound
social change and innovation.”
How to account for this new emergence is not entirely clear.
Perhaps in our increasingly secular global culture, the sacred
dimension is simply being forced to find new, more secular
channels by which to make itself known in the world. Or it could
be that, in response to mounting threats to our very survival, a
kind of adaptive impulse is arising in the species, calling us
to come together. As Juanita Brown puts it, “Perhaps in
the face of the collective danger we're experiencing, our
collective survival instincts are waking up and we're searching
for a way to pass forward that will not be suicidal.” But
among those who experience it, there is an increasing sense that
whatever is bringing this collective awakening about, its
implications are nothing short of evolutionary. As Bill Veltrop,
former Exxon executive and founder of the International Center
for Organization Design, puts it, “We're absolutely
convinced that we're experiencing the beginnings of an
evolutionary shift that's greater than anything we've ever
experienced . . . as [a] society.”