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Big Mind: How Collective Intelligence Can Change Our World
By Geoff Mulgan
Princeton University Press 2017
Big Mind, Geoff Mulgan's new book, is the culmination of 20 years of thinking, advising, designing and delivering on the front line of activism, policy and public work in the UK and around the world.
It's part manual and work-book, part philosophical tract, part invitation to learn and part call to arms for the growing practice of our ability to think and act together, “the capacity of groups to make good decisions—to choose what to do, and who to do it with—through a combination of human and machine capabilities.”
He argues from the early part of the book that “the ways intelligence is organised are largely fractal in nature with similar patterns occurring on multiple scales, from groups of friends to organisations and whole societies.” If you remember from your complexity theory, “fractal” means that the shape and patterns of organising are the same at whatever scale you observe the phenomenon you are studying. Think sea shells, snowflakes, lightning, broccoli, peacocks and pineapples.
“On each scale,” Geoff argues, “collective intelligence depends on functional capabilities: distinct abilities to observe, analyse, remember, create, empathise, and judge - each of which can be enhanced by technologies, and each of which also has a cost.” These are then supported by infrastructures that make collective intelligence easier: “common standards and rules, physical objects that embody intelligence, institutions that can concentrate the resources needed for the hard work of thought, and looser networks and societies of mind.”
The book, in line with Geoff's more recent writing for Nesta on his collective intelligence ideas (here and here), also describes how “collective intelligence assemblies” are created.
He suggests that the successful examples of collective intelligence “are best understood as assemblies of multiple elements. Discovering which assemblies work best requires continuous shuffling of the elements, since capabilities, infrastructures, and organisational models have to coevolve with environments.”
That makes intuitive sense. What we're trying to do is render the pieces - knowledge, expertise, physical and virtual assets, platforms, money, policy, power and authority - more intelligent as they assemble themselves in something that starts to look like a purposeful and decisive puzzle.
Yet, he continues, “some of the most important fields - including politics, the university, and finance - lack this capacity for iterative shuffling, and so become locked into configurations that keep them less effective than they should be.” This is crucial.
As I argued in a small book a few years ago written with former Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner, institutions too often find themselves out of shape for the new roles of collective intelligence (as Geoff offers the framework) to which we want them to contribute. As Lindsay and I argued, “changing shape” is an institutional reform imperative that now looms larger than ever.
Geoff's focus is as global as it is ferociously and predictably local. At the global level, he suggests, “there is a need for new assemblies that can marshal global collective intelligence for global tasks, from addressing climate change to avoiding pandemics, solving problems of unemployment to the challenges of aging.” He thinks it's possible to imagine what these could look like - building on recent initiatives in medicine and the environment that try to observe, model, predict, and act.
Geoff's work oscillates, often at great speed, between theory, action, learning, adjusted theory and more action. In the book, he complains that “these ways of organising thought on a large scale are still in their infancy.”
As a consequence, he admits he's writing about ideas and potential practice that “lack a convincing guiding theory and professional experts who know the tricks of the trade. In many cases, they lack a reliable economic base. Yet they suggest how in the future, almost every field of human activity could become better at harnessing information and learning fast.”
This is the book's call to arms, which is in effect a call to learn, together. It constitutes a broad and inclusive invitation to join the effort to start filling out the collective intelligence playbook. And that playbook should reflect that collective intelligence theory has to be constructed, at least in large measure, “not just by interests and habit but also by meanings and stories.”
This is a book that needs a bit of time to study and ponder. I keep going back to chunks of the argument and share the narrative with colleagues and clients alike. As always with a Mulgan book, there is plenty to challenge and provoke.
The book is not the answer, or even an answer, but it does have answers that test and stretch.
It draws on more than 20 years of intense study and practice to offer some sharp, difficult but very valuable questions. The American writer Thomas Berger one said, apparently, that the art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge (he also, even more pithily, answered the question “why do writers write” with the obvious answer, “because it isn't there.”; not strictly relevant here but a profound insight worth sharing).
If knowledge and questions go together, Big Mind is full of knowledge we can usefully engage, test, use and perhaps even add to.
In the end, the book is dedicated to the proposition that “creating such [collective intelligence] tools on a scale, and with capabilities proportionate to the challenges, and nurturing people with skills in “intelligence design” will be one of the great tasks facing the twenty-first century.”
I think's he right.
Read a longer version of this review on Martin's Blog
