Collective Intelligence – ElPropósito3 min de lectura

How and why to unlock this potential

Photo: unsplash.com/@pascalswier16

Teams have unique strengths, above all the ability to solve problems under the right conditions. Building the dynamics that bring a team together comes with challenges we usually take for granted or overlook, and they end up being the main barrier to unlocking a team’s collective intelligence. Extremely demanding situations call for putting that intelligence at everyone’s disposal. Here’s how.

Leadership plays a key role in sparking collective intelligence. Humility is one of the first things a leader has to cultivate, and humility takes self-confidence. Self-confidence makes room to trust others and to know that answers come faster once communication flows both ways.

The next step is articulating a vision. Knowing where we’re headed lets us point our efforts in one direction and use our resources better, time above all. When the task is "save the ship to save our lives" and the whole crew trusts that its efforts are and will be welcome, the options to pull it off are much easier to find.

Why is the pace we want one thing and the pace we actually achieve another? Much of it depends on how responsible each person feels for the challenge the organization faces. In a monolithic structure, leadership tends to set the vision and also execute everything, so the rest of the crew just waits for orders or answers.

Complex environments need all of this to run both ways. Crew and leadership alike should be able to articulate a shared vision, values and purpose that let them handle every task in front of them (ideally, this would become the way to work for good). Making that two-way street real takes communication: every member should feel the trust and safety to listen and be heard. That’s how we keep unlocking our teams’ full potential.

Unlocking the intelligence beneath any organization may be the needle in the haystack we need to keep sailing these rough waters. This pandemic has broken beliefs and paradigms in every corner of the planet, and it has shaken up management and leadership too. Everything that’s been said, over and over, about teamwork suddenly came to life. Now is the time to make it stick, seize the moment and make sure the ship survives.

Warm regards and all the best,

Rodrigo Baccaro

This week’s VELA:

• What I’ve been Viewing: What you didn’t know about coffee. A great, eye-opening TED talk, especially on the many myths around coffee. It clears up several topics very well, including roasting and how much the freshness of roasted coffee matters before you have a good cup in hand.
• What I’ve been Listening to: How Science Can Fix Remote Work. A very valuable podcast. The part about astronauts stood out. Living in space under extreme confinement, astronauts are trained in a fascinating set of skills, and the parallel with the isolation the whole world is living through is powerful. That’s what makes this audio so valuable, and I invite you to listen to all of it.
• What I’ve been Reading: Rescuing scientific innovation from corporate bureaucracy. One of the best Harvard Business Review articles I’ve read, and they’re all good. What does corporate bureaucracy do to the speed at which we need to innovate? The answer is in these lines, and it’s worth the four minutes. Pro tip: this is a very recent HBR article in Spanish, so if you’re thinking of buying a good subscription, I recommend HBR.
• What I’ve been Learning: Mail Merge with Attachments. A great, free Google tool. It’s an add-on you can install on any Gmail account to send personalized emails to your contacts with much less effort.

TO WATCH. If you’re interested in high-value webinars, check out the SmartWebinars playlist on YouTube, an initiative created by Zamorano graduates to share top-level knowledge in areas such as human development, economics, finance, entrepreneurship, agriculture and its many branches, among others.

Author: Rodrigo Baccaro

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