Wise executives tailor their approach to the complexity of the circumstances they face. David Snowden and Mary Boone suggest the key difference between simple, complicated, chaotic and complex problems lies in our knowledge of the relationship between cause and effect, as Mark Schenk explains here:

Collective Intelligence is a shared or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals and appears in consensus decision making in bacteria, animals, humans and computer networks.

Here is a short (five-minute) introduction.



This (free) book contains 55 essays covering just about every aspect of the subject: http://tinyurl.com/2hfnqs. Note, it is a 6.6MB pdf file, so will take some time to download.

The Yala is a platform for collaboration, designed to aid the emergence of collective intelligence. How does it work?

Emergence is characteristic of complex adaptive systems. These are the subset of complex systems able to learn in their parts and as a whole. The European Union, the stock market, ant colonies, the biosphere, the ecosystem, the brain, the immune system, the cell and the developing embryo are all complex systems that learn, change, adapt and grow.

Four actions aid emergence: connect neighbors, invite feedback, display patterns, and control indirectly (watch the video below).  All are baked into the process of creating a Yala.

Their goal is to improve the quality of dialogue at the "interfaces" of complex relationships. These are the places where people need to work together across some sort of boundary: functional, geographic, inter-organizational, and so on.

Dialogue is thinking together in a conversation with a center and no sides. A better quality dialogue is likely to be more articulate, symmetrical and authentic.

Consequently the prerequisites for dialogue guide the relatively simple interactions that give rise to the complex phenomenon of collective intelligence. Some of these rules are implicit in the Yala’s design, others openly on display in guidelines for web-based communication.