Novelty, Fads, Words, and the Waggle Dance

We've been listening to various sense making talks and others on the notion of "collective intelligence". I got the mistaken impression that this is a "new" notion / idea. After doing some ngram look ups and the wikipedia article and just some simple sense making, I came to a different understanding. In that process I thought I detected a pattern. 

• We (as humans) have a penchant for novelty, the new
• This penchant is used in various "waggle dances" to get us to move (metaphorically or literally) in a particular direction.
• Presenting phenomenon with new, unused, or seldom used words with the implicit implication that is a "new" discovery make for a more attractive / alluring / enticing waggle dance.

So, let us look at collective intelligence. The ngram view shows a reference to it around 1750. I expect that people have noticed this well before that. What are "elder circles" of ancient tribes but a form of collective intelligence?

Another part of this pattern is misapplication of the word. We see collective intelligence in some groups and not in others. My sense is that collective intelligence is always present in groups. It maybe fragmented,  localized, ineffective, inefficient, .... Perhaps a more useful way to think about it is as a spectrum - there are more / less effective forms of it in various groups, organizations, .....

Another part of this pattern is the issue of joining the spectrum of the phenomenon with the development ( on some metric, such as effectiveness, wisdom, ...) of this phenomenon. How does one get a group that has fragmented, ineffective collective intelligence to a "higher" / more advanced stage of that phenomenon. Various "spiritual" leaders have had insights into this such as love your neighbor, the eight fold path in Buddhism, ...... However, we have not yet figured out how to do this development in a deterministic fashion. Over two millennia of practice of these traditions and we still don't know how to do this collective intelligence in a guaranteed fashion like we build cars, bridges, and other complex structures. My optimistic self thinks that it is possible to improve our collective intelligence in a far more deterministic way. I am not sure about the how - that is part of our discovery, unfolding path ....

The Attraction of Idolatry

This notion came to me after being in a presentation with Trish Blain and hearing about her model of  the synergy between her notion of the four forces and Spiral Dynamics.

Various people throughout history have noticed that there are stages of development. We have development from childhood to adulthood. We have historical development of tribes, villages, towns, cities, nations, ...... civilizations. So, this developmental pattern is all around us. Wilber, Piaget, Kegan, etc., etc., have expounded on these stages of development. They have seen the "moon" and they have a "finger" pointing to the "moon". The finger is often a map, charts, graphics, .... that tries to describe the moon, i.e., that we have developmental stages as a fractal pattern in the universe. People create a "map" of the phenomenon. There a several issues with these  maps:

• The map entails implications that may not be present in the phenomenon
• The map becomes the focus of study, embellishment, "idolatory", dogma, ...
• ... still thinking ...

Let us take Spiral dynamics as an example. Spiral dynamics' map is a spiral graphic of stages of development. People can get so enamored of the graphic that they may forget that any representation of the underlying phenomenon leaves out many aspects of the depth and complexity of the phenomenon. So, the spiral creates a "simple" progression, like a ladder. You have to go rung by rung. You can't jump rungs. Contrast this spiral representation with a bucket of paint representation. We have all the colors of the spiral within us. Different "lights" / contexts highlight and bring forth different colors in us. I have seen young children act like wise adults on occasion, bypassing the teenage troubles. And we are all a mixture of colors. If our center of gravity is at turquoise, we have not lost our red. And certain contexts will bring out our red, blue, etc.

There is sometimes confusion in the spiral dynamics "community" about what is / is not possible in terms of stages of development. The actual phenomenon of stages of development is far more complex than any geometrical representation that we have yet been able to give it.