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 ....