Consider this: One draft horse can pull 8,000 pounds. Two horses working together as an effective team can pull three times as much – 24,000 pounds. That’s the potential of collective intelligence. It’s an untapped superpower that helps you work exponentially better together.
Just as IQ measures the ability of individuals to perform certain tasks, collective intelligence – or CQ – predicts a group’s ability to solve problems. It’s the secret to building high-performing teams that have better inclusion, innovation, and productivity.
And the good news is – every company can build it. Reflection Point helps to systematically unlock this deep mine of wisdom that’s hiding in every workplace, at the intersection between people. We help your teams to become greater (and smarter) than the sum of their parts. And we do this by deeply connecting teams, fostering relationships, and building the five key skills that breed collective intelligence.
“I never imagined that discussing stories would help my team work better together - but that’s exactly what happened.”
—ETHAN KARP, CEO OF MAGNET
“Following Reflection Point sessions, our collaboration is always better. We build on each other’s ideas versus trying to come up with the winning idea. My colleagues will offer an idea for dialogue and debate without attaching themselves to it. The introverts find their voice, new points of view emerge, and we all see the world through a slightly different and slightly clearer lens.”
—Marvin Riley, Former CEO, Enpro Industries, Inc.
1. Listening with humility.
So many times we listen only to wait our turn to speak or to catch someone in a mistake. Listening is not a weapon but a powerful tool for real learning. Listening well, with genuine humility, enhances our capacity for innovation and drives collaboration.
2. Asking good and curious questions.
Good questions are not “gotcha” or test questions, they are curious questions driven by an authentic interest to learn because you genuinely want to hear the answer. Asking good questions unleashes new ideas by surfacing the hidden insights of others.
3. Challenging strongly held assumptions.
We all navigate the world with a set of beliefs and understandings born of our education, upbringing, and experience. But we become entrenched when we see the world only through the things we already know. By challenging our assumptions and suspending our “known truths,” we open our minds to others’ points of view and expand our mental models.
4. Disagreeing with respect and without retribution.
In the healthiest and most productive organizations, people feel empowered to speak up and offer alternative points of view. Positive disagreement is the bedrock of learning that cannot happen without psychological safety, grounded in trust and mutual regard.
5. Widening the circle of empathy.
Science confirms that despite our best intentions, we are most empathetic with people we already know or who look and feel like us. It’s much harder to be open to those we dislike or with whom we fundamentally disagree. By deepening our relationships and expanding our understanding, we widen the circle of empathy and naturally expand inclusion and belonging.
Reflection Point’s approach works because it’s grounded in science and the latest research on organizational learning. Here are three key academic papers that prove collective intelligence and connection help us work better together.
Collective Intelligence Creates Smarter, Better, More Effective Teams
A seminal study called Evidence for a Collective Intelligence Factor in Human Groups found that teams with the highest collective intelligence solve problems faster, are more productive, and more innovative. It’s not the team with the smartest person. It’s not the team with the largest number of individually smart people or the highest average IQ. Collectively intelligent teams have the most honed social or relational skills, skills that help them listen and ask questions, debate and disagree, and be open to each other’s different perspectives and divergent experiences. They are the most socially sensitive. They are balanced turn takers, with each person contributing evenly to the conversation. And they are diverse.
Social Interactions Boost Productivity
In a compelling study at MIT called The New Science of Building Great Teams, researchers used body-worn sociometers to measure social interactions in a former Bank of America call center. These digital devices measured the length and depth of interactions among colleagues. Colleagues who interacted more had faster calls, less stress and the same approval ratings as their colleagues who stayed glued to their phones. When the company synchronized employee breaks across their call centers, they saw a 20% drop in the average call handling time—even for lower-performing teams—and a $15 million improvement in productivity over one years. Taking time to connect with colleagues fosters increased productivity.
Deep Relationships at Work Amplify Innovation
In 1990, two scholars wrote a widely respected paper on organizational learning called Absorptive Capacity: A New Perspective on Learning & Innovation. As table stakes, the most adaptive and innovative organizations have team members with a wide variety of skills and experiences. But this research found that it’s actually the quality of the relationships between these colleagues that matters most. When the relationships between people are deepened and improved, innovation, organizational learning and productivity all rise. Our relationships magnify our individual skills, unlocking a collective power no individual has alone.”
Teams communicate better.
“Reflection Point brought our team closer together, opened up lines of communication and broke down barriers.”
Trust grows.
“When we take the time to exchange thoughts and feelings outside of the work environment, we build a deeper trust inside of the work environment.”
Diverse perspectives are amplified.
“The Reflection Point experience changed my thinking about race, class, gender, injustice, and my privilege. It was personal, and deep, and changed my core being.”
Collaboration explodes.
“Reflection Point has helped my team’s focus and speed of execution, and our collaboration is better. Reflection Point is community building on steroids.”
Every week, factory workers at an engine manufacturer left the production line to do something completely different: talk about stories. Reflection Point facilitated discussions on everything from Ernest Hemingway’s short stories to John Steinbeck’s Of Mice & Men.
“We’re trying to change our culture. We’ve been doing things a certain way for over a hundred years, and we’re trying to get away from that. Reflection Point makes you come together, and it makes you talk to other people that you work with and see things from their perspective. It gets different ideas out there. That’s what we need, lots of different ideas, not just the same idea,” said one participant.
The group discussed and sometimes hotly debated the stories. In the process they got to know each other on a whole new level. Perspectives changed. Minds opened. And back on the production line, the team was transformed. They were more innovative, respectful, and better at solving problems together.
“It brought our work group closer together, opened up lines of communication, and broke down barriers,” said the team supervisor.
The team also credited Reflection Point with an increase in productivity. When asked why, a young machinist suggested that Steinbeck said it best: “You can’t hate a man once you know him,” he explained. “Now that we know each other, there’s not a problem we can’t solve together.”
Reflection Point uses hundreds of different stories, so we can choose the ones that unearth the right themes and discussions for your organization. A few examples:
“Kwoon” by Charles Johnson
An experienced student challenges his young martial arts teacher at his kwoon in a rough urban neighborhood. This story raises issues of leadership and mentorship, how we can learn from the people we serve, how to recover from an exposure of weakness, and how to build trust with a difficult person.
“The Color Master” by Aimee Bender
Growing in role, an apprentice to an expert color master meets a difficult set of orders from an important customer. The workplace fairytale explores client service, examining mentorship, succession, mastery and the struggle to achieve excellence in the face of emotional and ethical challenges.
“Dragon Slayers” by Jerald Walker
Facing harsh criticism from a highly regarded mentor, the author reflects on his self-image as a black man, his writing and how he mentors others. The story asks us to reflect on how we see ourselves, and how much stereotypes drive our perspectives of ourselves and each other, within and across race.
“I love the way that you could weave in and out of the story, and then also bring it full circle to what you’re facing or dealing with in a corporate environment.”
—Reflection Point Participant
Remember team assignments in school? I do. I was that kid that did all the work while the others goofed off.
The key to effective team work in school was simple: if you had one of the hardest-working classmates on your team, you were golden. If you were that person (like me), then you carried the load for distributed “credit.”
Despite the occasional team project, in school, we learn, work, and are graded individually.
Work is a solo sport too. We are hired and promoted, honored and recognized, for our individual skills and accomplishments.
But no matter how smart and accomplished, there’s only so much one person can do alone. A Deloitte survey of 245 C-level executives showed that 65% identified collaboration as a crucial workplace skill. But only 14% were satisfied with their company’s current ability to work well together. And that was before the pandemic sent many people home to work remotely, some for good.
If we didn’t learn teamwork at school, then how can we meet the needs of the current (and rapidly changing) workplace?
Collaboration doesn’t just happen when you put people into groups. It’s a specific set of skills that help us work together to achieve something no one person can do alone. It’s when the whole is more innovative, more productive, and collectively smarter than the sum of its parts.
Effective collaboration depends on the collective intelligence of the team.
That’s not just some fancy made-up term. Science tells us that collective intelligence is very real and very measurable. Just as IQ measures the ability of individuals to perform certain tasks, collective intelligence predicts a team’s ability to solve problems too. The findings of a seminal study (Anita Williams Woolley et al.) shed light on what this means.
Unlike our school experiences, the most collectively intelligent team is not the team with a single smart and hard-working member. It’s not even the team with the largest number of individually smart people or the highest average IQ.
The most collectively intelligent teams are the most socially sensitive - the ones where the members are most attuned to the feelings and perspectives of the others. They are balanced turn takers, with each person (not just the loudest person) contributing evenly to the conversation.
Finally, the most collectively intelligent teams are diverse. According to the study’s findings, teams with higher proportions of women tend to be more collectively intelligent. The smartest teams don’t manage their diversity - they succeed because of it.
In short, when teams are both diverse and have well developed skills, stand back! They are unstoppable. The most collectively intelligent teams also have the most honed social or relational skills, skills that help them listen and ask questions, debate and disagree, and be open to each other’s different perspectives and divergent experiences.
We can’t build these skills individually or simply hope that they will magically happen when we come together. These skills live in the spaces between colleagues, so they must be built - and practiced - together.
We would never ask a professional sports team to play without practice. A sports team’s excellence is more than knowing when to pass the ball. It’s knowing from experience and repetition where the others will be, and how they will respond when the ball is passed.
But we ask business teams to “play without practice” all the time. If you want your teams to have that sixth sense - of where their colleagues are going and when to pass the proverbial ball - you have to invest in connecting the spaces between them. That’s where the real wisdom of your organization is hidden - just waiting to be put to work.
If you successfully do this, the reward is immense: growth, innovation, inclusion and productivity. Collective intelligence is the key to being unstoppable.
