VShe back-to-school Monday begins with a joyous hubbub: reinvigorated, colleagues exchange snippets of their holidays (for those who were able to benefit from it). The morning serves to regain its bearings. 3 p.m.: the soufflé subsides, interactions between colleagues become rare. The silence is interspersed with sighs, marked by regret at not having been able to pose for another week, even by the anguish of starting a gray tunnel until Christmas.
A figure then haunts Myriam, who has just been appointed manager of cross-functional projects (between several departments): only 6% of French employees are truly “engaged” in their work, according to the firm’s “State of the Global Workplace 2022” report Gallup. To move forward, this dear Myriam nevertheless repeats at will that she is betting on collective intelligence.
A real mantra for managers who want to turn their backs on the traditional hierarchy (or pretend to do so), collective intelligence designates the processes by which a team of people who cooperate solves problems more easily than a sum of isolated people.
It seems like a common-sense principle, and yet it is framed by inspirational speakers and other “human relations experts” as about as amazing a discovery as the invention of electricity. Eh yes, “Alone, we go faster, but together, we go further”. “If man is a wolf for man, wolves know how to overcome their solitary nature when they hunt in packs! »enthused Myriam during the back-to-school meeting.
Change of mindset
Surprise: unfortunately, it is not so simple to tune all the violins of an orchestra (another well-appreciated metaphor, the one who conducts must be the conductor), and the means to do this deserve to be studied in detail. Appearing in psychology and biology, the concept of collective intelligence was adopted in management sciences in the 1990s, and joined the notion of work collective and that of intelligence, which is understood by the ability to take charge and solve a problem.
Collective intelligence therefore requires a change of mindset, based on a better quality of exchanges between peers. Cécile Dejoux, professor of management at the National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts, assimilated it into a interview to cooperation: “Collaborating is taking people who are in a group, and getting everyone to do a task; cooperating means being faced with a complex situation and co-creating together. »
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