Collective Intelligence

I cannot call myself a scientist. But I am deeply grateful to the many scientists around the world who not only do great research, but also make their ideas accessible to the rest of us — to parents, educators and curious minds who are trying to understand life a little better.

Over the past years, I have followed the work of researchers and thinkers such as Lisa Feldman Barrett, Andrew Huberman, Michael Levin and others. What I often take from their work is not the scientific details, which require a real scientific background, but something broader: a principle, which can be applied in our lives and translated into useful tools.

One of these principles, which already resonated with me, I found grounded in the work of Michael Levin.

The developmental biologist Michael Levin studies how cells communicate, coordinate and organise themselves. A single cell, on its own, can manage only small, basic goals — keeping itself alive, responding to its immediate surroundings. But when cells connect, something changes. Through the signals they exchange, they begin to hold a goal that no single cell could hold alone: to build a limb, to heal a wound, to form an organ of exactly the right shape. As he describes it, the intelligence is not only inside the single cell. It emerges in the connection — and with connection comes a larger purpose than any cell had on its own. This is what he calls collective intelligence.

This is not only true of cells. When we connect, we can reach further together than we ever could alone. A body is not just a collection of parts. It is a living system — one that, as a whole, can pursue goals and meet challenges that no single cell could ever meet alone.

But connection is not automatic, and it is not guaranteed. It has to be built, and it has to be cultivated. Certain conditions have to be present for many parts to become a collective whole — and when they are missing, connection fails.

Levin describes this vividly at the level of the body. When a cell breaks away from the network — when it stops responding to its neighbours and begins pursuing only its own survival, its own growth, at the expense of the whole — that is, in his description, what cancer is.

Cancer is an extreme case. But the principle it lays bare can be observed beyond the body. A group is not held together by proximity alone. It is held together by the conditions that keep its parts in relation.

So the question becomes: what are those conditions? What is it that allows a group of people — a family, a circle of friends, a team working together — to think and act as more than the sum of its members?

For over two decades, I have explored this very question in my professional life — building dozens of new teams. I lived it most vividly in parent-run children's initiatives, where paid educators and unpaid, volunteering parents had to become a single working community, for the sake of the children.

What I found, again and again, comes down to two things that must sit together.

The first is a shared goal. A group is not simply a number of people in the same room; it is a number of people facing the same way. Without something they are all reaching for — the well-being of the children, the building of something that matters — a group is only a collection of individuals, each pursuing their own small aims. The common goal is what turns many into one. It is the shared story that every part buys into, the reason the parts hold together at all.

We tend to imagine that such a goal is handed down. Someone stands up, lays out a vision, and the others align themselves behind it. Sometimes this happens, and sometimes it works. But a goal announced is not yet a goal shared. It becomes real only when others take it on as their own — and that is not something anyone can command.

In my experience, shared goals more often emerge than are declared. They form slowly, in the doing. People arrive with their own reasons, work alongside one another, and gradually discover what they are building together. Someone may name it roughly at the start, but the group reshapes it through the work until it becomes genuinely theirs.

And here is something worth noticing: a shared goal does not require shared motives.

Think of a football team. One player is there for the love of the game. Another wants to prove something to himself. Another dreams of fame. Their reasons could not be more different. What unites them is not why they came, but what they are moving toward together: the same ball, the same net, the same desire to win.

But a shared goal or vision alone is not enough. If everyone facing that goal thinks in exactly the same way, the group gains little from being a group. And this is the second condition, the one we find harder to allow: there must be room for difference.

The same football team shows it just as clearly. A team learns nothing from being a team if everyone plays the same role, thinks the same way, or sees the game from the same angle. Its strength is that each player brings something different — a position, a skill, a timing, a way of reading what is happening.

And now comes the most difficult part.

Knowing all of this changes very little on its own. This is, in most cases, our real problem: we understand something, and then we simply do not act on it. The knowledge sits there, true and useless. It is one thing to know that a group needs a shared goal and room for difference. It is another thing entirely to build those conditions on an ordinary Tuesday, with real people, in the middle of everything else.

And these conditions do not do not stay fixed. A group is not a structure you build once and leave standing. It is alive, and like anything alive, it changes. The balance that worked last month stops working this one. The shared goal blurs and has to be named again. Cultivating these conditions is not a task to complete. It is something closer to tending a garden — never finished, always responding to what is actually there.

So how do we become a well-functioning collective intelligence — and where do we begin? And once we have it, how do we keep it connected as everything around it changes?

Not through grand declarations, but through rituals.

A ritual is simply something that returns. The meal at the same hour. The time we come back to together, whether or not there is urgency or necessity.

Rituals seem small, and that is exactly why we underestimate them. But they do two things that nothing else does as reliably. They bring us back to the shared goal.

Groups drift. The daily friction of small things — who did what, who forgot what, who should have done more — slowly obscures the reason everyone is there. A ritual interrupts the drift. It asks, quietly and regularly: what are we actually doing here, together?

And rituals keep us in contact.

Connection does not survive on goodwill alone; it survives on contact. A group that only meets when something is wrong will only ever meet around what is wrong. A ritual makes contact ordinary rather than exceptional — so that the differences between people can be heard before they harden into distance.

This is what cultivating a collective intelligence actually looks like.

Not a system imposed from above, not a method applied once and then forgotten, but many small returns. Returning to the shared goal. Returning to one another. Returning to the table, the conversation, the question: what are we here for?

Because a collective intelligence is never finished. Like a mosaic, it is placed and re-placed, piece by piece, through the small repeated gestures of a shared life.

Source: the work of Michael Levin on developmental bioelectricity and collective intelligence. His lab's research is published at the Allen Discovery Center, Tufts University.