Collective Intelligence: Include The Disabled for Success

Want to be more productive at solving complex problems in groups? Work better in teams? Utilize all of your resources at their fullest potential, no matter how different some individuals might be perceived to be? Maybe you should study the way some ants bury their dead, ways fireflies in some parts of the world light up in synchronization, or the way field honey bees fly from flower to flower, collecting pollen and sweet juices, or nectar to produce honey. Read on; I am serious!

Have you ever been in a meeting and hardly anyone talked? Maybe the few outgoing people were the only ones voicing their opinions. As you might be sitting back in the meeting and listening and thinking to yourself, my thought is not valuable because it is quite different than all the other ideas that are being brought up; so I do not speak up in fear of being different.

I’ll bet you do not know how much your different point of view helps to make the outcome better for all! Without your different perspective the complete group may fail because you followed the opinions of only a few in the group; right or wrong.

If you have a disability or other unique viewpoints on the topic in discussion, or project, or program you are working on, it makes your input even more crucial to produce the very best output possible. I might even argue that if you are disabled, or have other challenges your thoughts are more important, since others do not have your unique viewpoint to offer such help or guidance.

This is true with software or hardware development as well. You would not want to develop inferior software or hardware products that are not accessible or usable by all people. In this highly competitive global market it is best to not limit your customer base to only a portion of the world’s population allowing your competitors to gain an advantage in which you may never have the opportunity to catch up. Include people with disabilities, we are brimming with innovative ideas!

With so much room for improvements in the current approach to working together, some groups and organizations have started to look at nature for resolutions and new ideas. Nature has done well when many members interact with each other with no one person directing, like the ants, fireflies and bees I mentioned

Do you wonder how such positive collaboration can happen?
Have you ever heard of swarm, or collective intelligence?

Swarm, or collective intelligence in one definition; is interacting as one large, self-organized group of computers or groups of people with all individuals fully participating, without infrastructure limitations. This is an emergent behavior, where complex group actions arise from simple local rules.

From Stephen Strogatz: Who Cares About Fireflies? We see fantastic examples of synchrony in the natural world all around us. To give an example, there were persistent reports when the first Western travelers went to South East Asia, back to the time of Sir Francis Drake in the 1500s, of spectacular scenes along riverbanks, where thousands upon thousands of fireflies in the trees would all light up and go off simultaneously. These kinds of reports kept coming back to the West, and were published in scientific journals, and people who hadn’t seen it couldn’t believe it. Scientists said that this is a case of human misperception, that we’re seeing patterns that don’t exist, or that it’s an optical illusion. How could the fireflies, which are not very intelligent creatures, manage to coordinate their flashings in such a spectacular and vast way?

The answer on how this can happen is swarm, or collective intelligence.

In the May 1, 2001, Harvard Business Review, Swarm Intelligence: A Whole New Way to Think about Business by Eric Bonabeau and Christopher Meyer talks about the following.

What do ants and bees have to do with business? A great deal, it turns out. Individually, social insects are only minimally intelligent, and their work together is largely self-organized and unsupervised. Yet collectively they’re capable of finding highly efficient solutions to difficult problems and can adapt automatically to changing environments. Over the past 20 years, the authors and other researchers have developed rigorous mathematical models to describe this phenomenon, which has been dubbed “swarm intelligence,” and they are now applying them to business. Their research has already helped several companies develop more efficient ways to schedule factory equipment, divide tasks among workers, organize people, and even plot strategy. Emulating the way ants find the shortest path to a new food supply, for example, has led researchers at Hewlett-Packard to develop software programs that can find the most efficient way to route phone traffic over a telecommunications network. Southwest Airlines has used a similar model to efficiently route cargo. To allocate labor, honeybees appear to follow one simple but powerful rule–they seem to specialize in a particular activity unless they perceive an important need to perform another function. Using that model, researchers at Northwestern University have devised a system for painting trucks that can automatically adapt to changing conditions. In the future, the authors speculate, a company might structure its entire business using the principles of swarm intelligence. The result, they believe, would be the ultimate self-organizing enterprise–one that could adapt quickly and instinctively to fast-changing markets.

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