Just a thought George - how does CI siffer from groupthink?

Euan, here are a couple of definitions of groupthink on the Web:

• An undesirable condition in which all members of a group (e.g. a project team) begin to think alike or pretend to think alike. No members are then willing to raise objections or concerns about a project even though they are legitimate and based on hard data.
www.projectauditors.com/Dictionary/G.html

• a group process in which group members work so hard to achieve unanimous agreement that they fail to consider realistically the various alternative courses of action available to them
lms.thomsonelearning.com/hbcp/glossary/glossary.taf

• the tendency of group discussion to assimilate opinions.
www.ivey.uwo.ca/intl_students/dictionary/idiomatic_dic.htm

• is ‘a mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ striving for unanimity overrides their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action’ (Janis, 1972).
wps.prenhall.com/wps/media/objects/213/218150/glossary.html

• a dysfunction in which some group members attempt to preserve group harmony by suppressing the voicing of dissenting opinion
highered.mcgraw-hill.com/sites/0072400773/student_view0/chapter13/glossary.html

• The forces that tend to suppress or resist divergent thinking when a group is working to accomplish a specific task within a limited period of time.
wwmr.org/AUSB-globalecon/glossary.htm

• The faulty decision-making processes that may occur in groups. (p.610)
www.mhhe.com/socscience/intro/cafe/lahey7/student/olc/chap16glossary.mhtml

• decision making by a group (especially in a manner that discourages creativity or individual responsibility)
www.cogsci.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/webwn

My definition of CI is a distributed capacity of communities to evolve towards higher order integration and performance through collaboration and innovation.

I hope this helps but if I missed something about your question, let me know.

Okay, George, so you're looking for a phase change, the creation of something new & different.

The day before commenting on your blog, I wrote:

Emergence is the key characteristic of complex systems. It is the process by which simple entities self-organize to form something more complex. Emergence is also what happened to that “utopian dream” of e-learning on the way to the future. Simple, old e-learning has combined with bottom-up self-organizing systems, network effects and today’s environment to morph into emergent learning.

Emergent learning implies adaptation to the environment, timeliness, flexibility and space for co-creation. It is the future. We haven’t figured it out yet. Or, from the perspective of complexity science, it hasn’t figured itself out yet.

Now, I realize that this is like the case of the dog that got on the bus: "What the fuck do I do now?" Back to my screed on emergent learning:

In their book, “It’s Alive,” management theorists Stan Davis and Christopher Meyer make a compelling case that business entities are living, complex systems. Many nodes—brains—come together to form something new—the corporate body. As my friend David Grebow says, it even has a Corporate IQ and, according to author David Batstone, a Corporate Soul.

When I look back at your definition of Collective Intelligence: "the capacity of communities to evolve towards higher order integration and performance through collaboration and innovation," I have a tough time figuring out when the tipping point has tipped, e.g. when the ice turns to water or when the performance is of such a higher order that an observer would say, "Boy, that's really different."

Sorry for mixing metaphors and thought-lines. I do believe that meaningful discourse requires sufficient ambiguity for participants to create their own meaning of what's presented. This ramble leaves enough white space for you to paint in your reactions, George.