Gloor - Swarm leadership and the collective mind: using collaborativeinnovation networks to build a better business

SWARM LEADERSHIP AND THE COLLECTIVE MIND

Using Collaborative Innovation Networks to Build a Better Business

SWARM LEADERSHIP AND THE COLLECTIVE MIND

Using Collaborative Innovation Networks to Build a Better Business

BY

PETER A. GLOOR

MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

United Kingdom North America Japan
India Malaysia China

Emerald Publishing Limited

Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK

First edition 2017

Copyright 2017 Peter A. Gloor

Reprints and permissions service

Contact:

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-78714-201-5 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-78714-200-8 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-78714-726-3 (Epub)

Steve Jobs did not create Apple! Of course, Steve Jobs started Apple together with Steve Wozniak! But he did not create it. He could never have done it on his own. Steve Jobs created the swarm that created Apple. From the very first day on, he was relying on untold legions of engineers, scientists, technicians, accountants, and janitors not to speak of 4000 years of accumulated wisdom, and scientific and technological expertise accumulated from Chinese, Indian, Mesoamerican, Greek, Roman, German, English, French, and American philosophers, scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs.

One human on its own is as useful as a single ant in creating the next Tesla, Apple, Google, or Facebook. However, just like the ants or the bees, a swarm of humans can do amazing things. And just like a swarm of ants or bees, the human swarm needs a queen bee, which is where Steve Jobs, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, or Elon Musk comes in. The key, however, to their endeavor is communication! Only by communicating their goals, and channeling the accumulated energy and wisdom of their swarm can they set out to create the next big thing changing the world.

The goal of this book is to describe how to communicate to bring together groups of people to innovate. Better communication leads to better collaboration, which leads to more innovation. The information stored in a single neuron in the brain only becomes meaningful through the massively parallel network of connecting axons and synapses. This is no different for thousands of human brains, which can only work together to innovate by communicating with each other in the best possible way.

The future of business is swarm business whether its at Uber, Airbnb, Tesla, or Apple, its not about being a fearless leader, but about creating a swarm that works together in collective consciousness to create great things that change the world. This book helps you to become the leader of your own swarm by building its collective consciousness. A successful swarm channels the competitive energies of all stakeholders toward collaboration, demonstrated by exemplary swarm leaders such as Steve Jobs or Elon Musk, and exemplary swarm businesses such as Airbnb and Uber. The art is to select, grow, and nurture the right swarm. The overlooked secret of swarm businesses like Airbnb or Uber is not the genius of Uber and Airbnbs CEOs, but the pride all Airbnb landlords take in their apartments, and Uber drivers in their cars, forming a cohesive swarm delivering a superb experience to the customer.

This book takes you on a journey from homo competitivus to homo collaborensis. It explains how you as an individual, as a member of an organization, and as part of society can become more collaborative, and why this is good not just for society and the organization, but also for you. In a parallel to quantum physics, this book introduces social quantum physics, defining four key principles of social quantum physics: empathy leading to entanglement, and reflection leading to reboot and refocus. Collaborative organizations combine these four principles to build collective consciousness: deep empathy that builds an entangled team, and self-reflection that leads to constant self-criticism and refocus. Once the team is operational, its collaboration can be tracked and boosted using the six honest signals of collaboration, patterns of collaboration which will further increase the performance of the swarm. The six honest signals are central leadership, rotating leadership, balanced contribution, responsiveness, honest sentiment, and shared context. In their way of working together, team members apply the five ethical laws of collaboration: transparency, fairness, honesty, forgiveness, and listening. By operating according to these laws of collaborative ethics, such groups work together as collaborative teams, entangled in collective consciousness. Their journey starts with recruiting and building an intrinsically motivated group of early enthusiasts, the Collaborative Innovation Network (COIN). The fundamental concepts are illustrated with a wealth of examples from leading organizations based on decades of research by our team at MIT, ranging from Uber and Airbnb over open source communities to Fortune 500 high-tech firms and healthcare. These examples will tell you, as an individual, how becoming more collaborative will give more meaning and satisfaction to your professional life. They will also tell the managers of an organization how they can leverage their teams creative energies to increase organizational performance. And finally, they will lay out a way forward for society, toward a more collaborative and less competitive future.