In the chapter 6 that Jeff Howe is righting about crowdsourcing he says. The definition of “crowd” is “a group of people united by a common characteristic.” By contrast, collective intelligence is diminished by too many common characteristics. It flourishes in direct proportion to the amount of diversity contained within a group of people, and their ability to express their individual viewpoints. In order to be wise, so to speak, the crowd can’t act like a crowd at all.

There are other conditions that must be met for diversity to trump ability:

• It must be a real pickle of a problem.

• The crowd must have some qualifications to solve the problem at hand.

• There must also be some method of aggregating and processing each individual’s contributions.
• Participants must be drawn from a large enough pool to guarantee a diverse array of approaches and their ability to express their individuality—their “local knowledge”—must not be impaired.

I find that one key to potentiate the emergence of ideas and collective intelligence by honoring diversity resides in the hability for conscious communication. Listening to someone speak is ok until you don´t agree. Then the voice of judgement appears and empathic listening disappears. Even with the right dialogue process the individual skills are much needed. Expressing disagreement by not reacting or wanting to convince the other. Listen in a generative way. Letting the creative tension to arise in us as we are able to respect the truth of the other...mmmm...my experience is that when this happens then you can see the other, value the contribution and as you named 'ideas might mingle, evolve and spark new worlds. Generative listening is listening for surprises, for what you don´t know, for possibilities.

In the recent report of the institute of noetic sciences called 'Changing the story of our future', which thoroughly explores our capacities for change, I read about a group of scientists which presented to a sample of republicans and democrats a series of contradictory statements made by both John Kerry and George Bush and asked each group to rate how contradictory those statements were. Scientist were measuring the participants brain activity while this occured. The results is that they didnot see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning. What they saw is a network of emotional circuits lighting up! It seems that the brain can learn very little from new data when their beliefs are challenged. The participants were literally censoring their cognitive dissonance. This findings tell us a lot about the need for individual skills in conscious communication to benefit any collective you desire to empower.

Governance also seems a keyword here. We certainly know by now that consensus in not the only tool available for decision-making. So which are the best tools? For which context?