Opening General Session: Unleashing the Power of Collective Intelligence

If you’ve ever had the displeasure of boarding a plane, you know how dysfunctional groups of people can be. The airline assigns seats and calls out group numbers, but it’s still Hunger Games at Gate 42. Everyone swarms the gate, jostling for position to get on as quickly as possible. There’s a thin veneer of politeness, but everyone’s on edge. And even though this has been happening thousands of times every day for decades, it never gets any better. And it’s not just how humans board airplanes. It’s how we merge on the freeway, how we choose our political leaders, and how we care for the environment. Individual people are smart, but when you put them together, the group’s performance is well below average.  Somehow, the opposite happens for groups of animals: A school of fish acts as a distributed network, detecting danger more quickly and more accurately than any individual within the group can. A swarm of cockroaches becomes a kind of living computer that solves mathematical equations to find optimal hiding places in a kitchen. Even a swarm of flies outwits the intelligent predators that hunt them. And natural ecosystems look after themselves indefinitely.

WHY DO HUMANS FAIL WHILE GROUPS OF ANIMALS THRIVE?
In the past few years, the science of crowds has revealed the underpinnings of swarm success, and the selfish mechanisms that make them so effective. Dan Riskin will explore the science behind it while sharing tangible lessons for leaders in team building. You’ll be inspired to change the way your group achieves its goals.