That's a bold claim. It argues that given comparable talent, teams with better collective cognition convert talent into results more efficiently. Making sense of this argument requires us to understand potential, collective smarts, and the mechanisms involved.
Potential is the latent collective output available within a team. Collective intelligence influences how much of that potential the team can actually express by constraining or enabling the range of varied action they can coordinate without losing coherence. Collective smarts is thus a team's emergent capacity to sense, understand, share, and act on information as a coordinated system, faster and more accurately than the sum of its members could.
The question is, where does this understanding and knowhow reside? In the players, their relationships, or interactions?
A team can contain highly intelligent, knowledgeable, skilled players and still behave stupidly as a collective. Various studies explore the differences between what a team has (individual player smarts) and how they combine into what a collective can do. The dominant logic is that team cognition is not the sum of the member parts but rather how the parts relate and interact. The knowledge may reside in individuals. The intelligence of the team resides in how effectively that distributed knowledge becomes coordinated action. More specifically, it's knowledge in interaction where the team's intelligence is actually produced. It makes intelligence a property of how actions are connected, less what individuals know. By implication, talent sets the ceiling. Collective intelligence determines how close a team gets to it.
This can be modelled as follows:
1. What the team knows - shared mental models, role knowledge, knowing who knows what.
2. How the team thinks together - noticing, communicating, interpreting, anticipating, coordinating and learning through interaction.
3. Whether it survives pressure - whether that distributed cognition continues functioning as uncertainty, novelty, fatigue and stress increase.
Pressure and novel contexts reveal the robustness of the team's collective intelligence. Stress shifts attention from the team to the self. Players start to lose the "team perspective" as their attention shifts from "what are we doing?" to "what must I do?" Pressure asks, how do we hold together? Novelty reveals the robustness of the team's collective intelligence by forcing the team to contend with challenges that sit outside of their behavioral repertoire. Novelty asks, how do we change together? In effect, how much newness and complexity can this team absorb before its ability to think and act collectively begins to break down? Smarter teams have a greater common understanding of who they are, better situational awareness, role clarity, who is good at what, more diverse information flow and coherence. They are able to make sense of more stuff and faster, process more information, and thus absorb greater novelty, adapt and act without losing their identity or shape.
A team cannot easily learn about its own collective intelligence because no individual occupies the whole system. Every player experiences only part of it. Given that collective intelligence is produced through distributed interaction, improving it requires some means of making aspects of that distributed process visible to the people participating in it. One of the most effective ways of assisting the process is providing players with team-based behavior-to-performance feedback. Monitoring behavioral states in relation to performance allows players to understand how their behavior is integrated into their outcomes. Without this feedback loop, players lack the ability to fully comprehend and thus learn from their mutually generated experience.
Collective intelligence is enacted through the development of common mental models, denser player connection structures, clear communications, generative interactions, a common understanding of roles and skills distributions, and a mindfulness for how outcomes are enabled through the whole. This is an emergent competency a team develops through active practice.
Circle-In gets teams to perform closer to their potential by making team behavior more visible. Who is connected to whom, the quality of their relationships, what players are thinking and feeling, together with the collective behavioral state this affords, at any point of the season. We make players more intentional, coaches more informed and the team collectively smarter.
Sources
1. Daniel Wegner (1987), "Transactive Memory: A Contemporary Analysis of the Group Mind." The origin of the "who knows what" idea: a group's knowledge includes a shared map of which member holds which expertise.
2. Nancy Cooke, Jamie Gorman, Christopher Myers and Jasmine Duran (2013), "Interactive Team Cognition." Argues that team cognition is an activity that resides in interaction, not a property stored in individual members. Measured at the team level, not summed across heads.
3. James Driskell, Eduardo Salas and Joan Johnston (1999), "Does Stress Lead to a Loss of Team Perspective?" Found that stress narrows attention and shifts players from a broad team perspective to a narrow, individual self-focus, degrading team performance.
