On 3 June 2019, CESAMES’s Club Dirigeants X–HEC–CESAMES met at the Ritz in Paris with Émile Servan-Schreiber. The organizer’s event page identifies the subject as supercollective intelligence in service of corporate performance. Servan-Schreiber shared CESAMES’s account the following evening.
The discussion belonged to the club’s Competitiveness & Complexity series. CESAMES describes the club as a forum for leaders to exchange ideas with an invited speaker in a small-group setting. The framing made collective intelligence a question of organizational capability, alongside the attention then being paid to artificial intelligence.
Three business uses, and the design question behind them
Both the official account and CESAMES’s LinkedIn recap identify concrete applications: improving sales predictions, estimating production delays and encouraging innovation. They also list questions about measuring a group’s intelligence and why diversity can improve its performance. The event brought those scientific and practical questions into the same conversation.
Sales and production delays create different forecasting tasks. A sales question needs a specified product, time period and measure; a delay question needs a promised milestone and a definition of lateness. These are examples of the question design those applications require, rather than contracts documented at the Ritz meeting.
Innovation requires a further distinction. Generating possible ideas and forecasting which ideas will succeed are related activities, but they do not produce the same output. An organisation may first need a range of proposals, then a way to assess their prospects. Combining the two tasks without making that distinction can obscure what a collective answer means.
Collective intelligence as a leadership capability
CESAMES presented Servan-Schreiber as a cognitive psychologist, an AI engineer and a prediction-market specialist. Its account described an enthusiastic discussion, while the post he shared identified his book Supercollectif. The agenda connected those research interests with problems leaders routinely face: uncertain sales, production schedules and choices among possible innovations.
The meeting connected group-intelligence research with ordinary business uncertainty. The NewsFutures case of forecasts for LCD televisions offers a separate example with a preserved performance comparison. CESAMES’s leadership questions explain why such methods can be relevant: an organisation needs to turn information held by different people into an estimate specific enough to inform a decision and check against what happens.
