On 9 January and 11 February 2020, Émile Servan-Schreiber reshared ManpowerGroup France messages inviting readers to make collective intelligence a driver of their business. The posts promoted his thinking about putting group knowledge to work. That question becomes practical when a team has different information, roles and views of the same decision.
ManpowerGroup had explored the subject in an account published on 16 July 2019 of Servan-Schreiber’s Matinale appearance on 4 July. That article provides substantive business advice, although the original destinations of the two 2020 shares remain unspecified. The event and the later promotions give separate dates to the discussion and its continued circulation.
Ask people who see the problem differently
The recap presents actively open-minded thinking as a practice: ask for other people’s views before making a decision, especially people who disagree with you. It describes this as a skill requiring training. The organisational recommendation was to make collaboration rules, listening and the sharing of speaking time part of how teams work.
Servan-Schreiber also argued for involving employees in innovation and forecasts of new-product success. Human-resources professionals and managers, the recap suggested, had a role in designing practices at the level of the group. Those are the speaker’s proposals, rather than evidence that a particular client achieved a specified commercial result.
The research behind the group-level question
Woolley and colleagues’ 2010 research studied 699 people in groups of two to five. It identified a factor associated with performance across tasks, correlated with social sensitivity and more equal conversational turn-taking. Individual intelligence was not strongly correlated with that factor. The study concerned small groups, rather than ManpowerGroup’s operations.
The forecasting relevance is a change in the question a manager asks: how will separate judgements become a useful combined answer? The journal’s account of expertise and diversity develops that issue. Asking for other views is an initial step. The practical challenge is to hear those contributions, preserve disagreement where it carries information, and use a clear method to reach a decision. Those procedures can then be assessed against the decisions and forecasts they produce.
