On 12 March 2019, Union des Savoirs hosted a public lecture by Émile Servan-Schreiber on collective intelligence. Its invitation placed the evening at the Maison du Japon in the Cité internationale universitaire de Paris. The next day, the association reported a full room, describing it as its thirtieth conference and thanking the audience for participating actively.
Servan-Schreiber reshared both the invitation and the recap. The lecture introduced ideas from Supercollectif through a series of questions: can a group’s intelligence be measured, how does diversity affect judgement, and how can organisations make better use of their members’ capabilities?
Questions about a group’s ability
The association’s official event page confirms the date and describes a format including audience exchanges followed by a reception. It advertised examples involving Boeing, Emmanuel Macron, artificial intelligence and US intelligence agencies. The programme thus connected the abstract idea of collective intelligence with business, elections and strategic analysis, inviting a general audience to ask where organised group judgement might help.
The invitation’s language about a group’s IQ has a research counterpart. Woolley and colleagues’ 2010 Science study found evidence for a general collective-intelligence factor across tasks. It was not strongly associated with either the average or the highest individual intelligence in a group. The reported associations included social sensitivity, conversational turn-taking and the proportion of women.
That finding gives substance to the question posed to the Paris audience: a group’s performance may depend on how its members work together as well as on who its cleverest member is. The study reports relationships in the groups it examined; it does not prove that any particular public lecture or organisational reform increases performance.
Public education, rather than a forecast scorecard
Union des Savoirs said that participants could meet at the reception and have the speaker’s book signed. That format carried the subject beyond a presentation: audience exchanges and an informal gathering gave participants opportunities to discuss how the ideas related to their own experience. The association’s report of a full room describes reception, rather than a measured learning outcome.
The evening belongs to the public reception of Supercollectif. Its relevance to forecasting is the question of organisation: how to preserve different contributions and combine them into useful judgement. The lecture presented that question to people outside a specialist forecasting community. It made group design a subject for public discussion, with research findings providing a starting point for asking how organisations could work better.
