Group Intelligence Software Explained

Google facilitated sprints

The Google Ventures incubator holds 5 day workshops (documented in Sprint by Jake Knapp) to refine the product offerings of high-velocity start-ups, e.g., Slack, Medium, Nest, etc.

The facilitator's qualitative skills and team orchestration can overcome bad group dynamics and mental gridlock in meetings and conferences. But unfortunately, good facilitors are a somewhat rare commodity in the average workplace.

A GV sprint workshop is a series of structured discussions that include key stakeholders and domain experts: engineering, design, marketing, product, etc. The week-long sprints iterate from customer goals and scenarios into a working prototype and usability validation. These highly focused and choreographed facilitator mindmelds can sometimes (but not always) produce remarkable results. Great effort has been expended to duplicate this experience in day-to-day organizational workflows, with mixed results due to dependence on highly skilled and specialized facilitators.

Group Intelligence Software

If you don't have an expert facilitator on tap, an alternative is Group Intelligence software, a team tool that can move a cross-discipline workgroup through lightly structured brainstorm exercises with the goal of shared problem solving, co-creation and peer-to-peer decision making.

Group Intelligence software can be more effective than Slack, Yammer, Jive and other social collaboration tools, which are essentially just chat and content sharing... not facilitated problem solving.

One of the key principles of Group Intelligence is the pattern of converging and diverging ideas created by the group.

Initial concept input

A group-intelligence elicitation session starts with an input tool that gathers concepts from a local or distributed team of knowledge workers and domain experts. In this example, team inputs are "bucketed" in SWOT categories, but the categories are completely flexible and can be different for every exercise.

Multi-scale rating tool

After concepts are received from team members, subsequent exercises organize, rank, rate and prioritize the items. Each discussion item can be ranked by multiple criteria

Check-off exercise

The multi-check tool lets users prioritize items they have defined in a previous exercises.

Science of collaboration

Under the covers, team problem solving exercises are assisted with patterns drawn from cognitive science and Group Intelligence research. One model for shared cognition is based on Thinklets, small units of useful, repeatable collaborative thought process. Each block in this diagram represents a Thinklet.

This is a partial list of thinklet collaboration patterns. A group intelligence session comprises a set of thinklets organized into a generative flow with a tangible outcome. Thinklets are: "Named, packaged facilitation strategies that create predictable, repeatable patterns of collaboration."

(Collaboration Engineering: Foundations and Opportunities, Gert-Jan de Vreede, et. al.)

Group intelligence exercise

Shown is a guided cybersecurity attack and penetration exercise. The same process flow could be applied to marketing, product design, risk management, decision support, health care, etc.

Different thinklet shared thinking patterns can be used at each step in the collaboration process.

Group Intellignce software simulates many of the qualities of real-world collaboration spaces but without the "group grid-lock" and heard mentality. Shown above: Pixar collaboration enclave.

Body of work

The approach to "virtual mindmeld meetings" described above is based on my work with senior facilitators and collaboration experts over the past 10+ years. With the help of opensource software, including the Apache machine learning stack , affordable, practical collaboration software solutions can be built for a wide range of team problem-solving exercises.