Tim Berners-Lee, Jimmy Wales, and Alpheus Bingham-the progenitors of the World Wide Web, Wikipedia, and the crowdsourcing platform InnoCentive, respectively-make up the center’s advisory board.ĬCI’s most provocative finding so far is that, by and large, the higher the proportion of women on a team, the more likely it is to exhibit collective intelligence (and thus achieve its goals). Malone set up CCI in 2006, drawing together a group of management scholars, neuroscientists, and computer scientists (some of whom, including Alex “Sandy” Pentland, Erik Brynjolfsson, and Pattie Maes, have been featured in our pages). MIT professor Thomas Malone discusses why women can increase a group's collective intelligence. The book also foreshadowed the decentralized “bottom-up” management model that has influenced companies like Zappos.

His book The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style, and Your Life (Harvard Business School Press, 2004) proposed that in an increasingly networked world, strict hierarchies would be less viable.

Like other technologists (one thinks of the late computer interface pioneer Douglas Engelbart), Malone grew interested in the ways that organizational design and computer systems design could augment each other. Formerly a research scientist at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), he holds 11 patents, largely in user interface design and the representation of complex processes in software. McGovern Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School and a key figure in organizational learning and design studies. The results could help business teams produce more thoroughbreds and fewer camels. Malone, the center’s ambition is to put forth a new theory of group performance, bringing together insights from social psychology, computer science, group dynamics, social media, crowdsourcing, and the center’s own experiments in group behavior. Under the leadership of its founding director, Thomas W.

What if you could measure the intelligence of a group? What if you could predict which committees, assigned to design a horse, would end up with a camel, versus which would develop a thoroughbred-or a racecar? The MIT Sloan School of Management’s Center for Collective Intelligence (CCI) was set up to accomplish just that sort of evaluation.

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