The Power of Joined-Up Thinking

Almost everything we've ever achieved has been done by groups working together: our naturally social, interconnected brains are designed to function best collectively. 

Technology helps us to share our wisdom and knowledge much more diversely than ever before. We sat down with neuroscientist and best-selling author Dr Hannah Critchlow to explore in what ways collective intelligence might be applied through alumni networks.

Five Things We Learned About the Power of Joined-Up Thinking

Girl power!

“The higher the number of females within a group, the better able that group will be harnessing that collective intelligence that's on offer to them …” 

Collective intelligence can now be done digitally …

“Before the pandemic, synchronicity was very much hampered via digital screen. In order to get the optimal level of brain synchronicity, you needed to be in the same room. Now, we’ve all had a lot of experience working over screens and are able to get some brain synchronicity via digital interactions ...”

Try flipping your brainstorms …

“If you flip hierarchies so the most junior person of a team leads the group, people feel more comfortable voicing their ideas. If you do your brainstorming via writing rather than verbally, people will anonymously write down twice as many ideas …”

Alumni is all brain chemistry 1 …

“You need to make your alumni members feel reward and pleasure but also encourage that feeling of legacy and perpetuity. It's not just you in the here and now, you are part of a wider, bigger thing, and people like that …”

Alumni is all brain chemistry 2 …

“Offering little things like alumni dinners or offering calendars, books, chocolates, or wine from the cellar to alumni members can light up different individual reward circuits in the brain so that people want to stay part of that community …”

Alumni is all brain chemistry 3 …

“Each individual brain is different. So it's almost like offering a plate of tapas. People can pick which bit that they want and get satisfaction from the particular bits they want, rather than everyone eating, say, a roast dinner …”

Q&A

Can you tell us about the book and why you wrote it?

I did my PhD at Cambridge, looking at dendritic spine plasticity in the role of schizophrenia. This looked at how our individual life stories are created and how connections within the brain change as a result of our experiences but are also set down when we're a baby in the womb where our foundations of thought are laid as our circuitry due to the genes inherited from our parents. 

My PhD was looking at how our unique set of life experiences and genes create this very individual cartography of the mind, which is a sophisticated circuit board with 86 billion brain cells, or neurons, woven together by 100 trillion connections, or synapses, that are washed around the brain by electrical pulses at speeds of 120 miles-an-hour. This creates our sense of reality and perception of the world, the decisions we make, how we communicate and how we navigate through life to create a very unique life story. 

I spent thousands of hours staring down a microscope at individual brain slices. I wrote a book called The Science of Fate, which was a Sunday Times bestseller and has been translated into eight different languages. It talks about how our destiny is predisposed due to our brain biology, and ends up talking about how our environment and culture also plays a role in shaping how we view the world. 

A huge amount of neuroscience knowledge has come out in the last 10 years, with a shift from neuroscience researchers looking at how we can unleash the full potential of our own individual brain power to looking at how we can start working together.

I wrote the book during the pandemic, a period of mass isolation across the globe. Being lonely or isolated can result in mental health issues such as anxiety and depression. Being sociable acts as a buffer and gives a resilience against mental health. We need each other's brains. We need each other's company to stay physically healthy, mentally healthy, but also to make sure that our brain is flourishing and we can tap into that intelligence that we hold within our own individual mind. 

Neuroscience looks at what happens when groups of people work together. The electrical oscillations within an individual’s brain become synchronized with other people's brainwaves as we work together with them. As we learn from other people, our brains become physiologically attuned. This is something we're probably already intuitively aware of, like when people say: “I feel like I'm in tune with you.”

Can you give us some examples where groups of people have a higher chance of succeeding?

When you bring together a group of brains and allow them to freely communicate and to work together, they are able to collectively create a more accurate representation of the world and balance out any individual biases. You are creating a fuller picture of the world, more able to problem solve and make decisions. By bringing together people with different brain strengths, you increase the breadth and the depth of cognitive power available within that group. 

How can we build communities at work that benefit the workplace?

You want to have that higher degree of brain synchronicity. There's some tricks from neuroscience that we've seen help the increase the chance that you do get that physiological intunement with other people. Some of these are intuitive. If we look people in the eye directly, exercise with them, or even sing, it will increase the chance that you get that brain synchronicity. So anything that you can do to embed those types of activities within your community can help.

The number one predicting factor for how well a group will succeed at tapping into that cognitive capacity isn't the individual IQ members of the individual members, it's the gender ratio. The higher the number of females within a group, the better able that group will be harnessing that collective intelligence that's on offer to them. Scientists are interested in exactly why that is. Is it that males are just not able to work as a group, something to do with their Y chromosome? It's more that culturally females are taught from a very young age to appreciate the art of turn taking and listening, the crucial skills that underpin our ability to form collective intelligence to work as a group.

Does collective intelligence still work digitally over Teams or Zoom?

Before the pandemic, research showed that synchronicity was very much hampered via digital screen. In order to get the optimal level of brain synchronicity, you needed to be in the same room. Since the pandemic, we’ve all had a lot of experience working over screens. We're now able to get some brain synchronicity via digital interactions, but perhaps not as strongly as in real life.

How can collective intelligence be used in business?

We are bombarded through our senses with 11 billion bytes of data every second. There’s huge amounts of data coming in through our eyes, ears, sense of touch, balance and taste. All of this information helps create our sense of reality. But we are not consciously aware of the vast majority of that data. We’re only consciously aware of something in the region 30 to 40 bytes of data per second. So it's a minuscule proportion. The rest of the data is stored is not within our own conscious awareness, but within our embodied cognition. 

We have a huge number of nerve cells within our heart, our gut, our body that have this ability to store intelligence from the outside world within this embodied cognition system. This is known as the heartbeat detection ability. The vagus nerve runs from the brain and picks up signals from the nerve cells that live in our heart and guts, and sends a signal to the region of the brain called the insular, which is involved in detecting environmental signals and can affect our decision-making.

How do we use collective intelligence to our benefit?

It goes back to this idea of relinquishing ego. It’s accepting that you have a very individual brain with strengths, but also flaws. Every single brain makes assumptions and comes to erroneous versions of reality based on our past experiences and genetics. Each of us sees the world in a slightly inaccurate way. If you want to be a good leader or a good member of a community, you want to communicate effectively so people feel comfortable offering up their viewpoint and know that they’re going to be heard, their views aren't going to be quashed, and that there's not going to be an echo chamber of clone-like ideas where any other viewpoints might be flicked aside. 

It’s important to create a culture of curiosity and tolerance for different views and welcome different views so that you can help with innovation, problem solving and looking at things from new ways. There are simple ways that people can do that in groups. So for example, if you flip hierarchies so the most junior person of a team leads the group, people feel more comfortable voicing their ideas. If you do your brainstorming via writing rather than verbally, people will anonymously write down twice as many ideas.

As a species, there's a circuit embedded deep within our brain making us want to be part of a community. It's been key to our evolution that we do want to be part of a tribe. It makes us feel safe. It helps us to take risky decisions sometimes think in new ways. It’s it is very good for prosperity and ability to thrive. On an individual level, it's very good for our individual brains as well.

Does that apply to corporate communities as well? 

If the tribe instils a feeling of fear or threat and becomes too insular and focused on attack and trying to defend itself, then there's a hyperactivity of the region of the individual brain called the amygdala, the brain region that's involved in the threat response. 

Bringing a group together by amplifying the worst case scenario or the fear of a competitor actually creates a hyperactivity of the amygdala within the members' brains at the expense of another region called the anterior cingulate cortex, which is the brain region that's involved in horizon scanning, forming novel partnerships and innovation. You require that electrical activity so that our species can problem solve into the future and horizon scan. You want a group to be a community of people who feel safe and can bring up their own cognitive offerings and their own ideas in a safe space, without feeling like they’re being threatened by another tribe on the outside. 

There's not a contagious concept of fear within that community. It’s actually more a community that cultivates curiosity and free discussion with no fear of being judged. That's what helps with the anterior cingulate cortex lighting up with activity so that people can form partnerships within that community to help solidify the bonds so that you create a strong community, but it also creates a wonderful safe space so that you can create innovation and new ideas to hop from mind to mind and evolve within that group. And that is what makes a group of people exciting. They feel comfortable with each other. They form new partnerships. They're getting new ideas. Their brain is fizzing with potential, huge amounts of synaptic plasticity. That's when people feel generally we're primed to enjoy that feeling rather than creating a community that has been driven by fear. 

What is the importance of company culture and belonging? 

This goes back to this idea of cathedral thinking and legacy as we understand more more about neuroscience and how our own neural networks operate. It’s inspired the generation of artificial intelligence and brain machine interfaces that have created unprecedented levels of change and is creating explosions in new ways of thinking. We're still grappling with how AI it's going to affect communities and our species into the future. One thing that sets us as humans apart from these artificial intelligence systems is this idea that we can operate on longer timescales. We have the ability to form bonds and to imagine the future for our descendants. We have that sense of loyalty and moral responsibility that's embedded within discreet circuits within the human brain. Alumni really is tapping into that concept of legacy and of an appreciation for longer time timescales within our brain. Again, it's looking at that activation of the anterior singular cortex, which is involved in horizon scanning for partnerships at the expense of the amygdala, the fear response, but also at the expense of the nucleus accumbens which is involved in immediate pleasure and reward and immediate gratification of yourself in the here and now. 

Are there ways an alumni community can contribute to a wider company community? 

Alumni have had the experience a similar experience of working within that organization, and they've got a loyalty to it, otherwise they wouldn't be interacting as an alumni member. So they've got a loyalty to that particular brand and identity and it's helped to shape them. But they've since gone and experienced different aspects of the world and developed cognitive strengths and a cognitive breadth as a result of those experiences they've had since. It’s literally their ability to share the experiences, with that sense of legacy and cathedral thinking and that sense that they feel bonded within the alumni community.

When you are building an alumni community, you think strategically about what you can offer because you are getting something in return. You're getting their perspective, their growth, the way that they have experienced different things as they've developed in particular areas. Hopefully you can start to tap into some of that collective intelligence within those individual members. But what can you offer the alumni? You probably want to start tapping into that nucleus accumbens that region of the brain that's involved in reward and motivation. What sets us apart as humans is that longer term view, that cathedral, legacy view that requirement and need of ours to feel that we have a purpose and we are involved in some kind of legacy. So you need to make your alumni members feel reward and pleasure from the interaction, but also encourage that feeling of legacy and perpetuity. It's not just you in the here and now, you are part of a wider, bigger thing, and people like that. 

Does the brain appreciate trying to stay in touch and trying to maintain a connection? 

It's the little things like creating events for alumni members that have just had families, so that they can go go back and interact with employees who are working there and feel that sense of belonging that they are still part of that community. So offering little things like alumni dinners or offering calendars, books, chocolates, or wine from the cellar to alumni members can light up different individual reward circuits in the brain so that people want to stay part of that community. 

How important is the personal touch?

Each individual brain is different. So it's almost like offering a plate of tapas. People can pick which bit that they want and get satisfaction from the particular bits they want, rather than everyone eating, say, a roast dinner!

In your research, did you come across challenges in implementing or encouraging joined up thinking? And if so, what are some of the solutions or strategies to overcome them?

How can you do joined up thinking within your own mind a little bit better? We know that one of the fastest speed of electro oscillations across the brain is called gamma waves. We need those fast speed of electro oscillation so that we can access all the disparate regions within our brain so that we can think with our whole brain so that we can start to make decisions not just on impulse, but by accessing all that framework of wisdom and information that's stored in all the different areas of the brain.

And we know that meditation is associated with increasing the frequency of gamma wave activity, which is possibly counterintuitive. You might think that sitting still and reflecting and meditating would quieten down and slow the electro oscillations in the brain, but it actually does the opposite. That allows you to have joined up thinking within your own brain. How do we make sure that we have joined up thinking with other people's brains? Again, it's going back to making sure that you operate as part of a team where there's a diverse number of different people within that team in terms of genetic, experience and age diversity so that you've got that breadth of thinking available to you so that you can start to tap into it so that people feel comfortable communicating. It’s going back to this idea that they feel comfortable and confident offering up their ideas. They know what their expertise or niche is, and they're confident within that, so you can start to create a greater pool of collective intelligence that you can tap into.

Some people may want to interact and engage more with alumni networks more than others. When we look at introverts, compared to extroverts, we see there's some really interesting biological findings. So introverts have a smaller volume of a region of the brain with beta endorphin receptors spread across it, so they literally don't have such an urge to go out and interact with as many people in order to fill up those beta endorphin receptors, the good chemical hormone within the brain that makes us feel nice, buzzy and warm. They have fewer of those slots to fill up and they don't feel quite as driven as extroverts who have a larger region of the brain and more beater endorphin slots that literally are driven to go and interact with many people as possible in order to feel like that that brain region is full. 

Introverts are very important because they allow a small community of support and a close network to be formed that can help support each other. Extroverts are very important because although they might spend less time nurturing each individual relationship, they're helping to allow ideas to hop from group to group. So they're facilitating the spread of innovation and new ideas. Both types of people with their different types of biology are very important for the smooth running of a group and also of a society. 

Is there anything from a written narrative perspective that can help activate people on the other side of your communications? 

Don’t come across as a bit grumpy! There's so much negativity within the world that it's quite refreshing to put a positive slant in it. It's about making sure that the person that's receiving this news can see what's in it for them. They might feel a sense of legacy or responsibility, but you want to make sure that they feel that they're going to be getting something positive, so they’ll want to invest their time, energy and mental resource into facilitating this relationship. It's not entirely one-sided. So you are giving something to them. We’re all wired to enjoy novelty. Part of the reason that the alumni might be wanting to have this relationship is that they’re seeking some novelty within their working life. This can spark the novelty receptive within their brain so they get a fizz of dopamine as well.

Presenters:

Hannah Critchlow, neuroscientist, broadcaster and best-selling author
Emma Sinclair, CEO EnterpriseAlumni