Trish's Blog

Last week I wrote that you shouldn’t treat your people as a collective but as a collection of individuals. Here’s what makes that more than a turn of phrase: it’s the only way collective intelligence ever actually emerges.

That sounds backwards. It isn’t. A team’s intelligence was never the property of the group; groups don’t think. It lives in the individuals, in the distinct way each one reads a situation. Collective intelligence is what you get when those separate readings meet; it’s the output, not the starting point. Treat the team as one undifferentiated mass, and you average those readings into mush before they can combine.

And difference isn’t demographics, roles, or titles. It’s the lens each person uses to interpret the world: their experiences, values, and assumptions. Two people in the same role and with the same background can sit in the same meeting and genuinely see different problems. That is the asset.

So the work isn’t building consensus. It’s surfacing those lenses before they get smoothed over. Teams that do this gain clarity, uncover blind spots, and make smarter, more innovative decisions than teams that optimise for sameness or harmony.

You don’t get to a smarter whole by blurring the individuals. You get there by refusing to.