Some years ago a friend of mine, Finn Voldtofte, was hosting some meetings that he had decided to call CIPI – collective intelligence practitioners initiative. He wanted it to be a forum for sharing experiences with reaching that place with a group where the group is smarter than its components – where are sort synergetic high energy occurs. The participants were mostly facilitators and process consultants, but the idea of facilitation was expanded a little, which allowed a researcher such as myself to join them. First time I was there, we were sitting four people on floor in front of Finn’s fire place for a very intense and deep conversation.

I don’t remember the course of events precisely, but the CIPI meetings was the bed from which the Moving the Edge convention sprang. On that link you can read more about it, but the site itself is defunct. The CIPI meetings went on after that, but ended haltingly when Finn died in December 06.

Now the CIPI has been reinvigorated by Martin Ehrensvärd and Maja Rottbøll, and I am happily participating again. The new life that has come to the new circle also invites me to think about the experiences and impact of the first round of CIPI, and how it has influenced present and future.

As I said, CIPI was a life-navigating circle to step into. This was because of the strong theme of our work together – Collective Intelligence. Ever since this series of sessions of conversations, where we were able to reach a very strong shared ‘field’ of intelligence, I have had a vision of working more to develop this capacity in myself and others. I has become a deep part of my identity. It was a massive experience to be able to intentionally create a space where you can know more than you usually can, and see more and reach for more than you usually can.

CIPI was created in order to explore the principles and practices that would create a field of collective intelligence. These principles and practices were collected and explored through observing the social energy in the group and how this energy shifted around and which actions triggered which changes. I think we laded on a list of social and personal practices, which is what each participant in the circle should watch in himself while also atending and remembering the readiness of the social practices. In one way the work was never finished, because it cannot be fully described. But I remember a distinct feeling of going in circles back to revisit the same basic principles over and over again. A feeling of “maybe we actually have a good-enough image of what we need”. A feeling that started a impatient build-up in me. “What would we be able to do now with this insight?”

When I talk about collective intelligence I talk about a intentional practice of personally engaged encounters. Not random stuff happening on the internet. Sure a lot of activity on the web and at large social events can be seen and described as manifestations of a form of intelligence that is beyond the individual. Like wikipedia or linux etc. In my view it is confusing the concept of collective intelligence to spread it over such broad subjects, but right now I do not have a better word for the experience than that.

Basically our explorations were done as a group of people sitting down in a circle and exploring what would emerge. The concept of “magic in the middle” guided us to reach into a shared field, and from there explore any concepts and ideas that would emerge.

As a designer I can see the enormous potential for this form of collaboration in working with solutions to future potentials. We could create circles were people could collaborate from their highest possible capacity. Design is inherently about exploring the unknown or the not-yet-known. It is a curious practice. I see the ideas of collective intelligence as hinting at a new way of doing design. As design spreads into new sectors of life and business, I would love to see this kind of processes unfold in innovation team, in organizational development and ideation processes. The simple but challenging process of brain-storming is actually a kind of collective intelligence practice. Without much demand on the inner work of the participants.

Collective intelligence, in the way we worked and still work with it, can be linked to spiritual practices,  is highly applicable in organzations, innovations, ideations and any other kind of creations – processes where the end point is unknown and the participants must lean forward to reach for new insights and this is best done when building energitically onto what we all bring to the circle.

For those who read Danish you can see more on the current facebook group – some of it is in English, actually