Leardership in Loose Systems
Coruption of Power
Docile Leader
Strategic Planning
Get to Variability
"One highly speculative explanation of how nature's "mass minds" operate comes from Bloom, whose unconventional theories and colorful rhetoric have marked him as an agent provocateur in mainstream scientific circles. Blook postulates that the phenomenon of collective intelligence merges from the interplay of five essential forces: conformity enforcers, diversity generators, inner judges, resource shifters, and intergroup tournaments. Conformity enforcers (like worker bees or middle managers) ensure that the group as a whole maintains sufficient cohesion to survive adverse conditions; diversity generators (like stray ants or artists) are the "odd ducks" who generate alternative hypotheses for the group to consider, thus ensuring variation; intergroup trounaments (like the waggle dances of bees or scientific debates) enable societies to test alternative hypotheses; inner judges reward productive behavior and punish deleterious actions. Finally, resources shifters (like alpha champanzees or coporate executives) make sure successful adaptations receive the support they need to benefit the group as a whole. Bloom's model, while intriguing, is too figurative to pass any empirical test. Nonetheless, respected evolutionary biologists like Margulis and David Sloan Wilson have recognized value in his original, if decidedly left-field conception of the global brain. We do not have to accept Bloom's theory as hard science, however, to appreciate it as a metaphor. As Alfred North Whitehead put it, "It is more important that a proposition be interesting than it be true. But of course a true theory is more apt to be interesting than a false one."
From Alex Wright's (2007) Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages p. 13