The Contributory Revolution. Pierre Giorgini
to Maël Montévil, it would be a very exciting (ex)organology research program to make a typology of ENC and EXD instances in different organizations.
1.1.3. The collective intelligence of working groups
Let us imagine a group of 12 people working in sub-groups, where each sub-group and each individual within the sub-group has a particular, well-identified function. We will define “group intelligence” as the ability to understand how the group works, the roles of the actors, the rules of cooperation and to intervene in it to modify its dynamics. Let us assume that this group intelligence is external to the group, i.e. entrusted to a “project manager” who has the power to intervene as they wish, according to their analyses and decisions. They are the only one to grasp the project as a whole and to control the dynamics of the group as a whole in order to lead it towards success, to supervise it. They oversee the group and are the only one with a global vision of it. They will then assign tasks to the different sub-groups and individuals, regulate interdependencies, modify the rules according to the progress of the work, arbitrate regarding the ideas to be maintained or the paths to be abandoned. They will distribute instructions according to their perception of progress, possibly modifying the sub-groups. This is an exo-distributive typology. Intelligence thinks of itself as the master of the game and what is not under control comes either from a lack of observation or from a lack of modeling or understanding.
Let us now imagine a group of 12 people without a leader, without external coordination, left to its own collective intelligence and where the technical systems allow each person to be in contact with the 11 others to produce a shared vision of what is being created collectively (holoptism). Everything is transparent and visible to all. The intelligence is then distributed and internal to the group, the rule being that no member of the group can take the leadership role. These are models tested in co-design, for example, or observed in animal ethology within starling clouds where there is no “squadron leader”. In this case, intelligence will be endo-contributive. Alliances within the group can be made and broken as the ongoing problem solving progresses. The “membranes” dividing the work groupings will be ephemeral, unlike the first model. They will be temporary alliances and not sub-groups with specific missions throughout the process. The solution will not be premeditated. It will be the result of co-contributory co-development. Individual representations, emotions and sensitivities will not be discounted or categorized by external intelligence; instead they will be internalized in the co-creative process itself because they are borne by each individual in their behavior and their analysis of the group.
The success strategy will be co-developed as it progresses. Each person will have to take into account that the only way for them to positively contribute to the collective success comes from the way in which, over time, they transform their own relationship to the other, to the others. They will not be able to “transform” the other by obtaining arbitration from outside.
To understand this even better, let us imagine 36 people standing, randomly distributed in a rectangular room. Each person randomly chooses two other people to whom they decide to connect mentally without announcing it. One person can therefore be chosen several times. The problem to be solved is to move each person so that when completed, each person is at the tip of an isosceles triangle with the two people they have chosen. In an exo-distributive approach, a mathematician draws a rectangle with 36 points, draws at random for each point, two points out of 35, and builds an algorithm that solves the problem, i.e. calculates the positions (x,y) that must be applied to each point to build the ideal figure. People become points and are therefore reduced to their x and y coordinates. Not taken into account in this case is the affinity, the emotional or intuitive influence that real people experience when choosing the two associates, even though they are supposed to do it randomly. This constitutes the first approximation. However, beyond that, the problem to be solved is eminently complex and few mathematicians are able to resolve it.
Experience shows that even “mathematical” minds cannot solve this equation after more than three hours of group work. However, experience also shows that if you ask the 36 people – with their bodies, hearts and heads, emotions and intuitions, once their associates have been chosen – to all move at the same time to reach this target (each at the head of an isosceles triangle with their two associates), everyone moves and after some slight chaos, the group converges towards this collective figure of isosceles triangles, usually in less than two minutes in total. In this case, we are indeed in an endo-contributive conception, the intelligence of the group is distributed and inclusive, and in this particular instance it produces a collective performance that is out of all proportion to the exo-distributive conception. However, we should not conclude that this is true for all “intelligent” activities, nor that this method would always be both possible and more efficient. Indeed, for example, if a single member of the group (stowaway) decides to always move without getting caught, the group never converges. This dissident takes implicit possession of the group, as it were. This is an essential point to which we will return.
1.1.4. Medicine as a playing field for this duality
In therapeutic intelligence in medicine we observe, for example, that systematic and extensive treatments with antibiotics – in an attempt to gain absolute control of the infection by external intervention – generate the behavioral responses of bacteria which put us at great risk (highly pathogenic resistant germs, increased need for precision and cost of antibiotic molecules, etc.). The global system cannot therefore be reduced to bacteria without any capacity to adapt and which, once killed, are happy to disappear and reappear unchanged. In the technoscientific strategy of treatment, we are indeed in an exo-distributive approach because the intelligence of the solution is carried by an external intelligence, the trained doctor and the pharmaceutical chain, whereas the bacteria–environment as a whole, as a system, seems to be part of a complex and endo-contributive approach. In the exo-distributive system, the patient, from the point of view of the active molecule, is modeled as a type of patient affected by the type of infection (a-personal). Only the doctor can possibly individualize the distribution of the remedy according to their singular perception of the sick person in front of them, but this is always according to pre-established categories (anxious, fragile, hypertensive, etc.). The diagnosis addresses the patient’s body reduced to its pathology, and directly intervenes against the source of the identified problem, the infection.
Modern research in this field is opening up new therapies in which patients themselves will be entrusted with the task of getting to know themselves and intelligently managing their own vulnerability to germs in a more holistic approach (prevention, general immune field, nutrition, anti-inflammatory diets, acidity or basicity, etc.). This makes it possible to postpone the immediate use of antibiotics and to limit their use to acute cases. Here, more use is made of the individual intelligence of the networked person, connected to others, to doctors, exercising their own “health” intelligence in a more integrated way, with their fears, their choices under the influence of others, also influencing the system (Wikipedia on health topics). The intelligence of the solution is more internalized and involves the person in all their dimensions, and not as a person reduced to a “biological machine”, categorized and repaired from the outside. We are in an endo-contributive approach. One example is acupuncture. It works and yet it escapes our models of understanding and prediction. EXD thinking will therefore seek to eliminate it as a taught science. In an ENC approach, we will conclude that the distributed intelligence of the living world at work in pathologies implements complex “ecorithms” that cannot be reduced and understood at this stage of science. Yet, their effective observed efficiency will lead us to pursue the uses and even their teaching, based on practice and observations, and to seek the theoretical support to understand them.
A final example in the medical field is also illustrated by the two opposing conceptions in medicine today: the reductionist and the holistic conceptions. The reductionist conception consists of intellectually reducing the human body and its functioning to a set of specialized organs, linked by identified networks and performing specific functions (liver, pancreas, heart, brain, etc.). Therapeutic intervention consists of correcting or improving the functioning of a failing organ, or that of several failing organs simultaneously. However, it