The collective brain

If you want to start a company, you can't do it in isolation. You need to find co-founders. You need to find employees. You need to find investors. You need to find funding. You need to work in a marketplace and so on. If you want to write an academic paper, people think that it's academics sitting in a dark room, maybe with candlelight, writing things. No, it's not true. We are connected to other scientists. It's an ongoing conversation, either through the literature or at conferences, or literal conversations where we're talking to one another and coming up with ideas. Nothing we do is on our own. We are an incredibly social species, an incredibly cooperative species, and everything that we've ever achieved works along those lines.

To say that is actually an understatement, because our cognition isn't just situated in our brains. This is one of the biggest misconceptions about human intelligence. It's not just situated up here; it is part of a collective brain. Innovations are not the product of innovators per se any more than your thoughts are the product of a particular neuron. Yes, an innovator is involved, an inventor is involved, but they sit in a social network, in a collective brain, where ideas are flowing around, recombining and reconnecting, and happen to reconnect in that person's brain.

How did that happen? Why is it that for centuries we had no calculus, then two people come up with calculus at exactly the same time? Why did Charles Darwin come up with a theory of evolution? Even if we had no Charles Darwin, we would have had Alfred Wallace, and we would have called it Wallacean evolution or something like that, because he came up with the same idea at the same time.

In both these cases, we can actually trace the way that the ideas came together to create evolution, to create calculus – or even Einstein's ideas. We can trace the origins of those ideas sitting in that patent room, working on electrical devices for the synchronization of time and how these shaped his gedanken, his thought experiments.

We distribute our cognition. As individuals, we understand a very narrow sliver of the world, and we're kind of stupid about everything else. As a collective, humanity is brilliant. Humanity is capable of solving problems, not specific humans per se, even if obviously a particular human is involved, and even if that particular human is a nexus of genes and of cultural ideas and of particular life experiences that lead to a particular experience that can create new industries.

It is about connecting yourself to something bigger than yourself, moving forward in that mission and that goal or whatever it is that you're trying to achieve.

The first version of that is ‘C’, the collective brain, recognizing that innovation isn't an individual process. It isn't just about finding 10X engineers and brilliant employees; it's about creating 10X teams or finding 10X engineers and putting them together into 100X teams. It's about the ways that we work together. It's about whether the problems in a company are exposed to the solutions in the company through a kind of collective process. That's the collective brain.

Obviously you can go so far off the beaten path that it's too costly, or you can be too narrow and not discover. In evolution we call this evolvability. It's the mean-variance trade-off. It's how much variation I should tolerate even when it's suboptimal so that I can discover new solutions and new things. Again, this is why companies differ, because small companies can't afford to do that. They should be stealing, which is the third principle. Whereas large companies can have a “skunk works”, large countries can have Silicon Valley, which is a graveyard of failure, but it leads to many of the successful tech companies the United States has.

In science, we call this intellectual arbitrage. The solutions to problems are sometimes scattered across people's heads, but sometimes they're just in a different industry. You can arbitrage. You can intellectually arbitrage ideas from, say, psychology, bring them over to economics and win yourself a Nobel Prize.

You can find something that's working in the tech sector and maybe apply it to the housing sector, or apply it to medical sciences or to the agricultural sector. Finding solutions in other disciplines that you're not aware of by talking to people you disagree with, talking to people in very different disciplines, talking to people in other circles is what the magpie strategy is all about.

It is also by definition divisive. This is the elephant in the room. If you want to grab that bull by its horns, you have to acknowledge the duality, that diversity is a dual edged sword. By definition, if we don't speak the same language – let's say, sales and engineers, they just speak very different disciplinary languages – there's no way for them to work together. You need to solve the paradox of diversity in ways that reap all the benefits without paying those coordination costs. How do you do that? You can have translators. You can have bridges, people who work across those disciplines or spend time in other teams, who then gather that knowledge and are able to serve as a bridge between two very specialized domains. By the way, this applies beyond companies to countries as well. If we don't speak the same language, you're going to have some trouble. Maybe today, in a world of machine learning, it'd be okay, but you'd have some trouble understanding what I was saying. If I decided to move to the United States and say, “In my culture, we drive on the left-hand side of the road,” it's not going to work, because it's a lack of coordination with the way people drive there.

We can find things that are slightly adjacent, requiring small mutations – companies, too. They can move to industries that are adjacent to what they already do. They can apply what they've discovered to a different domain. This is innovation through finding those adjacent possibilities.

Some organizations, for example, reward the person who gave the most difficult feedback. It might be an intern who criticized the CEO. That's a great way to create a culture where people are willing to speak out and not mind being wrong. There's no penalty to being wrong as long as you're informed. These seven principles, Compass, distill a whole bunch of literature in a way that's very actionable for companies, and what we typically do is take that, find the ways that people are already working and map it into something that works well for that company.

We're all on the same planet. We live in the same country. We're moving toward a common goal. When that trust breaks down, as it has in many parts of the world, we see effectively the deterioration of society, and we see many of the maladies of the modern world.

That's the problem that we face. Even with something like climate change, it's in all our interests to find ways for clean growth or investing in things that mitigate some of the damage that we've done to the planet. It's in every individual country's best interest, every individual company's best interest and every individual's best interest to forget all of that and grow as quickly as possible in any means we can. The “tragedy of the commons” and the solutions that have been discovered for enabling cooperation and collective action are essential to understanding how we move forward. Unfortunately, they also, including some of my own work, reveal that it's a very, very difficult problem.

Editor’s note: This article has been faithfully transcribed from the original interview filmed with the author, and carefully edited and proofread. Edit date: 2025