In the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, the Russian men's ice hockey team was set to win it all. The team had star players from the National Hockey League in North America and the Kontinental Hockey League in Russia and playing at “home” supported by their crowd, fans thought the gold medal was a sure thing. 

Even Russian President Vladimir Putin stated that the success of Olympic Games – which cost around $50 billion – depended on the triumph of the Russian men's hockey team. Not long into the tournament, however, it became clear that the team might not live up to these high expectations. 

Players who were top scorers on their professional teams didn't score, and despite all their individual drive and talent, the team was eliminated from the competition before the medal rounds even started. As that wasn´t enough, their final defeat was by the Finnish team, a previously unknown group of third and fourth-line professional players. Everyone was speechless: how on Earth could this team have failed so badly? 

By contrast, over 40 years ago, a hockey team from a different country had the reverse experience. Known for the "Miracle on Ice", the 1980 US Men's Hockey team, buildup of amateurs and college players, rose above all probabilities and won the shiny yellow medal that year[1]. 

Why do these episodes keep happening? What is turning the odds around? Well, the answer is old but gold: the difference between individual talents and talented teams shows that a team’s collective intelligence is a much stronger predictor of team performance than the individual ability of team members. 

The power of Collective intelligence includes a group's capability to collaborate and coordinate effectively, and this is often much more important for group performance than individual ability alone. In other words, just having several smart individuals may be useful, but it is certainly not enough, for creating a smart group or a smart organization[2]. 

So, why aren’t companies turning the odds in their favor already? When you look at organizations today, you can see that executives and senior leaders giving the orders and monopolizing the decisions continues to be the most common way to run a business. But this regular top-down approach is not the most efficient or successful dynamic when it comes to the way businesses are evolving. 

According to MIT organizational theorist Thomas Malone, most of us are still victims of a centralized mindset, the concept that the right thing to do is placing someone in charge in order to manage the core aspects of a business. He calls our attention to look at the several new ways of organizing that let more people to have more involvement in decisions and for better results[3]. As Steve Jobs once said:

“It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do. We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do”. 

The unleashing of this philosophy is already showing its reach. In 2015, Zappos decided to test and adopt a flat organizational structure referred to as "holacracy". Guided by CEO Tony Hsieh, the company abolished the manager role, got rid of job titles, eliminated its organizational hierarchy and adopted a revolutionary new system of self-governance. Automattic, the company that created WordPress, only employs around 200 people and all work remotely, with a highly autonomous flat organizational structure.

Although you will not find that many cases (yet), when you look at the core business models of the world’s greatest companies, you realize that the best way to gain power is to give it away. Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, and the CEOs after him that led the company, were brave enough to give power away to their customers and were rewarded with a different kind of power. Wikipedia, a platform that we all know and use, is a website where its power is decentralized in each one of us in order to improve it. Google, Uber, Airbnb, Reddit, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter…all companies where the power lies on a collective force of customers and users. 

Sure, this decentralized decision-making process and governance can’t be applied in every situation. In manufacturing or construction companies, for example, the major results come from things like economies of scale, and we may experience a centralization power to take full advantage of that.

But when considering knowledge-based and innovation-driven companies, in R&D or high-tech industries, the critical aspects of business success are regularly the benefits that result from decentralized decision making: creativity, freedom, motivation, flexibility. 

And yes, this new era of companies we are living in asks for a different kind of Leaders as well. Leaders have to be facilitators, not dictators. On the contrary of what we are used to and might think, new leaders are neither in the front ordering and giving specific instructions nor in the back not letting any man behind, they must lead from the middle in a roundabout way. 

So, if the largest and most disruptive organizations in the world are the ones in which business models are leveraging the power of many, why are companies still centralizing the process of learning in a few people? Why don’t companies change the way their people learn and share knowledge already? 

At pur’ple we believe this is the main competitive advantage of the future: the ability, rate and pace of learning of each organization. 

Can you imagine a company capable of leveraging what every single of its employees learn every day? Where everything learned individually becomes organizational knowledge? This is the sweet spot, the place where you will be able to unleash the power of Collective Intelligence through the knowledge of a Collective Brain.