Well, it's great to be here.

I'm Anita Woolley.

I'm a professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

And I want to start out by just giving you

a bit of an intuition for how we got interested in that

what I'm going to tell you about.

So I'm going to start off by giving you two examples.

In each pair I describe, I want you to think about,

which team do you think is going to be successful.

So the first example consists of two men's ice hockey team

from the Olympics.

So the first team is made up of stars

from professional leagues, from all around the world.

Their home country is hosting the Olympics,

prominent politicians in the country

have said that the billions of dollars

they spent to prepare for the Olympics

would all be worthwhile if this team brought home gold.

OK?

So that's motivation.

Compare this to the second team.

This team was actually convened less than a

year before the Olympics-- can we

go back one-- made up of amateur and collegiate athletes.

And nobody really expected much.

They just hoped that they wouldn't embarrass the country

since they were also hosting the Olympics that year.

So most of us would expect that the team on the left

would be more successful.

But those of you who know hockey know

that this is the Russian men's team from the 2014

Olympics, who was eliminated from contention

before the medal rounds even began.

And this is the 1980 US men's hockey team,

who brought home the gold medal despite all

that was working against them.

All right, so let's think of another example.

This one from presidential cabinets.

So you might think, it's election season,

you're electing a person.

Well, in fact, you're electing a person and his or her team

of advisors.

So in this cabinet, this cabinet was made up

of what one historian termed the best and the brightest,

highly accomplished Ivy League educated individuals,

strong interpersonal relationships,

including even some family members of the president.

Compared to this cabinet, made up

of men who lacked some formal education in some cases,

and were bitter rivals in a hotly contested

presidential primary.

Most of us, again, would expect that the team on the left

would be the more successful, but scholars

of American history will know that this is the Kennedy

cabinet, which was responsible for some huge decision making

debacles.

This is the Lincoln cabinet, who passed historic legislation

despite being in a deeply divided country.

What these examples really illustrate is that a,

we're really bad at predicting which

teams are going to perform well in the future, in part

because we have a tendency to focus

a lot on individual attributes and less

on how the group actually works together.

So a question that's important to ask

is, why were these team successful.

And what my colleagues and I would put forth to you

is that one potential answer is collective intelligence.

And so some of the research I'm going to tell you about

will support this idea and, hopefully,

leave you with about two different ideas for how

you can build smarter teams.

We have a strong tendency to focus

on hiring smart individuals, but we

don't know enough about how to build smart teams.

And one of the reasons why we focus

on individual intelligence is because there's

some very good metrics for it.

So where we're all familiar with G for general intelligence.

This is the idea that underlies IQ tests

and is highly predictive of how individuals perform

in a variety of domains.

We started our research wondering

if there is an analogous factor, c, for collective intelligence.

Are there teams that are consistently

good at working together across many different domains?

And can we use that information to predict which teams will

perform well in the future?

So we started our research to explore

if collective intelligence even exists.

We had teams come to our lab.

They spent many hours together performing

a whole variety of tasks.

We found that teams that did well on one kind of task,

let's say a creativity task, were also good

at mathematical tasks and other sorts of problem solving tasks.

When we calculated a score based on how they performed

on all of these tasks, we were able to then predict

with a pretty high degree of accuracy

how they performed in the future when

we brought them back to perform another more complex task.

And we were able to do so much better

than simply knowing the individual IQs of the team

members themselves.

So we've replicated this finding a few different times.

And repeatedly find that collective intelligence

is a much better predictor of how teams perform

than individual intelligence, whether you look

at the average intelligence of team members

or even the intelligence of the smartest person in the room.

So then we set about trying to figure out, well,

if it's not individual IQ that determines

collective intelligence, what does.

And some of what we found was rather surprising.

So one of our first observations was

that the proportion of women in the team

is related to collective intelligence.

And at first we thought it was a linear relationship,

but now that we've collected data on several hundred teams,

we find that it's more of a curvilinear relationship.

So on this graph, this is average collective

intelligence, and what you'll notice

is that when teams include less than 50-50 females,

they tend to oscillate around average.

But once you have more than half of the group female

is when you see that teams are consistently above average.

However, there's still a benefit to diversity.

It's not the case that all-female teams are always

way above average.

So one of the reasons, though, as we dug deeper

into this, why we see this relationship is

another trait that we measure, which is social perceptiveness.

So social perceptive is an ability

to pick up on subtle, nonverbal cues from other people.

We give all of the participants in our studies a test

called the reading the mind in the eyes test.

In this test, they see only the eye region of the face

and they have to draw inferences about what

this person is thinking or feeling

based on a list of choices.

We find that women score higher on this task than men.

And that teams that include people

with higher scores on tests like these

are more collectively intelligent.

We also measure a number of attributes of communication

in the groups, and have particularly noticed

that the distribution of communication is important.

Specifically, if you have one or two

people who dominate the conversation,

the team is much less collectively

intelligent than if you have more equal distribution

of conversation.

We've also conducted these studies

with teams working together online and collaborating

by a text chat, and we find a very similar results.

Equality in communication is still important, even when

they're using text chats.

It's also important even when you

look at who's contributing what to their shared products.

And similarly, in these online teams,

we surprisingly find that social perceptiveness is just

as important.

So reading the mind in the eyes test

is predictive of collective intelligence

even when team members are not seeing one

another's facial expressions.

Research that's just coming out from a team in the Netherlands

further shows that collective intelligence is really

driven by the lowest scoring member on tests

of things like reading the mind in the eyes.

In other words, including somebody

who has really poor ability in that domain

really seems to drag down a team that otherwise would be high

performing.

So with that, I want to leave you with two ideas that are,

you know, based on the consistent findings

of the studies that I've told you about,

as well as others that we've conducted.

First, is that it's really important

when you're convening a team to set egalitarian norms.

Over and over again, we see that the equality of contribution

is important.

This really comes from convening a team in which there

are no stars, as well as no people who are slacking off

or loafing.

The second piece is, you really need

to pay attention to the skills, the collaboration

abilities of the people in the team,

and specifically avoid bringing in people who are

going to drag the team down.

People who are very negative, who are domineering

can exert a disproportionately negative effect

on collective intelligence.

You what the people who are really good, also,

but avoiding the people who really drag things down

is equally important.

So hopefully, by paying attention

to a few of these attributes, we can not only hire smart people,

but also create smart teams.

So that, thank you very much.