INTRODUCTION

There is awareness that we live in a volatile, uncertain, complex, fast-moving, and vigorous world. Companies are not working in predictable environments. To explore and exploit their markets and market potentials, Collective Intelligence and resilience are becoming increasingly important (Mignenan, 2021; González, 2021; Al-Omoush et al., 2022).

The main products of most companies are commodities, which are replaceable or will be replaceable soon.

That means, that the parameters of the environment of the market of the company's activities and the added value must be more refined and clearly defined, as a guideline by which the company operates. For example, who are the customers, and what do they value? What is the true difference of the company's product compared to its competitors? Suppose there are no possibilities of differentiation in the company's core business. In that case, it should focus on the additional attributes that accompany the business, such as excellent service and processes, qualified and motivated personnel, strong customer relationship management (CRM), innovation and future trends research.

This guideline is the vision and mission statement by which the company exploits and explores its markets and market potential in a competitive world. The mission and vision of a company and its organizational chart are the framework for any action inside and outside the organization. A company's mission declares the purpose of the company and its vision the long-term goals, developed and verified through Collective Intelligence and resilience as a prevention concept for managing any risks and resulting opportunities (Lyons, 2008; Linnenluecke, 2017).

Generally, the people involved are embedded in socio-political, cultural, and economic structures as they are employees and managers, acting according to what is understood as professionalism in management and business administration. However, it is not free of certain opportunistic behavior and naturally impacts on the outcome (Wathne & Heide, 2000; Choi, 2014; Wong, 2021).

The Mission & Vision of a business must be complemented by a local strategy to be resilient. What does the future look like and in which direction is the journey going? What will the world look like in 5-10 years and what is the direction to take to still exist in 5-10 years? Then, it must be examined how to improve the existing business model or business models, to manage the existing ones and on the other hand, how to invent new products and business models to still be relevant in 5-10 years? Strategy is a vision of the future, a direction on how to get there and still exist in 10 years. (Osterwalder, 2022)

It is about imagining risk and opportunity, about trial and error. New fundamental ideas are generated bottom-up but must fit the top-down vision. It prepares the business for the current and upcoming challenges and makes the business resilient and its performance immune in vigorous surroundings. Collective Intelligence is needed to develop a vision of the future (Grasso & Convertino, 2012). The strategy and a direction on how to get there are long-term, but ideas and their implementation are short-term, based on a situational vision with a high learning effect.

This essay is based on the premise, that the integrity of the person and the group in the business engenders Collective Intelligence and, thus, synergistically strengthens the collective resilience, understood as the individual and the company’s resilience. Furthermore, the integrity of the individual and the team gives meaning and comprehension based on a value structure, which leads to collective resilience, in seeing the world, the life as a phenomenon with meaning as a place to act.

In this work, we constantly balance between the company and the personal view as people thinking meets group thinking. The idea is to review how the integrity of the person and the group in the business boosts Collective Intelligence resulting in collective resilience. The document base are the lectures of Jordan B. Peterson (2017b) about meaning and personality at Toronto University, the studies of Shalom H. Schwartz about values at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the author's professional experience.

To understand the context of this essay, we would like to set the boundaries for the main concepts used, like Collective Intelligence, the integrity of the person and the group and resilience in the dynamic business environment, before trying to be understood, that the integrity of the person and the group in the business engenders the Collective Intelligence and, thus, synergistically (Dictionary, 2023)^[1] strengthens individual and business resilience.

MAIN PART

Objects or situations can be perceived an infinite number of ways (Aguilar, 1999), and each action or event has infinite consequences (Peterson, 2013). It all depends on the context and the goals to be accomplished.

Virtually all organizations are marketing-, engineering- or manufacturing-driven on the micro level, but on the macro level, organizations are either project- or non–project-driven. (Kerzner, 2002)^[2] Project-driven organizations adopt matrix organizational structures; non-project-driven organizations usually adopt line or functional ones.

However, in the context of this work, we are considering any endeavor of a company a project, independently of its nature, project-driven or non-project-driven.

Because of the dynamics of the relationships inside our economized world of management, we will define a project as:

A temporary endeavor with a beginning and an end undertaken in the socio-political and economic surroundings, focused on a well-defined goal, driven by cooperation – coordination- collaboration mechanisms, the complementary actions of its team members.

This definition puts the project context with constraints in the focus instead of the technical definition of a project.^[3] (Soderlund, 2011; Svejvig, 2014; PMI, 2013) These constraints define:

• the perception of meaning,

• the comprehension of the individual based on his or her structure of values,

• the resulting rationality, influenced by emotions and motivations as a surface of thought of the individual for cooperation and coordination,

• a guide for action and decision-making. Project management is people business, group thinking meets people thinking, conscientiousness and openness to experience.

We are talking about working in a team when we are talking about projects. The collective application of competencies such as knowledge, skills, tools, norms, rules, values, habitus, purpose and techniques that organize activities to meet the project requirements. This is a definition of “Collective Intelligence” referring to a group or a team’s combined capacity and capability” …. not necessarily of the best in class …”to perform a wide variety of tasks and solve diverse problems.” (Chikersal et al., 2017) It is the concept of the meritocracy of ideas^[4] (Dalio, 2023).

“The primary difference between the individual Intelligence and the Collective Intelligence is the social dimension and the ability of groups to achieve unity of purpose, action and thought. Teams with high levels of Collective Intelligence achieve a state of interdependence and flow when they are working together.” (Chikersal et al., 2017)

Artificial intelligence is not considered here as part of Collective Intelligence. It is an instrument used by the individual and between the team members, but it lacks any social dimension to achieve, for example, unity of purpose. Today, artificial intelligence helps with creativity, with suggestions on how something could be tested, for example, but not yet how to implement it.

The definition of Collective Intelligence refers to the coordination and effective mobilization of the competencies, needed for example, to define and adjust a company´s strategy, typically top-down by a smaller group incorporating ideas bottom up.

The experienced performances of the coordination and mobilization of the competencies (real experiences, subjective perception, fulfillment of individual requirements) are weighted by the group and the individuals according to their expectations, such as individual levels of expectation, performance promises and information about alternatives. The gap between the individuals’ and business (group) expectations and experienced performance is a measure of the integrity of the individual with the team.

Figure 1
The integrity of the person and the team
Own elaboration

The integrity of the person and the team results from comparing the expectations and the experienced performance at individual and team levels.

Tradition, organizational culture, and code of conduct within a transnational company can lead to tensions and internal conflicts. (Steggemann, 2015) However, a complementary point of view, understanding its positive impact on organizational competitiveness, reduces the conflict potential and establishes temporary order because of the contribution power of complementarity.

No order is natural. Order is the result of power. In the end, everything is falling apart. Entropy is the normal condition. Power provokes resistance. Power is not exercised. It is not an essence. It is not a thing. Power is a relationship. There is no such thing as a central power. Power exists in small details.

We exercise power as soon as we act, when we seduce, induce, clarify and explain. A relationship without order is chaos, understood here as a search for stability. Power is everywhere. It is structure, it is truth, and it is who and what defines truth. We internalize relations of power within ourselves that allow many external relations to function. (Roderick, 1991)

Power is associated with responsibility and the importance of meaning something for our life is proportional to the responsibility that we assume. (Peterson, 2017b)

Power has to do with potential. The human being is a potential (Möglichkeit) as he has possibilities on how to shape his life (Gestaltungsmöglichkeiten), as Heidegger (Heidegger, 1993) describes it.

Power is, at the same time, authority and competence. Competence is understood as the personal ability to contribute. Contribution is given to help a person or play a significant part in making something happen (Merriam Webster, 2023). It is goal-directed and implies the power to do so.

Competences include skills, knowledge, and qualifications, but cannot be reduced to them. Knowledge resources and skills are necessary, but more prerequisites are needed. Action or contribution power results from a fundamental attitude of the human being, in which understanding, agreement and meaning converge at a specific place and time.

Power relates to the person’s relationships, as he is exercising power as soon as he acts: when he seduces, induces, clarifies, explains and contributes. Thus, contribution power competence (CPC) is understood in the following as:

A leader or group's time and space-limited ability and competence focused on an event to support a particular development purposefully via coordination and cooperation and aimed to the optimal adaptation to the situation.

Organizational or structure-wise competence is the official competence, authority and line competence, which has nothing to do with ability, but with attribution from others.

The different departments or areas of a company have authority and power as an institution but are not necessarily competent in solving or achieving something. So, the department is receiving psychological support from the assigned authority, underpinning its engagement in valued activities.

It is essential to know when analyzing the collaboration of different people in teams. There is a difference in power regarding the outcome, its influence, its contribution, belonging to a group and individual people. There might be more differences between the people but not within groups: group thinking meets people thinking.

The struggle of what is acceptable or not acceptable is stronger within the people and their belief system, as it affects their integrity, than between people or groups organized by a common inter-est.

Using the same “meaning”, understood as the implementation of norms, methods, processes, and practices, can be a problem in teams or projects, if the integrity of the individual is affected and if the individual is refusing to cooperate, because as he perceives the world based on his rationality, he is facing chaos. Chaos is “where the world and I do not match”. (Peterson, 2017b)

Rationality is “making decisions based on clear thought and reason” (Cambridge-Dictionary, 2023). So, on the one hand, it is founded on what the human being made up in his mind following a logical way of thinking, and on the other hand, it is created by reasoning on how the human being perceives the world with his senses. Rationality is context-dependent.

Merriam-Webster defines “thinking” as “the action of using one's mind to produce thoughts” and “thought” as the "reasoning power" to conceptualize; “reason” is defined as "a rational ground or motive" or "the power of comprehending, inferring, or thinking, especially in orderly rational ways" or related to intelligence as “the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations”. (Merriam Webster, 2023)

Human rationality is nested inside a Meta-physic structure of the human being, developed over millions of years. The old hypothalamic dopaminergic system runs on Serotonin and Dopamine (Kravitz, 2000). Therefore, it is crucial to consider that rationality is primarily based on emotions and motivation, as Jordan Peterson (2017a) explains in his lectures.

Rationality is the surface of thought. Rationality is knowledge and power. Rationality is the competence to guide activity and to perceive the world as a phenomenon with meaning, as a place to act.

Perception is a relationship between a subject and an object of perception: thus, reality is perceived as real (Russels, 2013). However, perception is only possible by situating the mind in a body with certain constraints or goals. A form without a being is without essence, a being without form is formless, non-existent (Küng, 1995).

There is no perception for human beings without goals because there is no filtering mechanism to determine the level of resolution at which they perceive (Peterson, 2017b). We need a set of guidelines or goals to make the connection between perception and the rest of our knowledge to form concepts, to simplify our world (Gibson, 1987)^[5]. These goals require a value hierarchy to make decisions.

Human beings do not expect things as much as they desire them. They value the current state less than a chance in the future. Desire is motivation (Peterson, 2013) and it is a motivational system that fundamentally gives rise to the motivation-action-perception scheme (MAP) (Peterson, 2013). Based on our rationality, this desire is the motivating stimulus that forces us to act.

The human being needs a goal to proceed. Having a goal gives motivation, while achieving the goal gives temporary satisfaction.

The goals and objectives are coming from the outside, they are given by other people. Purpose gives a direction. Purpose is not static, it is a process, it is what is giving a meaning. The goal is like having an end. The question of purpose doesn’t seem to end like a goal or an objective when it is accomplished. Goals are not important. What is important to know is the distinction between goals and purpose. What is also important to objectively know is the distinction between the outcome of goals and the outcome of purposes. So, there are different elements when talking about purpose. It is not aim, objective nor goal. Why is purpose that important? What is it that gives someone a meaning? Because someone can be completely busy, spending his time, spending his life in a very meaningless way. The human being is a biological organism.

Life will just happen to him and then he is dying. The question is finding this meaning, this purpose. Having a purpose is important because it gives a new meaning, a new sense of identity, a new sense of self-awareness, it nurtures the human being. (Peterson, 2017a).[^6] Moreover, it makes him resilient. As Nietzsche expressed, "If you have your why for life, you can get by with almost any how" (Nietzsche, 1998).

Donya Gilan et al. state that because of the complexity of crises and upheavals, individuals and societies are called upon to develop collective resilience. It raises the question of protective factors that enable companies to deal flexibly with crises and social upheavals. (Gilan, 2021)

Resilience is not only discussed at the individual level as a concept that provides meaningful answers to different challenges and crises but also when it comes to the business immune system.

Resilience and robustness are based on a system having reserves to withstand shocks; however, there is a crucial difference: robustness means that the buffers guarantee complete stability and if the system is exposed to unexpected shocks, it can be non-resilient and collapse. Resilience means that fluctuations are only dampened and then balanced out again; Robustness is static and resilient systems are flexible; constant fluctuations strengthen their powers, just like an immune system. (Brunnermeier, 2021)

Resilience is a relevant prevention concept. By imagining risk and opportunity, as a vision of the future and applying Collective Intelligence, the collective application of competencies, resilience and Collective Intelligence can be supportive to work on a wide variety of questions. It is a system “that brings together smart, independent thinkers and has them productively dis-agree to come up with the best possible collective thinking and resolve their disagreements in a believability-weighted way” (Dalio, 2023).

Resilient systems are dynamic and in combination with the concept of Collective Intelligence, the focus should, therefore, not only be on self-reflexivity and responsiveness but also on structural improvement measures. Resilience needs fluctuation, variation, alternatives, and interchange with others and rests on relationship.

The aim of promoting collective resilience in a business is the development of a culture of learning, exploring, appreciation and dialogue in companies, like Collective Intelligence. A business's most critical competitive advantage is the corporate culture, the way things are done inside and outside the company (Steggemann, 2011). It is about how we are living the company values, combined with our values, to fulfill the Mission and Vision of the company. It is about the company´s purpose, the passion, transparency, honesty, trust, humility, social commitment, and responsibility we take about it, to name just a few.

Taking responsibility is one thing and should not be mistaken for accountability, which is frequently used in traditional hierarchical organizational forms. Accountability is assigned and relates to punishment. It is a condition. In a performance-oriented society, members are rewarded for performance improvements and excellence.

Performance is considered a value; therefore, it is a reason for action and to regulate that action. The performance can be analyzed quantitatively as the number of pieces produced, a physical dimension, or qualitatively as in the social sciences, the behavior, quality, feelings, cooperation, and coordination, among others. In the personality system, in the individual motivational psychological structure, performance is essential as a need for achievement, in the economic system as a result of production and in the cultural context as a value. (Seibel, 1973)

There are different types of value (Silva, 1998)^[7]. Value is the intrinsic meaning of any action; in economics, a value is a utility; a value in politics is power; a value in science is knowledge. In the world of projects, ‘value’ is a quantitative measure of money and a qualitative measure of the personality system of the members of the organization, customers and stakeholders, among others, that influences the performance of the action and activity of the individual, as well as of the group. It is reflected in its profitability and competitiveness, and it is condensed in the creation of economic value for the company. (Steggemann, 2011)

As described earlier, the individual and group's actions and activity are guided by its rationality. What is considered rational is defined by the perception of what is acceptable or not acceptable in the individual's world. This reasoning and thoughts are based on subconscious values and their corresponding beliefs - perceptible as attitudes - of the individual when relating to the social world. Attitudes are subject to framing effects. They are context-dependent concepts. (Sherman, 1999)

According to the research of Schwartz (2016), fundamental values share several characteristics, and each is a belief about the importance of a desirable goal and functions as criteria for judging whether people, behaviors, events, policies, or other objects are good or bad (Bardi & Schwartz, 2003).^[8]

The motivation or the goal is what makes the difference. Values are ordered by importance relative to one another. The hierarchy of values in the person is transformed according to the circumstances. Heidegger is talking in this context about individuals living authentic and unauthentic lives. Merriam-Webster defines authentic as “not false or imitation” or “true to one's personality, spirit, or character” (Merriam Webster, 2023), ones identity. Someone who lives an authentic life makes decisions according to his self, unlike someone who relies on the "it is said", who bases his life on what is already "created" and stays with what is already "established" —all of us, in our own lives, like to lose ourselves in the great masses. At best, we go to a concert or a soccer game and there we scream like everyone else and we do not know why. Where we cannot do this is in our professional life.

The findings of value, research done by Bardi and Schwartz (2003), "can be interpreted as an indication that values motivate behavior, but that normative pressures partly obscure the relation between values and behaviors." (Bardi & Schwartz, 2003) Therefore, to ensure the integrity of the individual and the group, what needs to be reflected, for example, according to the research of the investigators, is:

• What are shared values and priority values?

• What determines the nature of these values?

• Do values have the same or similar meanings among the different groups of persons?

• Can we identify a comprehensive set of values?

• Does a value structure exist?

• What is accountability as the group members see it?

• Why are values collapsing, and which ones are?

• Etc.

It allows the individual to act by his values at different levels. It generates integrity, a comprehension based on the individual´s value structure. It is about how the individuals are living the company values, combined with their values and vision, to fulfill the Mission and Vision of the company. It creates meaning to be situated at the right place at the right time, turning truth into being; it builds identity, integrity and resilience of the individual with the company’s values; it unifies the team members to achieve the vision of the company. Group thinking meets people thinking.

CONCLUSION

The postulated premise in the introduction is coherent as laid out. The concept of Collective Intelligence, boosted by the integrity of the individual and the team with its contribution power competence, gives meaning and comprehension based on a value structure resulting in collective resilience, in seeing the world, the life as a phenomenon with meaning, as a place to act. The meaning of our life, of our actions, working in teams and projects, is proportional to the responsibility we take. It is a synergy generated between the individual and the company’s resilience, a habit of creative cooperation interactively so that each element or party increases the effect of the other.

We propose to deepen the concept of the integrity of the person and the team as described here to review if the lack of integrity disturbs the Collective Intelligence and, thus, weakens the collective resilience, the individual´s and the company's resilience.

Furthermore, it would be interesting to know how artificial intelligence, not considered here as part of the Collective Intelligence, as it lacks any social dimension to achieve, for example, unity of purpose, affects the integrity of the person and the team.

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Notes

Enlace alternativo

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