Creative Leader of the Week -- Anupam Mishra

Anupam Mishra in his very characteristic eloquent style talks about the ancient ingenuity of water harvesting in India to provide bacteria free potable water to the masses without the help of modern chemicals and modern water treatment facilities.

Of interest to note are the following:

a) The techniques that were used.

b) The application of collective engineering

c) The sense of collective ownership of resources in India which runs in the culture even today

d) Community and culture lead projects based on wisdom and understanding systems and great design thinking ideas that squarely defeat modern engineering ideas.

e) Examples of collective participation and collective contribution to welfare of society.

Moral:

The understanding of social problems is limited by the social consciousness of a culture and design solutions must be based on the culture of the land to suit the way of life not to change the way of living.

Hope you would enjoy this talk.

Collective Intelligence or Wisdom

Collective Intelligence is certainly not common intelligence or influence upon one's intelligence of the 10 closest people one would prefer to mix with.

Collective intelligence has more to do with wisdom rather than gaining information and knowledge or learning from the decisions of others.

This is because collective wisdom is subtle in its essence and formless. It then appears to me that such wisdom is ubiquitous so as to be available to all human minds. Therefore, it is not the personal property of any one individual though much of it would otherwise depend on one's individual intention to tap into this enormous resource of wisdom.

Gaining such collective wisdom is more of a process that helps one to tap into the truth of a situation and understanding patterns rather than being an idea or concept that might be stored in one’s brain as an image. It therefore follows that such truths are always universal in nature and not dependent on the varied perceptions of human senses other than that of the mind.

The process is helped by one's willingness to let go of clinging to specific viewpoints, practices, images, self images and sensual objects. It must also be free of intellectual sensations, tendency for mental constructs and even spiritual aspirations.

Collective Intelligence or Wisdom can only be gained or transferred from one to the other through stories, riddles, and puzzles or by solving problems.  

However, the output of Collective Wisdom would always remain formless and ‘becoming’ rather than ‘being’, never quite reaching the reality and never quite 'nothing'.