Consilient Conversations - An Overview

A means of harnessing collective intelligence - at the speed and scale of tomorrow’s conversations

What is a Consilient Conversation?

A means of harnessing collective intelligence - at the speed and scale of tomorrow’s conversations

1. A holistic sphere of Value and Values.  The space in which we create the context for Holistic Management and the harnessing of emergent collective intelligence or Embodied Cogntion.   Navy seals represent embodied cogntion.  Or in more common parlance, tightly knit teams like Seals can complete “no look passes”, let alone no talking
2. People think in words (language) thus, possibilities/ideas, relationships and action are shaped by the effectiveness of individual and group conversations
3. Unprecedented results demand unprecedented conversations.
4. An organization is a network of conversations. Leaders are orchestrators of conversations.
5. Diverse people with different views lead to aligned purpose and shared values
6. The majority of speaking and listening is unconscious, automatic and historically derived
7. New rules bring forth new tools

Consilient Conversation - The Challenge is to Reintegrate our Memes

Given that most of our intelligence is collective, our conversations must offer fixes to those three S’s (slow, small, schizmatic). Writing with prescience in 1998, EO Wilson suggested we could address the multi and even all-domain challenges of tomorrow like the environment through Consilient Conversation. Why? Because

A Consilient Conversation is a multi-domain view on a problem. Views that are “Consiled” or reconciled or Unified. Piaget defined mature Intelligence as the ability to orchestrate between multiple perspectives. Science is built upon Consilience in that there is nothing true in biology that disagrees with chemistry and there is nothing in chemistry that disagrees with physics – they build upon and extend each other.

Consilience was the dream of the enlightenment philosophers the dream that the design principles of all things are knowable including the design of the ideal society. It was too early for the enlightenment philosophers as psychology and sociology were not yet hard sciences. Wilson however, believed that we were entering the Consilient Century when for the first time through the magic of the Quantified Self (although he was writing before such terms had been coined) we could now measure everything about the human and in so doing finally Reconcille the Two Great Ways of Knowing – the Humanities and the Sciences, the head and the heart.