Collaborative Intelligence

What can facilitation do in the age of AI?

Within that question is another question I keep coming back to:

What becomes more important when artificial intelligence becomes better at thinking, generating and answering?

For me, part of the answer is Collaborative Intelligence.

Not the ability to think the same thing together.

Quite the opposite.

It is the ability to create a process where different people can bring their knowledge, experience, perspectives and ideas into the same room — and make something of them together.

A kind of collective thinking.

Or, as I sometimes think of it: getting a group to think like one big brain.

But that doesn’t happen simply by putting smart people around a table.

It requires a space.

It requires a process.

And it requires someone who can guide that process with a steady hand and a waking attention.

That is what I believe good facilitation can do.

Think before you think together

One of the things I increasingly do in workshops is something very simple.

I ask people to stop talking.

I give them a question.

A small piece of paper.

And a pen.

Then I ask them to think on their own for a few minutes before we start thinking together.

It may sound almost too simple.

But something happens when we put our own thoughts down before entering the conversation.

We remember something.

We notice a connection.

We formulate a question.

We discover that we actually have an opinion about something we hadn’t thought we had an opinion about.

We access things we didn’t realise we knew.

And then we bring those thoughts into the room.

Someone else’s thought connects with your experience.

A question triggers a memory.

A disagreement opens another perspective.

One idea changes the way someone else sees the problem.

And slowly, the group begins to think together.

That is Collaborative Intelligence.

The facilitator’s role

This is also why I don’t see facilitation as simply making meetings more efficient.

The role of the facilitator is to create the conditions for better thinking.

To create the room.

To frame the question.

To guide the process.

To notice when attention is drifting.

To slow things down when they need slowing down — and move things forward when they need moving forward.

The participants own the content.

The facilitator owns the process.

You own the content. I own the process. Together, we create the thinking.

That distinction matters.

Because the facilitator doesn’t need to be the smartest person in the room.

The job is to help the intelligence that is already in the room become available.

A human counterweight

I believe this becomes increasingly important as AI becomes part of how we work.

Artificial Intelligence can generate answers at extraordinary speed.

It can analyse enormous amounts of information, find patterns and produce possibilities almost instantly.

But perhaps our advantage lies somewhere else.

In our ability to pay attention.

To think independently.

To connect what we know with what others know.

To ask questions that change the way we see a problem.

And to create something that none of us could have created alone.

That is why I see Collaborative Intelligence as an important counterweight to Artificial Intelligence.

Not because we should choose one over the other.

But because the better AI becomes at producing answers, the more important it may become to know which questions are worth asking — and how to think about them together.

From Moving Pen to the room

This is also where Moving Pen has found its place in my work.

I created Moving Pen as a guided writing practice built around handwriting, attention and reflection.

But increasingly, I see it as more than a practice in itself.

It can be a way of preparing a group to think together.

Think on your own before you think together.

A few quiet minutes with a pen can create the space for thoughts that might otherwise never enter the conversation.

And when those thoughts meet the thoughts of everyone else in the room, something new can happen.

Attention creates space.

Space creates reflection.

Reflection creates better questions.

Better questions create better conversations.

And better conversations open up new ways forward.

That, to me, is what facilitation can do.

It doesn’t replace human thinking.

It makes more of it possible.