Hipbone recommends The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All by Tom Atlee.

In a nutshell, Tom offers us a persuasive account of what we can do, and how, to change our world -- not for the better as we as individuals might define it, but as we might define it if we listened to each other closely enough to arrived at mutual understanding.

That seems to be an attractive idea. Surely listening to each other closely is a highly desirable behavior. But there is a serious defect lurking in Hipbone's statement and Atlee's book, the idea that the result of close attention to one another will be mutual understanding that will somehow allow us to "create a world that works for all". All evidence indicates that is the least likely result absent a very powerful authority that can coerce society. When people listen closely to one another they may reach mutual understanding but that is only one of the possible and probable outcomes. They may as well reach deep antipathy or mutual loathing, or any other outcome along several axes. Listening closely doesn't cause or assist mutual understanding, it reduces misapprehension and identifies which social behaviors are possible without oppression or triggering open conflict.

Atlee offers a sample chapter of his book -Collective Intelligence - in which he demonstrates some of the detail where his ideas go awry. The chapter title is an indication of his confusion which can be summarized as failing to understand the role of competition and conflict in cooperative and creative behavior. Atlee has some useful insights, but misses the big picture and fails to understand how social systems work. For example:

In a classic experiment, group intelligence was measured by presenting small groups of executives with a hypothetical wilderness survival problem. All-female teams arrived at better solutions (as judged by wilderness experts) than all-male teams. The women's collective problem-solving capabilities were enhanced by their collaborative style, while the men's efforts to assert their own solutions led them to get in each other's way...

When people align their individual intelligences in shared inquiries or undertakings, instead of using their intelligence to undermine each other in the pursuit of individual status, they are much more able to generate collective intelligence.

Atlee's mistake in analysis of this event is confusing short term and one off results with long term and general system behavior. There is all of human history available to demonstrate that societies that fail to generate outliers - creative dissenters - do not endure. They lack the ability to deal with unanticipated threats, a possibility that approaches certainty as time passes. Systems that are too cooperative, even collective, are not robust or resilient. The diminished performance of systems with more balanced cooperation and competition - "coopetition" - in ordinary circumstances is the price of resilience and creativity.

It may be that small entities such as corporations that have short term goals can profitably use Atlee's approaches. They have the luxury of a reset button - hiring from outside - when things get tough. Atlee suggests that this small scale, short term approach to social organization is appropriate for societies on the largest scales but fails to consider that the reset button on such systems is collapse and chaos.

Atlee's confusion is fractal, repeating as scale increases. He misunderstands the behavior of enterprises in the same way he misunderstands the behavior of individuals. He gives a nod to modern complex descriptions of systems such as those of Dee Hock - "chaordic" self-organizing systems that manifest both chaotic and orderly qualities - but fails to understand the dynamics of multiple systems - systems of systems.

Unfortunately, all too many corporations are still playing a destructive role within our larger system, and are using their enhanced collective intelligence to consolidate power and consume resources faster. This is in part because society has yet to change the fundamental "rules of the game," including how corporations are chartered and monitored.

This very revealing statement encapsulates Atlee's analysis and prescription. His understanding of complex systems such as societies is impoverished, a sort of "sand box" perspective that wishes to impose initial conditions within a bounded environment that can be monitored and regulated. Atlee sees this as being somehow different from antiquated command and control approaches that have proved to be so ineffective, but he is mistaken. His ideas are tarted up versions of past failures, larded with consultant-speak buzzwords but devoid of useful or innovative prescriptions. He says:

Nonetheless, if we are to survive as a species, we need to apply our knowledge of collective intelligence to larger and nobler ends than profit. Our non-profit, community, and social change organizations can improve their capacity for creating effective change by applying the knowledge that has been gained about collaborative leadership, whole-system planning, self-directed work teams, and a host of other innovations.

Rubbish. If we want to survive it will be useful to gain some understanding of our species, perhaps even come to like it. We need to mature a bit, to overcome puerile fastidiousness and aversion to muck and mystery since that is the human condition. We are animals participating in continuously changing natural systems, coevolving with all of the other members of those systems. Our individual wills to persist and grow, the quickening, are not optional and are not a problem to be solved. We continually evolve new techniques that allow an increase in the scope and productivity of our aggregate efforts. We coevolve with these cultural inventions. But collective intelligence, planning and enduring organizations are the dead end failures of the past. Repeated failures as cultures rise and fall.

The lessons of our age are that ad-hoc associations of short duration for specific tasks are more effective ways to increase the size of the aggregate social mind. When Atlee (and Hock) say that "...the Internet, is not so much a thing as a pattern of agreements about interactions which help voluntary participants achieve certain shared goals or visions..." they seem to miss the key attributes of the internet, its robustness and resilience that allows uncooperative behavior as well as cooperative behavior. It supports multiple simultaneous, inconsistent, competitive and cooperative behaviors by having very, very few affordances or restrictions. When things go wrong, as they do continuously, the scope and duration of outage or damage is minimized. The system is easy to hurt and hard to kill. Efforts to make it harder to hurt make it easier to kill.

Authoritarians such as Atlee need to do more than update their language and arguments. They need to make peace with complex natural systems and their defining characteristics, their lack of optimization and admirable resilience.