Doug Engelbart on Collective IQ

Whether you are in the business of innovation or transforming your organization in the face of accelerating change, it's important to think in terms of capability: What makes us (more) capable? How do capabilities evolve and improve? How to innovate and improve them faster, smarter, better?

The solution rewuires an infrastructure of:

• tech capabilities (Tool System): that augments our  
• human abilities (the Human System): practices, paradigms, procedures, customs, methodologies.

The efforts to improve an organizational capability and increase collective IQ can be broken down into:

• A Activities Performing the day to day functions of an organization (“business as usual”)
• B Activities Attempts to improve how we do A Activities
• C Activities Attempts to improve how we do B Activities (“improving how we improve”)

Doug Engelbart proposes that in order to face an uncertain future an organization needs to evolve from a state of business as usual to state of constant improvement, an unfinished revolution.

In Doug Engelbart's terms, an improvement community is any group involved in a collective pursuit to improve a given capability. 

An improvement community that puts special attention on how it can be dramatically more effective at solving important problems, boosting its collective IQ, is a networked improvement community (NIC). 

Improvement communities opperate at the C-level activities in an organization (see above). Meaning the group is improving the capabilities of the people working on improving the business as usual-type activities.