Me To We:
Social science proves "together, we're better"
02 October 2010
Act as if you were
separate from nothing, and no one,
and you will
heal your world tomorrow.
Understand that it
is about power with, not power over.
-- Neale Donald Walsch
in Conversations with God - Book 3
"We are each
other's hope."
-- Elie
Wiesel
at We Day 2009
COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE
IN SMALL TEAMS
The supreme value of
small group listening,
equal participation
October 1,2010 -- A new MIT study has finally documented the time-tested
human experience in sustained Dialogue with its listening-to-learn that fosters
equality and can lead to unprecedented creativity.
Small, cooperative groups solve problems with
additive, collective intelligence beyond the cognitive abilities of the groups
individual members.
The ability to cooperate effectively, discover
new social insights, and creatively solve problems increases with:
1. the number of women
in the group.
2. internal social skills
to:
A.
sensitively perceive each other's emotions, and
B.
listen to ideas from everyone, equally -- the group's ability to take
turns.
When one person dominated, the group was less intelligent than in groups
where the conversational turns were more evenly distributed.
Teams containing more women demonstrated greater
social sensitivity and in turn collective intelligence, compared to teams
containing fewer women.
In groups of two to five, 699 people worked on tasks
that ranged from visual puzzles to negotiations, brainstorming, games, and
complex rule-based design assignments.
Investigators were clear that the gender effect cannot
be generalized.
Rather, people with social skills are good for a group
in search of useful, innovative outcomes.
Quality group relationships can be more important than
individual intellects that make up the group, for determining creative
outcomes.
Having a bunch of smart people in a group doesnt necessarily make the group smart, concluded Thomas
Malone, one of the MIT investigators.
Putting
heads together:
New study: groups demonstrate
distinctive collective
intelligence when facing difficult tasks
MITnews -- 01 October 2010
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/collective-intel-1001.html
FROM "ME" PEACE
TO "WE" PEACE
The best kind of collective thinking and creativity in the Holy Land brought
together a big roomful of Palestinians and Israelis.to
engage -- for some, for the first time in their lives.
MEPEACE -- http://mepeace.org
-- is a the growing social network that hosted the interfaith dinner and
team-builder.
A Danish reporter wrote: "I participated in this
event and covered it for Danish media.
"It was a great event and it was wonderful to see
two supposedly different groups of people approaching each other and opening up
to each other."
Interfaith
Iftar-Shabbat Dinner
September 11 -- Beit Jala
NTD TV news -- 2
min video
http://www.mepeace.org/video/mepeace-interfaith-sept-11
ME TO WE:
A global call to
expand our identification
and cooperate of everyone's good
In the mountains of Ecudor, when a task seems
impossible, the village chief -- a woman elder -- has the solution.
"Tomorrow...there will be...a minga,"
she shouts out.
Minga is a
community coming together to work for the benefit of all.
Once a minga is called,
children are sent as runners to neighboring villages -- there are no
phones.
People from different tribes drop what they were doing
and travel sometimes six hours to, for example, build a school -- even though
their own children live too far way to attend.
Everyone understands that by helping others in another
village they helped their collective future.
Someday the people of this village and their
children will return the favor.
In Kenya, the harambee
-- "all pulling together," in Swahili -- is of supreme human
activity of mutual assistance.
It has been elevated to the official motto of the
Kenyan culture and nation.
ME TO WE in one contemporary example of young
adults animating a life of service to birth the new global spirit of
cooperation.
Me
To We
Better choicesf
or a better world
STAGING TOMORROW:
Jewish and Palestinian youth
master skills of co-creation
for theatrical excellence
Summer 2010, the finest kind of collaboration was modeled by 100 young
Palestinian and Jewish Israelis from Peace Child Israel -- http://www.mideastweb.org/peacechild/
.
They gathered to celebrate their collective
theatrical genius to cooperate in scripting, compositing music, and performng their peace-related stage productions.
It was "a fabulous day of peace-building
hosted by the Habima National theatre," wrote
their director, Melisse Lewine
Baskovich ( pci@netvision.net.il ).
The youth-driven teams are composed of mature
communicators and cooperators on partnered teams from paired Arab and Jewish
towns:
Sakhnin - Misgav
Nazareth - Yagur
Baka al-Gharbiya
- Petach Tikvah
Tira - Kfar
Saba
Tel Aviv -
Jaffa
New bi-lingual productions are created and performed all year for
thousands of Arab and Jewish school students and the general public.
The Habima National Theatre
event culminated one year of activity with musical excerpts from five
different, original plays full of story and symbolism about the road beyond
war.
VIEW today's young citizen leaders into their
shared future.
Peace
Child Israel
8 min youth-created video --
28 Sept 2010
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGIagsU8_rk
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These and hundreds of other success stories are preserved at http://traubman.igc.org/messages.htm