Collective Intelligence is the key to building the marketing team of the future!

The Next Generation of Collective Intelligence

No individual builds a jumbo jet. Boeing credits the first 747 to around 50,000 people, a group it called “The Incredibles”, who produced the first aircraft in about sixteen months by Boeing’s own account. They were completing the aeroplane while the enormous factory around them was still being built. Mechanics, engineers, administrators and thousands of specialists somehow held a shared picture of something none of them could see in full. No single person could design, manufacture and deliver the aircraft. A group of smart individuals built something extraordinary.

That is what a great company really is: a machine for placing individual talent inside collective intelligence. The best organisations do more than employ capable people and divide work between them. They create the culture, processes and shared understanding that allow individual expertise to combine into something far more powerful. Mc Donalds worked out that if you applied specialist logistics and workflow you built a more reliable burger. Boeing worked out that you align specialist to a goal with the right conditions and you can deliver a defining product of the era.

I have seen versions of this across my career at Unique Digital, MediaCom, Canton, Goodway and now TAU Marketing Solutions . Industry legends such as Sarah Treliving , Kirsti Wenn 🌻 , Stefan Bardega, Paul Frampton-Calero ⚡️ and James Briscoe invested time and energy in strengthening the collective around them. They brought together amazing people with skills across different areas of marketing and showed them what delivering together and great looks like. I was proud to play my part in what I believe to be some of the best marketing teams we have seen delivering pioneering work.

You see that same trait in almost all of the most successful businesses, as an onlooker I have seen it in companies I admire. MIQ, Criteo, Efficient Frontier would be just three examples of companies who when at their best delivered at multiples of the skills of the (very good) individuals. Their strongest people contributed far more than their individual output because they improve the intelligence, confidence and capability of everyone around them. The company becomes more than the sum of the people inside it.

Boeing later demonstrated what happens when that collective intelligence breaks. For the 787 Dreamliner, it outsourced around 70 per cent of the design, engineering and manufacture of major modules to more than 50 strategic partners. On paper, the idea was compelling: specialists would build complete sections, Boeing would integrate them, and the aircraft would arrive faster with less capital tied up at the centre. Instead, the programme ran years late and billions over budget. Boeing had an organisational structure, clearly divided modules and detailed interface specifications, but what did not travel was everything nobody had written down. Practical judgement, manufacturing experience, the reasons behind previous decisions and the instinct to recognise a problem across several interconnected systems remained fragmented. The same company that had coordinated 50,000 people around a shared picture had divided the work among 50 partners who each held a specification but not the picture. The lesson is not that specialism or outsourcing is bad. It is that specialism without shared context destroys value.

Companies have been trying to solve this problem since corporate intranets arrived in the 1990s. We created wikis, SharePoint sites, knowledge bases, lessons-learned databases and communities of practice. Most gradually became graveyards because the incentives behind them were fundamentally broken.

Writing something down cost the author time immediately, while the benefit went to an unknown colleague at some point in the future. People therefore documented too little, and much of what they did document quickly became stale. The official knowledge base existed, but the useful knowledge continued to live inside people’s heads. Instead, knowledge travelled through tea and coffee. You found the person who knew, made them a coffee, extracted the nugget and walked away carrying it in your memory. Perhaps you passed it on, perhaps you forgot half of it, but either way the knowledge rarely became a durable part of the company. These days it's so much harder to find that person and make them a coffee but you can record a zoom/teams call.

In our company, we combine meeting transcripts, shared context files and agents that can carry knowledge from one person and one session to another. My team must be sick in the face of me talking about "compounding context" but it's working. As we have gotten better at the process and tech stack to do this the speed of our development from product design to servicing has beens staggering. Even better we are now able to use our tools and experience to help our clients do the same.

You could call it documentation but actually it's more of a shift than that. Its a almost fanatical need to record each conversation. It's passing data to colleagues in a way thats AI efficient. It's having access to every individuals workspace and context and ensuring the machine knows how to read it. Because if the machine can read it and you can guide it, the work is done for you to a higher level than anyone could do on their own. The old coffee process still works: find the person who knows and capture the context. The difference is that the nugget no longer has to leave the room inside somebody’s memory, because it can become available to the next person, the next team and the next agent.

Just as mportantly, the system can reveal what the organisation does not know. When somebody asks a question, the answer may be available in seconds, but when it is not, that failure identifies a gap in the company’s shared understanding. The missing context can then be captured once and made useful to everybody. Most organisations repeatedly pay to rediscover things they already know. Worse, they often fail to discover the important things they do not know until those gaps cause mistakes, delays or missed opportunities. AI gives companies a way to identify, capture and close those gaps continuously.

This process is for everyone, from start-ups to enterprises. Of course startups will find it easier as they can write their practices and policies with this in mind. Moving a battleship will take longer. Yet at least with these principles the battleship can know where its going, what the end state looks like and when it gets there, one team or department at a time but to a known template it can bring all its talent and guns to bear upon its goal. This battle between the nimble startup and the slower moving but hugely powerful behemoth is going to define the era. Some giants will get stuck and sink, some will become more powerful than ever.

Crucially It does not need to begin with a grand transformation programme. It starts with one team, one department or one important workflow where knowledge is valuable but fragmented. Capture the context, make it usable, discover what is missing, improve it and then expand.

You also need to build in when how and what to cut. Too much bad context gums up the system, while outdated or misleading information can be more dangerous than no answer at all. A near-miss can look relevant enough to send both a person and an agent confidently in the wrong direction. Teams will get this wrong particularly to begin with but it's a muscle you build over time. Once you learn how to keep the cream it all gets fun from there, trust me.

Back to Boeing. The 747 was built by 50,000 people who could not all fit in one room but somehow held the same picture. Boeing tried again with The 787, built not internally but by 50 partners who each had a specification but lacked enough of the whole picture. The result was one of the costliest projects in human history. The company that had learnt to bring together the team and bottle the talent lost it in a outsourcing drive. The lesson isn't to never outsource but to focus on how you bring talent together.

This is the opportunity of the age. If we can all be more like Boeing with he 747 more often. Enriched by more intelligence on demand we can make every company, every department capable of greatness. Firmly led by humanity and talented individuals. Even better, everyone has their own talents, for too long we have tried to flatten people to fit into a structure, if we get this right everyone's unique differences can come together and be multiplied. Everyone's value can be enhanced! This feels like a mission to me!