Google studied 180 teams - IQ didn't matter

I was trying to figure out a very ambitious project involving some famous individuals and activists. One strategy draft, then a second, it just felt overwhelming and I felt stuck. I tried to get the rest of the organization I was working with on board, but people resisted.

So I did what I do best — I found time to think and reflect. And I caught myself in my own certainty because I was working alone. I needed to involve more people — not just to spread ownership, but to get better ideas.

First, I had several 1-on-1s to recruit a few people from the organization and bring a small team into the process. Then we shared a first draft with 100+ people from the organization for feedback. Then we organized a townhall for anyone who wanted to come and brainstorm. Not only did the resistance disappear as people got involved, but the ideas different people brought to solve our biggest barriers felt so obvious once they shared them — yet I had been completely blind to them.

The ambitious, unlikely project became reality. Not because of my brilliance or anyone else's — but because we tapped into something much more powerful: collective intelligence. As we continue our series on leading in uncertain times, let's talk about how to shift from the "smartest person in the room" mindset to a much more powerful question: how do I make the room smarter? 👇

We've been raised on a mythology of individual brilliance. The visionary CEO. The decisive general. The genius who sees what nobody else can. It's a comforting story — but research keeps dismantling it.

In 2012, Google launched Project Aristotle, analyzing over 180 teams across 250 variables. Their hypothesis: assemble the smartest people and the team will perform. The results shocked them. Who was on the team barely mattered. What predicted success was how people interacted — did everyone get equal time to speak, were members sensitive to each other's cues, and did people feel safe to take risks and admit mistakes? Google expected a formula for assembling genius. Instead, they found that collective intelligence has almost nothing to do with individual intelligence.

Researcher Anita Woolley at Carnegie Mellon confirmed this at scale. Groups have a measurable "c factor" — a collective intelligence — that predicts performance across a wide range of tasks. It's not correlated with the average IQ of group members. What predicts it? Social sensitivity, equal turn-taking, and diversity of perspective. And when one person dominates the conversation — even the most knowledgeable — the team's collective intelligence drops. The smartest voice in the room, left unchecked, literally makes the room dumber.

Here's why this matters so much in uncertainty. Rigid top-down hierarchies are slow at sensing reality. Information gets filtered as it moves upward — sometimes to be polite, sometimes to avoid blame, sometimes to protect power. By the time it reaches the leadership, it's been sanitized, smoothed, and stripped of the signals that matter most.

In a crisis, the people at the top often have the least accurate picture of reality. The signals that matter — emerging problems, shifting conditions, early warnings — hit the edges first: frontline staff, customers, junior colleagues, the people closest to where reality actually unfolds.

This is why collective intelligence isn't just nice to have — it's a survival mechanism. People who rely only on their own judgment are working with filtered, delayed, incomplete information. People who activate the intelligence of the entire network are working with reality.

This demands a fundamental shift in what leadership means. The old model is command and control — the leader sees, decides, directs. The new model is connect, listen, develop, and activate.

Connect means building relationships across the system, not just up and down the hierarchy. The leader who only talks to their direct reports is missing 90% of the signal.

Listen means creating the conditions where people actually tell you the truth — not what they think you want to hear. Without safety, you get silence. And silence in a crisis isn't peace — it's blindness.

Develop means investing in others' capacity to lead, regardless of title. Every person who can exercise judgment and make good decisions under pressure is a node of intelligence in your network. The more nodes, the smarter the system.

Activate means distributing leadership across the system. Not delegating tasks — distributing authority and power. Letting the person closest to the problem make the call, because they have the freshest data. In uncertainty, control is an illusion. The only real advantage is speed of sensing and responding — and that requires many eyes, many ears, and many minds.

1. Equalize the airtime. Teams where conversation is dominated by one or two voices underperform. In your next meeting, track who's speaking. Use rounds where everyone speaks. Ask the quietest person first. The intelligence is in the room — it just needs space to surface.

2. Seek signal from the edges. Make it a habit to talk to people two or three levels away from you. Frontline staff, new hires, interns, external partners. Ask: "What are you seeing that I'm probably not?" Then actually listen.

3. Reward the messenger. In most organizations, bringing bad news is punished. In collectively intelligent organizations, it's rewarded. If someone tells you something uncomfortable, thank them publicly. You're training the system to keep telling you the truth.

4. Distribute the decisions. Identify decisions that don't need to come through you. Push them to the people closest to the information. They'll learn faster than any approval chain ever could — and you've just multiplied your organization's decision-making capacity.

If you're leading a team: Two moves this week. First, when your team is about to lock in a decision, ask: "What's the strongest argument against what we're about to decide?" If nobody can answer, you don't have agreement — you have conformity. Second, have one conversation with someone two or three levels away from you and ask: "What are you seeing that leadership probably isn't?" Whatever they tell you is worth more than your last strategy meeting.

If you are not leading a team: You don't need a title to make a room smarter. In your next meeting, when you sense something is being left unsaid, name it: "I think there's a concern here we haven't surfaced yet." That single act — voicing what others won't — is one of the highest-value leadership moves that exists. It requires zero authority and 100% courage.

There's a kind of leader who walks into every room believing their job is to have the answer. And there's a kind of leader who walks in believing their job is to find it — knowing it's probably distributed across the people already sitting at the table.

The first leader is limited by one brain. The second is powered by every brain in the room.

Your job was never to know everything. Your job is to build a room smart enough to figure it out together.

Until next time, keep evolving ✊

PS: I'm opening a few free coaching sessions this month for managers and team leads navigating uncertainty. If you lead others and want to improve, reply "I'm in" to schedule a time.

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