Your Team is a Mind
Your team is a mind. This is a fundamental idea to this blog and my work bringing cognitive science into the team space to create intelligent teams. Today I want to take some time to explore minds, swarm minds, and team minds. To do that, we’re going to take a journey back through time to 17th Century France to understand where your concept of mind first came from, and why it is probably leading you astray. But first…
If you have one, take a look at your arm. Go on, humour me.
You’re probably gazing at the limb that comes out of your shoulder and has a hand at the end of it. Easy.
Now take a look at your mind. Where is it?
Maybe you scrunched up your eyes and tried to look inside your brain. Or you got all indignant because your mind is the thing you use to do the looking, in which case you can’t look at your mind any more than your left foot can stand on itself, or a hand can pick itself up.
Hopefully you experienced some kind of weirdness and a realisation that this mind thing that is so integral to who we are is not easy to point to, and if you think too much about it it’s not particularly intuitive where or what it is. Even if you experienced some confusion or frustration, I’m going to make a guess that when you tried to locate your mind you not only tried to find it inside your body, but in your head. You probably identified that your mind is something to do with your thoughts - privately talking to you throughout the day.
René Descartes was a French philosopher and mathematician who was interested in this question in the 17th Century. He came to a conclusion in his sixth Meditation:
“There is a great difference between the mind and the body, inasmuch as the body is by its very nature always divisible, while the mind is utterly indivisible”
In other words Descartes tried to understand the world by looking at it and he realised that the physical world could be divided up into parts. The arm is split into the upper and lower arm and hand. The hand into palm and 5 fingers. Fingers into individual phalanges and so on. Not just his body, but a table can be ‘divided’ into legs and the top, and each leg into splinters of wood that can be divided down ad infinitum.
However when he tried to locate and examine his mind, he found that his mind could not be divided down. He encountered what he experienced as one centralised thinker that he could not divide further. He therefore concluded that the mind and the body are made of different kinds of materials. The body and the world were made of ‘res extensa’ - extended stuff, whereas the mind was made of ‘res cognitions’ - thinking stuff. He believed that the two met mysteriously in the pineal gland, a real structure which sits in the dead centre of the brain.
Not only were the mind and body two different things according to Descartes, but the mind was more trustworthy than the body. Whereas Descartes was able to imagine a mind floating without a body, he wasn’t able to imagine a body without mind being present. Whereas the body and its senses can be wrong, the thinking mind’s logic cannot be deceived unless fed faulty information from the senses. Mind and body are separate, and the mind is more important than the body. The mind is ‘you’, and the body is something that you operate. ‘I think, therefore I am’ is his famous articulation.
This ‘Cartesian Duality’ (Cartesian from the name Descartes) went on to inform the dominant model of mind in Western philosophy.
You’d be entitled to find Descartes’ theory problematic. What is this ‘res cogitans’ which is different from all the other matter we are familiar with? That feels rather fanciful, supernatural and non-scientific. The body and the mind clearly affect one another, but if they are made of different things how does physical sensory data turn into thoughts, and how do thoughts made up of res cogitans lead to very physical actions in the body and world? In trying to define the nature of mind, Descartes invented the mind-body problem.
The thing is that even if you have these questions - when you instinctively think of what a mind is, you are probably thinking of something approximating Descartes’ definition of mind. If you tried to find your mind in your head, or if you identified it largely with your brain, or if you think of your mind as that small voice that speaks to us in the silence you are using a concept of mind rooted in Cartesian dualism, whether you mean to or not.
The vestiges of Cartesian Dualism are littered so freely through Western thought that it’s hard to avoid them. The idea of ‘mental health’ being separate from physical health relies on this dualism. If you do something stupid and blame it instinctively on your brain (and not your hormones, neurons, senses and muscles), you’re invoking Descartes. If you believe that the real you resides in your head in some way, or in your thoughts, or you think it’s conceivable to transplant your personality into another person’s body, that’s a feat of mental gymnastics that leaps off of a Cartesian platform.
It’s important to realise this, because if we don’t recognise the way that Cartesian Dualism runs deeply through our intellectual veins, we are unconsciously limiting how we can understand mind, cognition and thought. If like me you’re in the business of solving problems for customers or users, having a limited understanding of mind will lead to limited applications of problem solving.
You may have struggled with the first sentence of this article - that your team is a mind - precisely because of how Cartesian your view of mind really is. There’s no real room in Descartes’ model for a mind to exist outside of one person’s brain, let alone in their body, or between many bodies.
So what’s an alternative?
The late Marvin Minsky - an early and influential artificial intelligence researcher - argued in his book Society of Mind that mind is actually divisible into many simple ‘agents’, each of which is trying to do something straightforward and easy to explain.
He writes:
‘Intelligence is not the product of any singular mechanism but comes from the managed interaction of a diverse variety of resourceful agents.’
In other words, our minds are made of coalitions of small, easy to understand mechanisms cooperating and conflicting. These agents make up a ‘society’ which constitutes your mind. You could stretch this a little and argue that each neutron or even each cell in our body is its own kind of agent, trying mostly to fight for its own survival, using whatever means are at its disposal. Occasionally these cells will die to keep the organism healthy, like soldiers might put their lives on the line going out to war, or like the astronauts in the film Armageddon who sacrifice their lives to save the earth from the impact of an incoming celestial body.
Mind is the property that emerges from all these different physical and theoretical agents interacting with each other. By way of analogy, if you ever go to ‘The Symphony’ - you are experiencing something that emerges out of interactions between the orchestra, audience, score and venue. A coalition of lots of agents - violinist, horn players, cellists, percussionists, audience members and stewards - make up a transient society every scheduled evening which is experienced as ‘The Symphony’.
So too each human being is a transient coalition of interacting cells, biochemicals, neuronal impulses, environmental constraints, bodily sensory experiences and social interactions. Out of these a mind emerges. Conscious thought and the processes that take place in the brain are a vital part of human cognition certainly, but are by no means the whole picture of mind.
Consider another biological system; a beehive. Beehives as a totality can solve problems that individual bees cannot. A hive can find an optimal place that is safe and close to food sources where all the bees can gather food for each other, protect the queen and further their own survival. Go and look up the waggle dance. This is when a drone bee will go and search for a new potential location for the hive, and upon finding a good one returns to the and hive waggles its body in the direction of the new hive. The more certain it is that the new location is a good one, the more ferocious the waggle. Between a number of drone bees all waggle dancing with their shared knowledge the hive finds a suitable new location.
There is a term for this kind of mind - swarm cognition. One can take the Society of Mind idea to its natural conclusions and argue that all human cognition is a kind of swarm cognition, just at the level of a single body system.
So if your mind is a team, it’s not too wild to imagine that your team is a mind. Just as the beehive has conventions which allow all the bees to share what they know and collaborate to create and maintain the hive, your team has the skills, knowledge and perspectives it needs to solve the problems they are being paid to solve. The knowledge skills and perspectives are distributed across and between the team members like the players in an orchestra, and the job of the leaders - both formal and informal - is to help create the conventions, culture and collaborations that enable swarm cognition.
So where is your mind? It’s in your head, and your body, and extends into your fellow humans, both past and present. Not only this but you are contributing to minds that exist through and beyond you in this beautiful entangled waggly dance of life that we all get to briefly enjoy. Waggle on my friends, waggle on.