The Cloud and the human condition

How important is organisational culture and collaboratively building knowledge at work? People do go on about it a lot. But does it mean anything ? Or do individuals just need to get their noses to the grindstone and actually do some work?

This article is interesting in many ways. A particularly fascinating section discusses individual intelligence. Interesting fact: the human brain may have been shrinking over the past 500,000 years.

Joseph Heinrich 'The Secret of Our Success' (2016) says:

“In primates, the strongest predictor of cognitive abilities across species is brain size. Consequently, it is not implausible that we are dumber than the bigger-brained Neanderthals … Neanderthals may have needed those individually larger brains to compensate for their smaller collective brains.”

That may be difficult to accept – that you are thicker than a Neanderthal roaming the Northern forests 50,000 years ago – but it is worth focusing your limited mental processing power on the quote's last sentence.

Large brains are energy hungry. Basically, human success may be down to a biological and social form of cloud computing. There is a very clear evolutionary benefit from ditching the heavy laptop and power brick and opting for a lighter model with access to the 'cloud'... or culture, as we call it.

One of humanity's defining capabilities may be the ability to develop an extraordinarily powerful collective brain. Our Dunbar Constant (the cognitive limit to the number of people we can maintain social relationships with – which is being expanded by social media) is about 150 compared to about 50 among the other great apes. We may have less individual brain power than Neanderthals, but our ability to develop this collective knowledge may have allowed us to outstrip our erstwhile rivals.

I attended an excellent Common Purpose course last week that was all about understanding our own cultures (our "core and flex"), studying those we are interacting with, and working out how to build creative relationships. A few thoughts and questions relating to the article and, to some extent, to that training:

• Building cultures that support collaborative – as opposed to individualistic – action and learning may actually be quite fundamental to 'who we are' as humans.
• How does modern communications technology interact with this vitally important cultural cloud? Social media etc. can increase our Dunbar Constant (see above) and transform our ability to collaborate. But does email culture, the transfer of responsibility in the cc. and bcc. list, build healthy collaboration in organisations, for example? Panning out, is some of this technology encouraging a tribalism that seriously challenges our ability to collaborate and form useful cultures at the societal level?
• Have societies and organisations that have nurtured effective collaborative cultures done better than those that haven't in the past? Will those societies and organisations that manage the interaction of modern technology with their cultures and ways of collaborating do better in the 2020s, just like Homo Sapiens outperformed those big-brained, individualistic Neanderthals?