At any given moment, you have the entire history of the world at your fingertips. Thousands of years of collective human knowledge are folded neatly into the smartphone in your pocket thanks to its connection to the internet, informing your ideas, decisions and actions.
The internet is just one example of what I call the “collective brain”: the societies, networks and platforms which enable us to transmit information and learn. Whilst 5G might be a relatively recent development, the collective brain has existed for as long as humanity has roamed the earth. Despite this fact, when we think about success and innovation, we think of brilliant individuals making extraordinary leaps and decisions that seemingly no one else could.
A hundred years ago, it was Henry Ford and the Model T. Twenty years ago, it was Bill Gates and Microsoft. Today, the media obsesses over the thoughts and fall-outs of AI visionaries like Altman and Amodei.
This is because we are, like moths, drawn to the brightest flames: intent on seeking out what we perceive as the most successful people to emulate. But this idea of success is at best a partial truth. We have a cultural fixation with individual genius, and it risks misguiding leaders about where they can truly add value for their businesses and teams.
Consider calculus. Many believe Newton was the lone genius who devised this branch of mathematics all on his own. Fewer know that German mathematician Leibniz first published a method for it in 1684. It’s now widely accepted that both discovered calculus separately, having neither met nor communicated, living in different places over 300 miles apart.
Evolution tells the same story. Alfred Russel Wallace independently formulated a theory of evolution by natural selection in 1858, a year before Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published in 1859. Even if Darwin had never been born, we would have discovered evolution through Wallace.
These examples aren’t anomalies. History refutes the myth of the individual genius because innovations are collaborative and cultural. Calculus builds upon the principles of standard algebra, which itself was iterated upon over thousands of years, from as far back as ancient Babylon.
Individual intelligence plays a part in progress, but if it hadn’t been Darwin or Wallace, someone else would have arrived at natural selection. The AI Boom isn’t intrinsically Altman or Amodei: there could have been any number of AI visionaries that would have seen the same success had they got there first.
Innovations do not spontaneously emerge from the minds of exceptional individuals. Our most culturally significant movers and shakers are only ever a single neuron pulling from and contributing to the collective brain. Progress doesn’t happen in a vacuum – it is the product of collaboration between individuals and of a cultural inheritance passed down through generations.
This has profound implications for how leaders should think about their roles.
How to be a network architect
If you’re looking towards one person for all of your best ideas, you’re misunderstanding where breakthroughs come from. Your most impactful role as a leader is to become a network architect, connecting the right people with the right skills to the right information.
To start harnessing the power of the collective brain in your workplace, you need to facilitate a culture which is genuinely collaborative.
Start with a simple audit of your organization’s knowledge, mapping each team’s skills, knowledge, and networks. Where are the gaps? Who holds knowledge that could be beneficial elsewhere? Organizations are often underconnected; they have a wealth of talent siloed away from teams where it could help. Your job is to wire them together with feedback loops that lead to innovation.
Rotating people across teams can expose them to new problems, enabling a cross-pollination of good ideas that siloed structures stifle. Hosting monthly problem-sharing clinics, where teams bring along tricky live problems, can surface solutions that groupthink suppresses.
Ideas compound when they can flow across networks and move between teams, creating fertile ground for organic innovation.
Technology as a window into the collective brain
Today’s LLMs – like Claude and ChatGPT – are the most powerful tools ever built for accessing the stored knowledge in the collective brain because they’ve been trained on every book and webpage that we’ve ever written. Because of this, generative AI can surface connections that no one person could hold alone in their head.
Similarly, synthetic audiences tools like Electric Twin give us a way to pull from distinct parts of the collective brain, pooling behavioral data, cultural data, and an organization’s first-party data to interrogate what specific segments of the population think without even needing to ask them.
When used intelligently, these technologies become a force multiplier for your collective intelligence, expanding the range of different ideas you can consider without slowing you down.
Some argue that LLMs are fundamentally limited. Trained on existing data, they can only recombine ideas, not create genuinely new ones. This argument isn’t wrong, but fundamentally misunderstands that humans too are doing the same thing – recombining ideas is precisely what creates genuinely new ones.
Understanding the collective brain makes it apparent how to use AI to supercharge it. Use AI to find holes in your product roadmap. Use it to confront decisions with other perspectives to take you out of tunnel vision. Use synthetic audiences to stress-test a product decision against a wider range of perspectives than your team can offer. But let the humans make the judgement call.
Harnessing the collective brain gives you access to a wider range of information to help you and your team make more informed decisions.
The leaders who get this right won’t necessarily be the next Darwin or Newton or Amodei. But that isn’t the point. Instead, they’ll be the ones driving collaborative cultures, allowing ideas to flow and their organizations to succeed as a collective. Connecting the right people with the right information in a collaborative culture ensures fertile ground for teams to innovate within their organizations. So stop chasing flames, and tend the fire instead.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
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