Regardless of the end goals, Collective IQ comes down to how quickly and intelligently the group can iteratively assess a situation, identify needs and opportunities, realize desired outcomes, and incorporate lessons learned, while continuously adapting to changing conditions until the goals are met. Whereas an individual's IQ is based largely on the brain one is born with, a group's IQ is based largely on how the individuals engage:   (1) in the group process for 'concurrently developing, integrating, and applying its knowledge' toward its mission, for which Doug affectionately coined the term CoDIAK,   (2) in the shared memory of swirling knowledge gained, captured, retained, and accessed within a shared 'dynamic knowledge repository', or DKR.

whoever is working on developing and/or deploying new/improved tools and practices for boosting Collective IQ could use what they build to boost their own effectiveness – it's the expectation that anyone working on an important aspect of boosting Collective IQ will seriously push the envelope through their own experimentatal usage of their work product(s); it's providers using what they provide to become faster, smarter, more effective providers.

If we can see how some of the basic assumptions that we bring to the development of computing technologies lead us away from improvement in our ability to solve problems collectively, we can reexamine those assumptions and chart a different course.

The ARPA community was about, "Hey, we're in deep trouble and we're getting in deeper trouble. We need to get more enlightened and we need to do what Doug Engelbart called... we need to not just augment human beings, augment human intellect, but we have to augment the collective IQ of groups." Because most important things are done by groups of people. And so we have to think about what it means to have a group that's smarter than any member rather than a group that is less than the stupidest members.