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.

Collective IQ is a measure of how effectively a group, organization, community, network, nation, or world can address important challenges -- whether finding a cure for cancer, bringing out a successful new product or service, or turning around a disadvantaged community.

Engelbart was fundamentally motivated by a vision of augmenting human intellect to tackle complex societal problems. He saw digital tools not as ends in themselves, but as part of a broader system to improve how people think, collaborate, and solve problems together.

The Bootstrap Institute

Computing Pioneer

Engelbart's Core Question

Douglas Engelbart

Douglas Engelbart

Early on, Doug Engelbart recognized that what makes us capable, beyond the basic human abilities we were born, is a whole infrastructure of capabilities, with higher level capabilities depending on the execution of lower level capabilities. For example, the ability to solve a problem collaboratively depends on our ability to communicate with language, to use acceptable conventions and methodologies for working together, to identify opportunities, plan, implement, write, discuss, etc.

The quality, breadth and depth of a DKR contributes significantly to increasing or lowering our Collective IQ.

The DKR is the emerging collective record of all this activity captured on the fly -- the emerging collective vision, know-how, the group brain, memory, where the dots are connected and the right hand knows what the left hand is doing.

Doug developed the shorthand CoDIAK for the concurrent development, integration, and application of knowledge to characterize the basic knowledge processes shown in the purple boxes at right.

The key determining factor of any group's Collective IQ is how effectively it can develop, integrate, and apply all this iterating knowledge from the swirl of disparate concurrent contributions.

A dynamic knowledge repository is a living, breathing, rapidly evolving repository of all the stuff accumulating moment to moment throughout the life of a project or pursuit. This would include successive drafts and commentary leading up to more polished versions of a given document, brainstorming and conceptual design notes, design rationale, work lists, contact info, all the email and meeting notes, research intelligence collected and commented on, emerging issues, timelines, etc.

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.

bootstrapping

At its core, bootstrap marketing is about doing more with less, using cost-effective methods to reach a target audience and drive growth. This approach is not just a reaction to resource constraints but a strategic choice that prioritizes creativity, innovation, and a deep understanding of the market.

Bootstrap as a metaphor, meaning to better oneself by one's own unaided efforts, was in use in 1922.[4] This metaphor spawned additional metaphors for a series of self-sustaining processes that proceed without external help.