THE COLLECTIVE BRAIN

It usually starts the same way. A whiteboard. Some sticky notes. A half-dead marker. A room full of people pretending to know what the meeting is about. Coffee is involved, obviously. And someone nervously says, “So… what are we trying to solve again?”

And then something shifts.

Someone speaks up. Then someone else. Ideas start bouncing around. Not all of them are good, but some hit differently. There’s laughter. There’s disagreement. Someone draws a box around a stick figure and calls it a “concept.” Suddenly, the room feels different.

That’s not chaos. That’s thinking.

But not the usual kind. Not the kind that lives inside one person’s head, chewing on problems in isolation. This is something else entirely. Something more powerful. It’s what I like to call the collective brain. A state of creative fusion where a group of people starts acting like one big, messy, brilliant mind.

This is what workshops are actually about.

Design sprints, innovation labs, strategy sessions, whatever you call them, they’re not just meetings with post-its. They’re structured environments for emergent intelligence. They create space for something our brains are really good at but rarely get to do at scale: connect ideas, quickly, across multiple domains of thought.

Think of it like neurons firing in a brain. In isolation, a neuron can’t do much. It sends a signal, maybe. But it’s only when it connects with others, when it builds synapses, that real thinking happens. When people start talking, reacting, remixing ideas? That’s social synapsing. That’s the real neural network.

If you’ve ever walked out of a workshop with your brain buzzing, your coffee cold, and the feeling that something genuinely new was created… congrats, you just experienced it. You’ve tapped into a shared cognitive engine.

And it’s fast. Way faster than any one of us alone.

There’s this idea in cognitive science called “distributed cognition.” Basically, it says that thinking isn’t something that only happens inside our heads. It happens in our tools, our environments, our relationships. Writing on a whiteboard? That’s thinking. Moving a sticky note? Thinking. Hearing someone misinterpret your idea and then realize their version is actually better? Definitely thinking.

That’s why workshops work. They’re not about alignment in the corporate-speak sense. They’re about wiring people together so thought can travel.

I’ve seen it happen in ways that still surprise me. People who barely talk in normal meetings suddenly become central nodes in the idea network. That quiet developer in the corner? He connects two ideas with one comment and boom, the whole direction changes. The senior stakeholder who always dominates the Zoom calls? They finally pause and say, “Wait, that might actually work.” It’s electric.

And when the format is right, timeboxed, visual, inclusive, it’s like flipping a switch. The group doesn’t just share ideas. It builds on them. It runs tiny simulations in real-time. It sees dead ends before anyone commits code. It finds shortcuts no one person would have noticed alone.

You could think of it as a kind of social RAM. When a team gets into a flow state during a sprint, it’s like you’ve pooled everyone’s working memory together. The team holds a problem, context, constraints, and wild ideas all in one space. And the throughput? Way higher than any slide deck could ever capture.

But here’s the catch. It doesn’t happen by accident.

Just like a brain needs glucose and oxygen and sleep to work well, the collective brain needs structure. It needs rules, but loose ones. It needs safety, but not comfort. It needs a facilitator who doesn’t dominate, but steers. Someone who knows when to poke and when to back off. Someone who can smell groupthink and toss a metaphorical wrench in the gears just to see what happens.

I remember one sprint where the problem was so tangled we almost gave up on day two. We’d been mapping out flows for hours. Nothing felt right. People were tired. Grumpy. Someone even said, “Maybe we just don’t solve this.”

And then someone made a dumb joke about it being like The Matrix. That we were stuck in the simulation. And someone else said, “Wait, what if we just unplug that part?” It was nonsense. But it led to a real insight. We reframed the entire solution from that point forward. And we made the deadline.

It wasn’t brilliance. It was bandwidth. More brains, connected in the right way, move faster than one brain working overtime.

The closest analogy I can think of is Wikipedia. Not the content, but the editing model. Individual contributors can be biased, wrong, or incomplete. But the system, over time, with enough people cross-linking and correcting, tends toward clarity. It’s not perfect, but it’s robust. That’s what a good workshop is. Real-time, high-bandwidth, low-latency Wikipedia for ideas.

The funny part? We don’t do it nearly enough.

Most teams spend too much time in status meetings and too little time in thinking mode. Real-time, high-bandwidth thinking. Not the asynchronous kind where you reply to a document in comments at 10pm with, “Looks good.” I mean the in the room kind. The face-to-face (or face-to-Zoom) kind where ideas are shared, stretched, flipped, and sometimes thrown out entirely. That’s where progress lives.

And here’s the twist: the more diverse the minds, the better the brain.

You want engineers and designers and product managers and legal and sales and yes, even Barry from compliance. Because cognitive diversity doesn’t just feel good. It works. It’s literally the biological equivalent of having more types of neurons firing together. More perspectives means more unexpected synapses. And that leads to better decisions, faster.

Design sprints get this. That’s why they timebox the chaos. They force fast thinking but also space for slow reflection. You diverge. You converge. You sketch. You vote. You test. It’s not perfect, but it’s calibrated to keep the collective brain from overheating or freezing up. And if you’ve ever done it right, you know the feeling. Exhausted but alive.

There’s a kind of deep trust that gets built too. When people solve something together under pressure, when they see the thinking evolve live on the wall, it changes how they work later. Communication gets tighter. Feedback gets faster. Meetings get shorter. Because now the network is primed. The synapses are there.

I’m not saying every problem needs a week-long sprint. That would be like trying to microwave everything because you like popcorn. But for the complex stuff? The messy, interdependent, can’t-Google-this type problems? There’s nothing better.

Sometimes people ask me why I care so much about workshops. Why I keep running them, designing them, tweaking them. And honestly? It’s because they remind me what thinking together feels like. Not just talking. Not just agreeing. But real, collective cognition. The kind that makes your brain fizz for hours after.

So next time you’re stuck, or siloed, or spinning your wheels in another 45-minute status check-in, try something different. Get the right people in a room. Give them a marker. Give them a weird prompt. Create just enough structure to keep the energy from leaking out.

And then? Let the collective brain take over.

Because in the end, ideas aren’t born in silence. They’re sparked in collision. And the best kind of thinking?

Is shared.