Thousands of people can write a song together?

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Ever ask a friend, “Hey, what do you think of this idea?” and then adjust your idea based on your friend’s response? Of course you have. This taps into a basic aspect of our brain that enables us to learn. It’s the “a-ha!” moment. 

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When we work alone, all we have is our own mind. But when we share our ideas and see those of others, the different perspectives trigger a-ha! moments. This is why two heads can in fact be better than one. And why more can be better still. 

 

But working together can be a challenge because we favor our own ideas. In fact, many of you will start this exercise with song lyrics already in mind. So if we all just shared, all we’d do is argue.

 

That’s where Synanim comes in. It guides groups by starting at the core of the question, the values with which we build our perspectives. Rather than aiming to corral our ideas, Synanim guides us to reconstruct ideas starting from scratch. This is true collective intelligence. And it does this with extreme efficiency, enabling groups of any size to build new ideas together. 

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Can you imagine how long it would normally take to get 46,656 people to agree on something? Eeek! But Synanim will get us there in just six one-hour sessions.

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How?

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Participants are anonymously assigned to groups of six. They proceed through a number of writing steps quickly answering questions according to instructions (such as “keywords only”) limited by a timer and a character count.

 

Between the writing steps, participants view the entries from their group and select the entry they feel best reflects the group overall. Synanim identifies group leaders based on how many points they earn from providing popular entries and from identifying the entries the group most likes. These leaders are invited to the next level, as shown.