It’s Monday morning. The house is quiet in that brief window before the day fully begins. I’ve done the things that usually settle me—meditation, yoga, coffee while the light slowly comes up outside the window. The kids are organized and into their day. The calendar isn’t overwhelming.

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And yet something feels unsettled.

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Not panic exactly. More like a low hum beneath the surface. Fragments from the weekend drift through my mind. A radio segment on geopolitical tensions. A conversation with a friend about long histories of harm finally being spoken aloud. Another headline flares into public attention that seems utterly important and game changing but somewhere I know that it will then sometime soon disappear again just as quickly.

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And beneath it all is a growing sense that many of us are trying to orient ourselves inside something larger than any single event. A kind of collective unease. A disorientation. You can feel it in conversations lately—around dinner tables, in workplaces, in communities, in the endless stream of commentary online. Something happens somewhere in the world and almost immediately the familiar pattern begins.

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Someone didn’t listen.
Someone made the wrong call.
Someone failed.
Disastrous consequences revealed.
Or the potential of them looms

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The search for someone to blame spins up quickly. Politicians. Media. Corporations. Social media. Institutions. Each explanation feels compelling for a moment, and yet none of them seem to fully capture what we’re experiencing. Because underneath the finger-pointing there is a deeper question quietly waiting.

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What if many of the breakdowns we are witnessing are not primarily individual failures? OR the fault of one aspect of what is happening?
What if they are all interconnected? Systemic?
What if we are not disconnected from them but a part of them? You know -  the three fingers pointed back at us as we pointed at the cause.
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When We Lose the Ability to Hear One Another
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Research across organizational behavior, psychology, and group dynamics suggests something both troubling and hopeful. Groups often already hold the knowledge they need to make wiser decisions. The difference between wise and disastrous outcomes often depends on whether people stay connected enough to be able to share some deeper truth —so that what someone knows, senses, or questions can actually shape the direction the group takes.
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In other words, the real question is not simply who made the mistake. It is whether the relationships and patterns of interaction allow people to hear one another clearly enough for insight to influence action. This is where the distinction between collective wisdom and collective folly becomes important. Collective wisdom emerges when people come together around a shared purpose and remain open to the diversity of perspectives, experiences, and ways of knowing that each person brings. It grows from a recognition that we are fundamentally interdependent and that understanding deepens when we listen across differences.

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Collective folly pulls in the opposite direction. It shows up when connection weakens—when people cling tightly to what they already believe, when disagreement becomes a threat rather than a source of learning, or when voices quietly disappear from the conversation. When this happens, groups can become less intelligent together than the individuals within them. Not because people lack insight. But because the connections needed for that insight to circulate have frayed.
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The Seduction of Simple Explanations
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When things feel unstable, we naturally look for clear causes. This weekend I was listening to Jonathan Haidt speak about social media and The Anxious Generation. At the same time, California is launching a court case against major social media companies, arguing that they are responsible for the negative impacts many young people are experiencing today. The research supporting these concerns is compelling. Social media is clearly part of the picture. But focusing on it alone risks missing something deeper.

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Long before algorithms, human groups struggled with similar dynamics. Hierarchies that make it hard to question authority. Time pressure that rushes conversations before understanding has formed. Cultural norms that reward confidence more than curiosity. Over time, patterns like these weaken the quality of connection between people. Social media may amplify the signal—but the deeper challenge lies in how we relate to one another in the first place, and what it reveals when those connections begin to break down at scale.
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To understand why this matters, it helps to look at how wisdom emerges in living systems.
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Lessons from Living Systems
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Nature offers a useful perspective.
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A forest appears, at first glance, to be a collection of individual trees. But ecologists now understand that forests function as deeply interconnected networks. Trees communicate through underground fungal systems, exchange nutrients, and respond collectively to stress. Resilience in these ecosystems does not come from uniformity. It comes from diversity and interdependence.
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Different species respond differently to drought, disease, and disturbance. Because multiple capacities remain active, the forest can adapt. When diversity disappears, fragility increases. A single disturbance can ripple through the entire ecosystem. Human groups are not so different.
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When only certain voices are welcomed—or when disagreement becomes unsafe—our collective intelligence narrows. We may move faster, but we also become more vulnerable to blind spots. From the outside it can still look like alignment. Everyone agrees. Decisions move quickly. Momentum feels strong.
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But something subtle may be happening underneath.
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Important insights are no longer traveling through the relationships where they could make a difference. How Collective Folly Takes Hold Collective folly rarely arrives dramatically. More often it creeps in quietly. Conversations narrow. Certainty hardens. People begin speaking less freely. Differences are framed as threats rather than sources of insight. Groups may still appear coordinated. Everything looks aligned. But alignment can sometimes hide another problem: the group has lost its ability to truly hear itself.
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History offers many examples of this pattern. In the 1986 Challenger space shuttle disaster, engineers had raised serious concerns about launching in unusually cold temperatures because of potential failures in the shuttle’s O-ring seals. These concerns were discussed the night before launch. Yet the launch proceeded. Investigations later showed that the failure was not simply technical. The conditions surrounding the decision made it difficult for dissenting voices to influence what happened next. The knowledge existed. But the connections needed for that knowledge to shape the decision were too weak. The problem was not ignorance. It was that the people who understood the risk were not fully heard and there was not an effective way for them to communicate.
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Burnout as a Signal
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Another signal that something in our collective life is out of balance is the widespread experience of burnout. Burnout is often framed as an individual problem—people taking on too much work or failing to manage stress effectively. But burnout can also be understood as a relational signal. Many environments reward a narrow set of capacities: speed, productivity, decisiveness, and constant output. Other capacities—reflection, curiosity, questioning assumptions—get pushed aside. Yet growth in living systems is always balanced with renewal.
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Without pauses, without space to sense and reflect, the vitality of any group begins to fade. Human communities are no exception.
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The Practices That Make Wisdom Possible
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Collective wisdom does not emerge simply because people are in the same room. It arises when the quality of connection between them allows curiosity, difference, and deeper listening to remain alive. People must be able to listen deeply—not only to what is said, but to what is still forming beneath the surface. They must be willing to suspend certainty, creating space for perspectives that challenge their assumptions. Groups need patience to sense what is emerging together, rather than rushing prematurely toward conclusions. They must remain aware of the wider web of relationships they are part of, recognizing the deep interdependence between people, communities, and the living world. And perhaps most challenging of all, they must cultivate enough trust to remain open to what might arise beyond their current understanding.

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These are not personality traits. They are practices. Practices that require attention, discipline, and repetition if groups are to remain capable of wisdom.
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The Question This Moment Is Asking
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Many people right now feel a growing sense of uncertainty about the future—about the stability of institutions, the direction of the United States, and the trajectory of the world. It can feel as if the ground beneath us is shifting. In moments like this, the instinct is often to push harder for certainty. To demand clearer answers, faster decisions, stronger declarations. But another possibility exists.
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What if this moment is asking us to strengthen the capacities that allow collective wisdom to emerge? Not by eliminating disagreement. But by learning how to remain connected to one another long enough for deeper understanding to form. Because history shows us something important. When people lose the ability to listen across differences, collective folly becomes more likely. But when the conditions for deeper listening, curiosity, and shared inquiry return, something remarkable can happen.
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Groups often become more intelligent together than any individual could be alone.
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Practicing Collective Wisdom
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Collective wisdom cannot be mandated. It must be practiced. It lives in the spaces between people—in the quality of attention we bring to one another, in the willingness to stay curious rather than certain, and in our ability to hold difference without immediately collapsing into debate or division. In a time when many parts of our public life seem to be struggling to listen, creating spaces where people can slow down, speak honestly, and hear one another may be more important than ever. Not as a luxury.
But as a foundational practice for how we navigate the disorientation we are experiencing.
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No single villain will take us down.
And no single hero is arriving to rescue us.
The future will not be shaped by individual insight alone.
It will be shaped by our capacity to recognize our interdependence—
and to listen, think, and learn together.

As Jacob Needleman once wrote in a futurist essay at the turn of the 20th century:

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If the group is an art form of the future, then convening groups is an artistry we must cultivate to fully harvest the promise of that future.
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Yet when we look around our world, we can feel how easily that artistry is lost. The Dalai Lama X1V described the paradox of our time in a poem:
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We have taller buildings, but shorter tempers.
Wider freeways, but narrower viewpoints.
We have more knowledge, but less judgment.
More experts, but more problems.
We have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our values.
We talk more,
but understand less.
We communicate constantly,
and yet we struggle to truly meet one another.

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Perhaps that paradox points us toward something essential. The challenge of our time may not simply be technological or political. It may be relational. A challenge of how we live, decide, and learn together. Because collective folly does not arise from a lack of intelligence. It arises when the connections that allow intelligence to circulate begin to break down. When voices disappear. When certainty replaces curiosity. When disagreement turns into division instead of discovery. But the opposite is also true.
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When people slow down enough to listen deeply…
when curiosity returns…
when difference becomes a source of learning rather than threat…
Something remarkable can happen.

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Groups often become wiser than any individual within them. And perhaps that is what this moment is quietly asking of us. To rediscover something simple, ancient, and profoundly difficult: How to stay connected to one another long enough for wisdom to emerge between us.

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