Why churches are stupid

Because of my interest in corporisations -the notion that human corporate entities have a spiritual identity of their own- I'm reading from time to time, research and ideas about the way that corporations etc work. One of the things I'm reflecting on is the issue of intelligence. I seem to recall research showing, for example, that beehives collectively have the problem-solving intelligence of a human child. By analogy, it seems to me that human corporisations will have intelligence.

So it's interesting to see this Edge article: Collective Intelligence | Conversation | Edge, where this is precisely the point at issue. One of the intriguing things it says is this:

The most intelligent person is not the one who's best at doing any specific task, but it's the one who's best at picking up new things quickly. That's essentially the definition we used for defining intelligence at the level of groups as well.

If that's right in probably indicates churches to be pretty unintelligent given that they don't seem to learn very quickly. If that is right, then some of the other things in the article would be useful to consider (assuming we think it would be a good thing if churches as corporate entities were intelligent). The findings of the research indicate three things would need to characterise in-church interactions:

The first was the average social perceptiveness of the group members.... When you have a group with a bunch of people like that, the group as a whole is more intelligent.

The second factor we found was the evenness of conversational turn taking. In other words, groups where one person dominated the conversation were, on average, less intelligent than groups where the speaking was more evenly distributed among the different group members.

Finally,...t the collective intelligence of the group was significantly correlated with the percentage of women in the group. More women were correlated with a more intelligent group.

Explains a lot, doesn't it? Of Course much of this comes down also to the way power and hierarchy work in the organisation. If you think about those factors, they tend to die back in groups where there are 'strong leaders' operating a hierarchical top-down culture.