The Co-Intelligence Institute
Promoting Innovations in Collective Wisdom, Co-creativity, and Collaborative Governance
We explore, gather, promote and develop real-world innovations in individual and collective wisdom, choice-making, and co-creativity.
We collaborate with initiatives that foster the capacity for wise relating and greater understanding of the whole.
We develop pattern languages and tools that help people and communities design self-governance systems that partner with life.
We help people engage creatively and wisely with disturbances and diversity by connecting them with resources.
We are a small nonprofit group of passionate people committed to wise relating and partnership with life.
We know that respectful, creative engagement with the whole helps promote long-term broad benefit.
We love inclusive, creative, and emergent approaches that help people address shared challenges and aspirations.
We realize that wholeness is central—all dimensions of the whole. We are guided by the realization of wholeness in all that we do.
We seek to engage the whole person; the whole community or collective; the whole story, situation or system; the whole set of available capacities, resources, and possibilities—especially the emergent potential of differences and disturbances and the wholeness of synergy, nature, and spirit.
Our Institute
Board Members
Andy Paice
Board President
Jennifer Atlee
Board Secretary
Sita Magnuson
Board Treasurer
As CII-affiliated practitioners, we seek to bring aspects of co-intelligence and wise democracy to life through our on-the-ground design, consulting, and facilitation practices.
In our work with clients, we each seek to explicitly evoke and engage the wisdom and resourcefulness of the whole on behalf of the whole; we each do this in our own diverse ways. In addition, as CII-affiliated practitioners, we meet periodically with founder Tom Atlee and with one another for mutual learning on the interrelationships between co-intelligence practices and theory.
CII-Affiliated Practitioners
We also want to honor all of our larger family, the people who have contributed to our Wise Democracy Pattern Language Project and those who contributed to previous incarnations of CII’s work, including our various supporters over the decades.
Our Founder:
Tom Atlee
Author & Independent Researcher
Founded the nonprofit Co-Intelligence Institute in 1996.
His early co-intelligence research in the late 1980s focused on the relationship between group dynamics and collective intelligence.
From the mid-1990s through the mid-2000s, his focus shifted to developing society's capacity to function as a wise democracy.
From 2005-2010 he explored possibilities for the conscious evolution of social systems grounded in a sacred science-based understanding of evolutionary dynamics.
During 2011-2015 he focused on public wisdom, co-intelligent economics, and participatory sustainability.
Tom is now doing courses and developing a community of practice around the wise democracy pattern language, seeking more practice-based ways to engage people around wise democracy. He hopes these intertwined, expanding explorations can help channel the energies surrounding our 21st-century social and environmental crises into positive possibilities and system-transforming initiatives.
Tom's social change vision is grounded most deeply in new understandings of evolving wholeness, which recognize the value of diversity, unity, relationship, context, uniqueness, and the spirit inside each of us and the world. Co-intelligence is intelligence that arises from that kind of wholeness. It has collaborative and collective dimensions and intrinsic interconnectedness, which we see clearly in wholesome forms of politics, governance, and economics.
Co-intelligence theory also highlights the many facets of intelligence (like head and heart), wisdom, and the higher forms of intelligence (natural and sacred) that move through and beyond us. Although Tom and the Institute focus on very practical issues of group; social; political; and economic dynamics, co-intelligence also has many esoteric dimensions.
An early theoretician and advocate of collective intelligence, Tom's inclusive mapping of the field is featured in two major books on the subject—Mark Tovey's Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace (2008) and Nasreen Taher's Collective Intelligence: An Introduction (2006).
Much of Tom's work features new visions of social change agentry—from the co-intelligent activism articulated in his books Participatory Sustainability, The Tao of Democracy and Reflections on Evolutionary Activism: Essays, Poems, and Prayers from an Emerging Field of Sacred Social Change (2009), to his co-organizing of the Evolutionary Salon on Philanthropy (2006) and the Storyfield Conference (2007) to his many blog posts on social issues and action.
In addition to his books, blogs, and websites, Tom has published extensively in alternative journals and publishes a newsletter featuring significant articles and websites by other commentators, as well as his writings. He has also worked with several leading authors on their books.