Tools & Resources
For supporting co-intelligence and co-creativity
FEATURED TOOL
The Co-Intelligence Institute’s
Wise Democracy Pattern Language
This Wise Democracy Pattern Language highlights dynamic factors and design principles which can make an activity, organization, or community more wisely self-governing.
Based on hundreds of real-life innovations, this evolving database of wise democracy “patterns” helps us understand, re-imagine, and transform how we manage our shared world.
You can now buy a beautiful boxed set of version 2.0 pattern cards and support materials here. Version 2.0 is also available for free download here.
Tools for Co-Intelligence
Some of our favorite ways to activate co-intelligence in our lives and work.
GROUP PROCESS
Listening Circle Process
As people take turns listening and speaking authentically from the heart, they go deeper together evoking ever-greater whole-seeing.
Dynamic Facilitation
A group moves from conflict to breakthrough collaboration through a facilitator's powerful reflective listening, with people feeling fully heard and opening into co-creativity as the Big Picture comes into view for all to address together.
The World Café
At small tables or circles, people explore a question that matters to all, then mix into new circles, sharing what they’ve heard so far… in many rounds, they live into new questions with intimacy and the unfolding collective intelligence of the whole group.
Open Space Technology
An engaging conference happens with no prior agenda, guided by participants taking responsibility for what they care about and moving through and around self-organized sessions to wherever they find themselves learning, contributing, or having fun.
Group Works Deck
A compilation of brilliant interrelated design patterns that underlie group processes and experiences that “bring life to your soul,” available online and as a printed card deck.
The Change Handbook
A pioneering book that curates over 60 potent group processes and approaches to whole-system change.
Participedia
An online compilation of over 350 participatory processes and approaches of all kinds for widely varied purposes.
ORGANIZING & ORGANIZATION
Teal Organizations
Flat management structures supporting worker autonomy, well-being and peer relationships in self-managed sub-groups aligned together through organic communication for their deeply shared evolutionary purpose.
Sociocracy
An organizational hierarchy of interlocking circle teams of workers who share a team aim that contributes to the whole organization’s aim, running on “good enough”/consent decisions that enable self-organized activity that's aligned with their shared aims.
Future Search
A “whole system in the room” stakeholder approach to conflict that surfaces past relationships, current shared realities and challenges, and shared visions which participants self-organize into teams to pursue.
Open Business
A business model based on openness, accessibility, transparency, inclusion (including decisions by consent and/or consensus-building), accountability, benefits distributed openly according to people's contributions, and personal and organizational freedom.
Network Weaving
Many resources and perspectives involving network-building and support for just relationships, interdependence, and greater capacity for impact and change.
Community Toolkit
Encyclopedic online guidance for creative community organizing.
POLITICS & GOVERNANCE
Wise Democracy Pattern Language
A compilation by the Co-Intelligence Institute—available in both online and card deck modes—of design guidances for co-creating participatory systems to enable people to generate empowered collective wisdom - with each guidance accompanied online by examples and resources for applying it.
Humble Government
An emerging form of government that establishes overarching policy directions and goals and then turns them over to stakeholder networks to pursue and occasionally come together in action learning forums to share experiences and challenges — and sometimes even revise the government-mandated goals.
Minipublic
A citizen council made up of a demographic cross-section of the community or country who learns about a public issue and deliberates to a set of supermajority recommendations about it which are shared with decision-makers and/or the electorate.
Polis
An online participatory poll where participants create responses to a question and then vote on responses from others while the platform sorts them into opposing groups and enables consensus to emerge among those different groups.
Study Circles
Small grassroots groups study a shared topic (often political) to develop shared understanding.
Warm Data Labs
A dynamic process involving conversations within and across diverse contexts related to a complex system or challenge in order to better realize its unique and evolving complexity.
ECONOMICS & PROSPERITY
Public Sphere patterns
An online compilation of design guidances for a healthy public sphere. Also available as a downloadable printable card deck
The Commons (Wikipedia) (Commoner’s Catalog)
Guidance to maintain together what we all need and use.
Doughnut Economics
Guidance to operate societies using systems that help meet human needs within Earth’s limited capacities.
Full-Cost Accounting
Guidance for taking into account all ecological, social, and other costs and benefits, as well as finances.
Glocal Subsidiarity
Guidance for carrying out functions and decisions at the lowest level they can effectively be performed, in light of the needs of the larger world.
Regenerativity
Guidance for learning from, joining, and contributing to Life’s dynamic tendency to regenerate its own well-being, resilience, and resource base.
Emerging Economy Wiki
A compilation of factors in and approaches to a healthy sustainable economy that serves people’s actual needs.
Reliable Prosperity Pattern Language
Design principles for systems that provide quality of life for all lives involved.