Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar welcomes Anita Williams Woolley, professor of organizational behavior and associate dean of research at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business, to speak as part of the Richard M. Cyert Distinguished Lecture in Business Administration. The Richard M. Cyert Distinguished Lecture in Business Management is named after Richard M. Cyert, who was professor and dean of the Tepper School of Business and president of Carnegie Mellon University between 1972 and 1990.

About the lecture

People, Processes, and Incentives: Collective Intelligence and the Future of Organizations

The environment surrounding organizations is becoming more complex, and traditional ways of managing people, processes, and incentives in organizations can make it hard to adapt. In an adjacent field, research on intelligence has focused on the capabilities that enable a system to adapt and accomplish goals in changing environments for almost a century. Building on that work, my collaborators and I have examined collective intelligence in human systems, identifying the memory, attention, and reasoning functions that need to be fulfilled for intelligence to emerge. We apply these insights in our current research where we teach AI agents how to recognize good collaboration in human systems in order to develop new ways to intervene to increase collective intelligence

About the speaker

Anita Williams Woolley is a professor of organizational behavior and the associate dean of research at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business. Professor Woolley received her doctorate in organizational behavior from Harvard University, and her research includes seminal work on team collective intelligence, which was first published in Science in 2010 and has been featured in over 5000 publications and media outlets since. Her papers have been published in Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Academy of Management Review, Organization Science, and Management Science, among others. Her research has been funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Army, and DARPA, as well as private corporations. Currently, Professor Woolley is a senior editor at Organization Science and a founding associate editor of Collective Intelligence. At the Tepper School, she teaches courses on managing teams and leading global and distributed teams.