Measuring Happiness, Creativity, and Performance in Individuals and Organizations by Analyzing Collective Consciousness

This lecture shows how to measure and increase happiness, creativity, and performance through analyzing collective consciousness within organizations and on the Internet, using social media analysis. It is based on the concept of swarm creativity and Collaborative Innovation Networks (COINs). COINs are self-organizing teams of intrinsically motivated innovators, collaborating over the Internet to create new things. In our research we are developing a “Social Compass” that helps individuals navigate their emotional world, just like Google helps a person navigate the relational world of facts and science. Just like Google Maps shows where somebody is in the physical world, where they can go, and where the bottlenecks and traffic jams are, the “Social Compass” helps individuals navigate the social landscape of their emotions and the emotions of others. It tells individuals how others see them, and what they can do to be happier, and more collaborative and productive. It gives an individual a “virtual mirror” of their own communication behavior, and shows them how others see them. 

The “Social Compass” takes as input communication signals, and through machine learning gives recommendations for more happiness, better collaboration and higher productivity. It analyzes body signals measured through smartwatches, organizational communication from E-Mail or chat like Slack or Skype, and online social media from Twitter, Reddit, or YouTube. From these three types of communication archives, it calculates the seven honest signals of collaboration (strong leadership, balanced contribution, rotating leadership, responsiveness, honest sentiment, shared context, social capital) and the emotions of the person (joy, sadness, fear, anger). These honest signals and emotions are used as input for machine learning, to calculate the FFI personality characteristics (openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeability, neuroticism), the Schwartz ethical values (openness - conservation, self-enhancement – self-transcendence) and moral foundations (care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity). The lecture will be illustrated with many practical examples from industry.

Research Questions

· Does knowing my emotions make me happier?

· How can such a system be productively deployed to increase collective happiness of organizations?

· How can it be used to increase individual and team creativity and “group flow”?