Lauren Moore Nignon

For Lauren, there’s nothing more important than humans making good decisions together, in other words “collective intelligence”. It terrifies her that we’re not even close to figuring this out – anywhere. Throughout history, salons have played a major role in bringing key people together to ignite social movements. In many cases, it’s been women doing the organizing behind the scenes. At a conference in San Francisco, Lauren met Betsey Burrows, whose monthly gatherings were the hidden force that produced collective intelligence giants like Vint Cerf and Doug Engelbart. Like Betsey, Lauren has a long history of bringing together random, brilliant people. Now, she does this virtually, with CICOLAB. All around her, Lauren sees her male colleagues developing top-down, tech-heavy solutions. She thinks collective intelligence is strongest when it springs up from the grass roots. So she focuses on developing simple, human ways for people and groups to express themselves and find each other, creating the conditions for deep innovation to emerge.