We believe we are on the verge of a boom in collective intelligence.
For most of human history, intelligence has been expensive to coordinate. What one person knew was difficult to find, hard to transfer, and easy to lose. Organizations built layers, meetings, reports, processes, and information systems to overcome those limits.
AI changes the economics of cognition. Search, synthesis, translation, simulation, drafting, critique, and memory are all becoming dramatically cheaper.
That creates the possibility of organizations that aren’t simply faster or leaner, but genuinely smarter together.
But the boom isn’t guaranteed for every organization.
Adding more intelligence to an organization doesn’t mean the organization will know how to use it.
AI can also create new bottlenecks, more confident mistakes, a rush to consensus, weakening skills, and the appearance of action around decisions that still don’t get confronted.
The majority of organizations will simply try to heave ever more AI onto teams. The successful few will redesign work so this new intelligence can compound with human capabilities.
We use superadditive as a design standard for every project we take on.
Putting capable people together doesn’t automatically create a smart organization. Adding AI doesn’t automatically make one smarter either.
We want organizations in which human judgment, machine capability, and the system around them make one another better. That’s the ambition behind the name and our practice.
We take four things as given.
We are inventors.
Our work combines research, field experience, and the direct testing of our own hypotheses.
Organizational intelligence doesn’t belong to one academic field. Our practice draws from organizational development and psychology, but also from fields that have spent decades learning how people make consequential decisions inside complex systems.
Ultimately, though, no practice can simply be copied and pasted from one org to another. In everything we do, there is experimentation and learning.
We’ve been working on this problem for a long time.
Superadditive grew out of more than a decade of organizational change work inside large, complex companies. Our founder, Bud Caddell, started his career in software development before moving into strategy and organizational change. He later served as a partner at Undercurrent and SVP of Digital Strategy and Innovation at Deutsch LA.
Throughout our work, again and again the technical answer turned out to be only part of the problem. Organizations could see a better way of working and still fail to act on it. Important information stayed trapped in one part of the company. Topics swirled without closing. Teams optimized their own work while making the larger system worse.
In 2014, Bud founded NOBL Collective to work on those problems directly. Over the next decade, the work included more than 300 client engagements across 25 industries and six continents.
AI made the underlying question harder to ignore. Organizations can now generate more information, analysis, software, and options than ever before. More output doesn’t guarantee better judgment or better organizations. In some cases, it makes the weaknesses of the existing system only more consequential. Superadditive grew from that realization.
A deliberately small group.
Superadditive is Bud Caddell and a deliberately small group of senior practitioners drawn from organizational psychology, technology, organizational change, and adjacent disciplines.