Background: This study explores the factors constraining group decision-making, where those factors might tend to restrict groups from selecting optimal solutions with regards to sustainability or sustainable development. This study also explores the factors constraining group decision-making from framing problems in the optimal way (choosing the optimal problem to solve), and how together these factors constraining groups from choosing the optimal problem to solve or the optimal solution to solve it with, might tend to bar groups from achieving optimal outcomes. To address the first set of constraints, collective intelligence algorithms aim to use the intelligence of crowds to select optimal solutions. To address the second set of constraints, General Collective Intelligence solutions, as defined in this paper, aim to further improve outcomes by selecting the optimal problem to solve.
Results: In the absence of General Collective Intelligence fundamental economic forces are suggested to drive a continual increase in the alignment of group decision-making with the interests of decision-makers rather than with optimizing collective impact. And while sustainability and sustainable development might be achieved locally in the face of this misalignment, globally this misalignment is suggested to compete directly against that achievement. For this reason, maximizing collective outcomes such as impact on sustainability or sustainable development is suggested to require General Collective Intelligence in order to reliably increase the forces driving groups towards prioritizing collective impact until those forces are greater than the forces driving this misalignment. As a result, without General Collective Intelligence this misalignment of group decision-making in a direction other than optimal collective impact is suggested to be a hidden "bug" that may prevent sustainability and sustainable development from being reliably achievable globally through current sustainability or sustainable development programs.
Conclusions: General Collective Intelligence is a pattern of biomimicry that potentially replicates the robust and stable multi-cellular cooperation nature has evolved over more than a billion years to enable cells in organisms to cooperate to sustainably achieve outcomes. Platforms organizing groups into such a General Collective Intelligence are suggested to be required in order for sustainability or the sustainable development goals to be reliably achievable globally.