Mastermind Groups: Accelerators of Success

By Jean-François Thiriet, Nadia Grandclement and Eric Baudet

How do you bring yourself, your team and your venture to the next level of success? This is the question that entrepreneurs, managers and business leaders ask themselves every day.

Creating or joining a Mastermind group is one of the most powerful and effective answers to that question. A Mastermind group is an inn

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dilts Strategy Group
• Release date: Oct 26, 2017
• ISBN: 9781947629165

Book preview

Chapter 1

What is the Driving force behind a Mastermind Group?

1.1 What is a Mastermind group?

Show me your friends and I’ll show you your future.

- John Wooden

Napoleon Hill is credited with coming up with the Mastermind Alliance concept. In his work Think and Grow Rich¹, published in 1937 (and which we recommend to anyone who has an interest in achieving success), Hill describes the main principles that contribute to achieving sustainable success. Based on interviews he conducted with 500 of the most successful people of his time, Hill synthesized the principles that guided them along the path to success. What emerged from these interviews is that people who are successful have the following traits in common:

* a clear, obvious desire for success

* self-confidence

* expertise in some area

* an imaginative mind

* the ability to make decisions

* the ability to plan things out

* perseverance

You will discover as you read this book that a Mastermind group develops most of those attributes simultaneously. Because of their involvement in their Mastermind group, participants get to the point where they:

* have a better idea about what they want (a clear desire for success)

* increase their confidence when it comes to their ability to accomplish that (self- confidence)

* develop their skills to get to that point (engaging multiple areas of expertise)

* free their imagination so they can envisage more possibilities

* become engaged and then make decisions

* facilitate the undertaking of action (planning)

* learn from their failures as well as their successes (perseverance)

The Mastermind group concept appears for the first time in Chapter 10 of Think and Grow Rich. For Napoleon Hill, one has to imbue the desire to succeed with more power for it to find expression in the world. He defines power as organized knowledge and enunciates three ways that it can be obtained:

* through creativity

* through collective experience (which is also included in books)

* through studies and research

In spite of all our efforts, none of us is ever able to accumulate enough knowledge over the period of a lifetime. No one can be fully creative, have enough collective experience, accumulate enough experience, or do enough research on her/his own. To put it another way, even if we do our best with the knowledge we already have, our knowledge is limited anyway. That which has led us to the point where we are will, in all likelihood, not take us any further if we only rely on ourselves.

Think and Grow Rich is the first book that addresses the Mastermind concept in an overt way; it even talks about the Mastermind Alliance. On the other hand, it seems that Mastermind groups were started long before our own era. People talk about how King Solomon, already in his time, became wise because of the people who surrounded him. People also talk about King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, and even of Benjamin Franklin and his Junto group, with whose helped he started the first libraries and fire brigades in the United States. Thomas Edison himself, belonged, between 1915 and 1924, to the Mastermind group known as The Vagabonds, along with Henry Ford, John Burroughs, and Harvey Firestone. For the record, Thomas Edison only received three months of instruction during his life and relied entirely on others in order to come up with his inventions. It has been said that on the day Thomas Edison’s laboratory burned down, Henry Ford showed up with a check for $75,000 and told him to start over. People also talk about Franklin Roosevelt and his Brain Trust, which was a group of advisers who were chosen for the different knowledge and skills they offered.

To use a metaphor: perhaps you are familiar with the game in which someone hands out an envelope filled with puzzle pieces to seven or eight people who are told to put the puzzle back together. At the end of the allotted time, the facilitator asks who has been able to do it. Obviously, no one raises their hand. Because what each one of them does not know is that some of them have some of the pieces of somebody else’s puzzle. So for each of them to succeed in completing her/his puzzle, she/he needs to get together with the others and collaborate on the task.

So What is a Mastermind Group Exactly?

Napoleon Hill defines what happens in a Mastermind group as "the coordination of the knowledge and efforts of two or several people who work for a common goal, in the spirit of harmony. For him, two minds cannot work together without creating a third invisible, intangible force, which is something akin to a third mind." This is where collective intelligence concepts come into play as part of already existing Mastermind models, and make a difference, which is something we will discuss later.

Here are some other definitions for a Mastermind group, which we came up within interviews we carried out with facilitators and participants in Mastermind groups :

To be in a Mastermind group means that you are surrounded by exceptional people and that you end up doing some really awesome things.

A Mastermind group is made up of people who get together to help one another accomplish what they want to most in life.

It is a group that offers three, four, five, six, or seven pairs of eyes so that my situation can be looked at from different perspectives.

In contrast to training that offers a specific format, or training that responds to needs related to business management performed by senior executives, which is carried out through interventions from people outside of their companies or organizations, the Mastermind group answers the needs of individual participants by surrounding them with people who are working in the same kind of environment that they are.

A Mastermind group essentially involves contributing to the success of others, at the same time that we find our own solutions, while it acts to bring us closer to the achievement of our goals and dreams.

A Mastermind group is a source of encouragement, stimulating ideas, and constructive feedback.

A Mastermind group is a venue where, although encouragement takes place, what goes on is not necessarily pleasant.

A Mastermind group is a commitment to share the best of ourselves—our experience, skills, and what we have learned.

A Mastermind group is a group of wise people, or to put it a little differently, a circle of wisdom.

A Mastermind group consists of a formal, structured encounter that is focused on a goal that is normally carried out in a noncompetitive environment.

A Mastermind group brings together brilliant, enthusiastic, motivated people, under optimal conditions.

Here is what some who have written about them have to say:

"A Mastermind group is a group of talented, motivated people, each of whom has a different background and a different way of thinking about things, but which is concentrated on unleashing the organization’s potential²."

"A Mastermind group is a practical method through which you can take ownership of yourself and benefit, on the basis of the experience, training, education, expertise, and intelligence of others, as if all that is your own³."

"Mastermind groups combine things like brainstorming, training, the taking responsibility for peers and support groups, with the goal of strengthening your business activities and personal skills⁴."

"A Mastermind group is a place where you can share your challenges and ask for help in a constructive way, that is to say, for a guided solution⁵"

And finally, here’s the definition we propose: "A Mastermind group is one that includes entrepreneurial people in search of excellence and the rapid development of their businesses, and is, in general, led by a facilitator who is experienced in the logic of collective intelligence."

Your Mastermind Group’s Vision:

Putting it into Practice

One of the first steps that should be taken to get your Mastermind group going consists of writing about its vision; and that vision answers the question: What would you like to see happen in this group?

Here are some simple examples:

It should be a really great place where the people can be deeply inspired to become what they are best at.

It should offer a reassuring, positive venue where one can learn, grow, and find greater personal and professional freedom.

We have found that the following formula to be a useful way to facilitate your Mastermind group to define their vision:

"Our group is … (who)____________________

which does (what) ..._____________________

for… _____________________

so that... ______________________"

A good example of applying this formula is the Core Leadership Circle’s vision⁶:

"The Core Leadership Circle" is a powerful group of peers that brings business leaders and influencers together on a monthly basis, so they can support and inspire one another, at the same time that they enjoy themselves as they completely accomplish their major goals.

1.2 What is a Mastermind group that employs collective intelligence?

It is from the clash of two improbable ideas that great ideas are always born.

− Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO

Collective intelligence is a term that refers to the cognitive abilities of a community, which results from multiple interactions between its members⁷." It is intelligence, in the greater sense of the term, strongly correlated with the capacity for coming up with new solutions, without needing to reuse existing solutions. Collective intelligence is also strongly linked with the capacity of a community of individuals for adapting to new situations and new problems without relying on past solutions.

Collective intelligence can potentially be used under a number of circumstances. A well-known experiment illustrates this idea⁸: A group of people is shown a transparent container filled with candy and then asked to independently guess how many pieces of candy are inside it (without allowing them to open it). Even if no one comes up with the exact number of pieces of candy, the average of all the answers inevitably comes close to the actual number (within a few pieces). Google employs this principle to determine, in advance, the number of potential users for their product. Similarly, Microsoft applies it to identify the best date to come out with its software.

The behavior of animals provides many examples of collective intelligence such as dolphins that swim at great speed and cross alongside one another, without ever colliding, or birds that fly in swarms without needing to communicate, and schools of fish that regroup to form, in a collective way, a darker, bigger mass, so they can scare off predators.

Studies by Professor Thomas Malone,⁹ founder of MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence, came up with the main factors that contribute to the emergence of collective intelligence in groups of humans.

They are:

1. The balanced participation of each person in a group

2. The number of women in the group.

3. The ability of each member to recognize and respond to the emotions of the other members in the group. (This criterion has a high positive correlation with the preceding one, since women often tend to understand emotions better than men.)

This last criterion is fundamental to collective intelligence. In other words, emotional and social intelligence are key factors when it comes to successfully creating collective intelligence.

This brings us to one of the fundamental guidelines for facilitating Mastermind groups, specifically, that of using the principle of multiple intelligences.

Rather than just operating from cognitive intelligence and a purely-thinking mind, a Mastermind group that makes use of collective intelligence engages four other essential capacities:

* emotional intelligence;

* somatic intelligence;

* relational and systemic intelligence;

* meta intelligence; i.e., the capacity to include all of these different kinds of intelligences inside the Mastermind group’s space-time container.

Cognitive intelligence is symbolically represented by our brain, emotional intelligence, by our heart, and somatic intelligence by the intestines (enteric nervous system). In fact, modern neuroscience has shown that there are highly complex systems of neurons and synapses in the heart and intestines. (The nervous system surrounding our intestines, for instance, is equivalent to the brain of a cat).These discoveries confirm the age-old hunch that there is an intelligence of the heart and a gut intelligence.

A major part of facilitating collective intelligence in a Mastermind group involves calling upon all four kinds of intelligence in each individual, as well as at the group level. This includes applying them to define the goal the group wants to accomplish. This is very significant, especially when it comes to the recruitment of members for your Mastermind group. For example, we have found that many effective Mastermind groups seek out people who demonstrate intelligence of the heart even more than their business successes or the length of time they have been in their profession. One might even say that Mastermind groups are brain, heart, or gut oriented. The Mastermind collective intelligence approach calls on all of those capacities at the same time.

The quality of results produced by any system depends on the quality of awareness from which people in the system operate.

− Otto Scharmer

Participants in a Generative State

When multiple intellects become activate, and it’s the facilitator’s task to ensure that, the group is able to experience what is called a generative state. It is a state where each one of the members is deeply in touch with herself/himself, and, at the same time, something greater than herself/ himself. This state brings about, for a group, creative results that are beyond the competencies of each individual member, just like the things that a hand, taken as a whole, can do are greater than what a single finger can do, on its own.

Have you ever participated in a group where ideas seem to emerge by passing through you, rather than coming from your own mind? These frequently come as original ideas, charged with emotion. It’s difficult to forget such moments, when group members experience a generative state. It is also easy to notice when group members are not in a generative state. The group goes limp. People become bored. They get the impression that they are wasting their time and energy… On the other hand, when the group is in a generative state, all of the different kinds of intelligence (body, heart, brain, mind), work at 200 %, at the same time and in the same place. The group is then functioning at full throttle, elevating all of its members. And that’s nothing less than exhilarating!

If you don’t allow the harmony that’s supposed to be present in your Mastermind alliance to mature, that isn’t a Mastermind group. That’s just a certain level of cooperation, or some coordinated effort.

− Andrew Carnegie

The Generative Field

When a group engages in generative collaboration, the process begins to spread beyond the group; it starts to take place all around the group and with others. Ideas bounce off of one person and onto another, gain momentum, converge, and everyone learns because of three simultaneous phenomena that the generative state produces:

1. The Phenomenon of Resonance refers to our nervous system’s, or more specifically, our mirror neurons’ ability to pick up on emotions and the motives behind other’s behaviors. This ability of everybody in the group to fall in step with the others brings about an uplifting effect that makes everyone feel as if their hearts are beating as one. It is not uncommon to hear the following type of comment in a Mastermind group: It’s unbelievable what (she/he) has shared with us. It’s as if (she/he) was directing her/his words directly to me. Even if (she/he) was not addressing me directly, what was said was completely applicable to my own situation. This is a concrete expression of what would be called resonance. Resonance results from the question: What connects us?

2. The Phenomenon of Synergy refers to the ability to see our differences as things that complement each other and, in that way, produce generativity. This ability is illustrated by a quote from Thomas Jefferson: If two people swap a dollar, each of them has one dollar. But if two people exchange an idea, each of them then has at least two ideas. Synergy comes from exploring the question: What are the differences that we have that enrich each other?

3. The Phenomenon of Emergence refers to the ability of one system to produce other systems that become more and more complex, and more and more extensive, because of the multiplicity and quality of members’ interactions. This is similar to when hydrogen and oxygen molecules mix to produce water, which is a system, itself, that transcends its original components. The relevant question here is: "What new can emerge through the way we resonate, and from our