If your point is just that different people have different capacities, then sure, that's true enough. But even so, it's an extremely coarse summary of an enormously complex and detailed landscape.
I think I am not being clear in what I am saying. My point is that if you have a group of 10k average individuals their collective intelligence will not let them design something like this even though they will have the manpower and presumably the raw materials to build it. But if you add a small handful of much smarter than average individuals with expertise in the relevant engineering fields and they would not only be able to conceive of it as a concept but also design and it and lead the larger group to building it.
This does not absolve the group of needing to recognize those who are the most intellectually capable amongst them and put them into a leadership role. But the opposite is true because you cannot by definition imagine someone who is significantly smarter than you and you cannot emulate it. Collective intelligence of a group is bounded by the smartest person there. Adding more average intelligence to a group will not make it smarter, just larger, and potentially get in the way of the group recognizing the intelligence of its smartest members.
> Collective intelligence of a group is bounded by the smartest person there.
I maintain this is false. Who was the smartest person in the Vienna circle? A group of competent, well aligned people is potentially a much more capable thing than the one member with the highest IQ score alone. Collective intelligence is no simple combination of the capacities of its constituents. That is what the anthill demonstrates. The capacities of individuals do limit the capacities of the whole in some way, but it is nowhere near as simple as "bounded by the smartest person". This has a lot to do with the fact that "smartest person in the room" is not a particularly meaningful title absent a precise definition of what intelligence/competence means in your context of interest.
I agree with your point that adding people to an organization does not necessarily improve its capacities. Collective intelligence is not simply additive, nor is it simply bounded by the best individual on any particular dimension
