Crystallisation through Communication (1)

Part 1: How Dialogue Sharpens Strategy

The Power of Crystallisation

Over the years, while playing Go with people from around the world, I began noticing a pattern: when players explained their reasoning aloud, their moves improved. They saw options they had missed, and their choices became more deliberate.

That observation led me to a simple experiment. I began asking players — especially beginners — to speak their thoughts as they played: to describe what they saw, what they intended, and why a particular move made sense. Go mirrors real life closely enough that when something feels reasonable in thought, it often holds true on the board.

The results were consistent. When players verbalized their reasoning, their clarity sharpened — even when I said nothing in return. It wasn’t that they suddenly understood Go better; it was that the act of articulation forced their thinking through two filters — first their own, then mine. Whatever they said had to make enough sense to be spoken, and then to sound coherent to another mind.

As I introduced the game to more people, I found myself teaching less about Go tactics — corner shapes, josekis, fusekis — and more about the reasoning process itself. Surprisingly, that shift worked better. Players who learned to reason out their own ideas eventually arrived at the same strategic insights I might have taught them, but those insights were more deeply internalised. They were earned through thought, not memorised through repetition.

That simple change transformed the learning dynamic. Their moves grew sharper, their intentions clearer. The noise of instinct began to crystallise into structure.

The same phenomenon appeared when I paired two beginners to play together against me. When they spoke openly, their play improved dramatically. Even without formal skill, the quality of their reasoning rose through dialogue. Mistakes became feedback loops. Their moves began to echo a shared rhythm.

Cheating, by Design

This is the same reason platforms like Chess.com and OGS (Online-Go-Server) consider it cheating when two people use the same account in rated games. It’s not just about fairness — it’s about how profoundly dialogue reshapes cognition.

Two minds reasoning together create an undeniable advantage, even if they are of the same rank. They see more, refine faster, and move more coherently than either could alone.

What’s even more revealing is that higher-ranked players aren’t allowed to receive commentary from lower-ranked ones during a game on these platforms. In practice, the power of dialogue can supersede the rank difference in both directions. A well-timed question or alternative frame can elevate a weaker player’s move — or expose a stronger player’s blind spot.

During FusekiB Immersions, we encourage this kind of “cheating.”We pair minds deliberately — not to manipulate results, but to accelerate understanding. Every game becomes a shared reasoning process, an experiment in crystallisation through communication.

From the first stone placed, you are not playing alone. You are crystallising with another mind — testing, refining, reflecting in motion. It’s a practice that steepens the learning curve dramatically. Dialogue becomes the accelerator of insight, and every move is a shared step toward coherence.

Collective Intelligence

What I witnessed during these mini experiments at the Go board has a long history in research.

Over a century ago, Francis Galton discovered that if a crowd of people were each asked to guess the weight of an ox, the average of their guesses was astonishingly accurate — closer than nearly any individual’s.

This became known as the wisdom of crowds: the idea that, under the right conditions, the collective mind outperforms the individual one. When independent perspectives are aggregated, random errors cancel out, and the signal — the truth — emerges more clearly.

But that’s aggregated intelligence — where minds stay separate and the synthesis happens statistically.

What happens when the minds interact instead?

Well, that’s interactive intelligence — or what we in FusekiB call crystallisation through communication. Instead of cancelling out noise mathematically, two people refine it socially. Each time someone articulates a thought, questions it, or reframes it, ambiguity is stripped away. The dialogue itself becomes a reasoning engine — a live circuit of reflection, feedback, and recalibration.

The Edges of Interactive Intelligence

But there’s a limit to this effect. As more minds enter the loop, the benefit starts to decline. The dialogue that once clarified begins to fragment. The focus shifts from reasoning about the problem to reasoning about each other’s reasoning.

Empirical studies show that two people working together often outperform one, but five people rarely outperform three. Beyond that, coordination cost eclipses clarity. Each new participant adds both signal and noise, and the noise grows faster.

Research on collective reasoning consistently supports this pattern.

• Social loafing (Latané et al., 1979): as group size increases, individual cognitive contribution decreases. Members assume others will refine the idea, and the collective engine idles.

• Information overload and coordination costs (Kerr & Tindale, 2004; Hackman, 2002): performance peaks around three to five members, then drops as energy shifts toward managing communication rather than analysing the problem.

• Cognitive bandwidth limits (Miller, 1956; Cowan, 2010): people can track roughly four to seven reasoning threads at once. Each added participant multiplies conversational complexity, quickly exceeding collective working memory.

• Hidden profile effect (Stasser & Titus, 1985): as groups grow, they discuss shared information more and unique insights less. The result is premature consensus — higher confidence, lower accuracy.

The net effect is that beyond a certain threshold, diversity turns into conformity. Louder voices dominate; quieter ones adapt. The group appears unified, but the range of critical ideas narrows. What was once a field of reflection collapses into repetition.

The Necessity of the External Mind

Still, one truth remains constant: communication with at least one external mind is essential.

Crystallisation doesn’t happen in isolation. It requires friction — another mind, another frame of reference — to transform intuition into coherence. An Internal thought loop recycles the same logic; an external sounding board forces differentiation.

The act of explaining, defending, or re-articulating your reasoning activates a deeper layer of cognition — one that clarifies not only what you think, but how you think. Even a brief exchange can sharpen structure.

This isn’t about consensus or validation; it’s about exposure. Communication externalises thought, turning mental noise into a shared signal that can be examined, mirrored, and refined. Even a silent listener can spark this process; their presence alone demands coherence.

The strategist who learns to think with others — not for approval, but for crystallisation — accesses a form of intelligence that a solitary mind simply cannot produce.

Reasoning is private, but crystallisation is social.

Just as a Go player improves by playing real games — and not by replaying imagined ones — a strategist develops clarity only by bringing thought into dialogue with another mind. The external world, whether human or environmental, serves as a cognitive mirror. Without it, ideas stay vaporous.

So while too many voices can dissolve coherence, the absence of any voice at all prevents it from forming. The strategist learns to seek this balance — to think alone, but not in isolation.

It’s in that exchange — between one mind and another — that strategy becomes visible, coherent, and alive.

Let’s Crystallise

Strategic development, in FusekiB and beyond, is not played in silence. It’s a conversation — between moves, between minds, between what you see and what you don’t.

Each time you articulate a thought, you trace the outline of clarity; each time you share it, that outline sharpens. The goal isn’t to agree or to speak the most — it’s to move thought forward, one word and one refinement at a time.

Crystallisation through communication is not a trick of dialogue. It’s the discipline of making thought audible enough to evolve. And in that evolution lies the strategist’s quiet art — the ability to listen, to reveal, and to reason in motion.

Use these questions to surface your own reasoning and see where it sharpens.

• When was the last time you explained your reasoning out loud — not to convince, but to clarify?

• Who in your circle helps your thoughts sharpen instead of echo?

• How might your strategic process change if you treated conversation as part of thinking, not what follows after?

The power of communication is undeniable — but harnessing it requires courage. In Part 2 of Crystallisation through Communication - Why We Resist Dialogue, we’ll explore why teams, leaders, and even strategists themselves often avoid the very process that would make them sharper.

Because knowing how to crystallise is only half the story.

The harder part is learning why we don’t.