Recently, my colleague Al Blixt from Dannemiller Tyson and Whole Scale Change took extra time from his day to catch me on a recent learning community session event, which I missed, where the group discussed The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki. At a slice in time when we must move from individual intelligence to operating from a collective intelligence, this is timely. The entire notion of wisdom of the crowds reminds me of the day of conducting public consultation on policy issues. The bureaucrats insisted that only the experts knew anything of value. the public were ignorant and incapable of offereing any intelligence on economic policy. The assumption was you had to be an economist or hold expertise to offer credible input.
The concept of Wisdom of Crowds for those of you who have not read it, is sourced from British scientist Frances Galton who, in 1906 at the age of 87, had developed a reasonable amount of contempt for the intelligence of the average person. With that belief firmly entrenched it was easy to maintain that power must be centered in the elite and selected few. He came across a competition to estimate the weight of a fat ox after it had been slaughtered and dressed. Eight hundred placed their estimates. 'Many non-experts' competed' as he would later write. Having readily made the comparison to voters who have no idea what they are voting on he set out to demonstrate the incapability of average thinkers when thinking en masse. As a statistician in the field of heredity he initiated the math to prove his point. 'the crowd guessed that the ox, after it had been slaughtered and dressed, would weigh 1197 pounds. After it had been slaughtered and dressed, it weighed 1198 pounds. The book then explores the kinds of problems we face, the characteristics that make crowd wisdom effective, the applications amongst other things. What the book also does, for me at least, is indicate the power of the collective mind when it is applied to questions that do not have a read answer; questions whree the collective knowledge of the group becomes the answer. I am referring to addressing major global issues through collective intelligence.
Surowiecki provides three types of problems: 1) Cognition problems: Problems that have a definitive answer. 2) Coordination problems: Require members of a group to figure out how to coordinate their behaviour in each other knowing that everyone else is trrying to do the same. 3) Cooperation problems: Involve the challenge of getting self-interested, distrustful people to work together, even when the forces of self-interest would predictably pull them apart. The book will touch many things in readers, but it does make it clear that groups can and do hold greater intelligence than the smartest one among the group. That in itself is a power reason to harness the collective intelligence of all working in a corporation to create a future that works for humanity and the planet. My thanks to Al. www.dannemillartyson.com
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