It was originally published in 2004 and is considered by many a must-read book for all those interested in intelligence, information, collaboration, decision making and “social stuff”. The Wisdom of Crowds has been traveling with me for a while for lack of time to read it. I have finally been able to finish reading it. And now that I have, I am tempted to start reading it again. Let me say why.
In The Wisdom of Crowds Surowiecki defends that “under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them” (p xiii). This thesis, which underpins the whole book, fascinates me. It takes “social” to another level. And yet, part of it questions whether knowledge and information sharing, under certain circumstances, produce worse outcomes (check out chapters 9 and 11).
Crowds can help in three types of problems: cognition, coordination and cooperation. And wise crowds depend on diversity of opinion, independence, decentralization and aggregation. These are all subject to detailed definition, analysis and reflection in part I of the book.
Part II focuses on considering the applicability and the face of the wisdom of crowds in different contexts: traffic, science, committees, companies, markets and democracy. Interestingly enough, Surowiecki states that democracy is not a wisdom-of-crowds-type scenario as there is no right answer (i.e. the common good) – what one believes to be the right answer is very likely different from what someone else believes it to be.
As there are plenty of summaries (see here and here, for example) of the book, I would like to take the opportunity to share some thoughts that came to my mind when reading the book. I hope they act as teasers for you to read the book, prompts for your own reflection, and maybe starting points to in-depth work.
Communities of practice
I cannot say for sure but I believe Surowiecki never used the term “communities of practice”. However, I thought about this kind of social networks many different times throught the book.
“The smartest groups, then, are made up of people with diverse perspectives who are able to stay independent of each other.” (p 41)
Isn’t this a characteristic of communities of practice? (And completely the opposite to what happens in a project team or a functional team, for that matter?)
“Groups benefit from members talking to and learning from each other, but too much communication, paradoxically, can actually make the group as a whole less intelligent.” (p xix)
How does this relate to the amount of pressure we feel and impose on communities to have a big percentage of “active” members and many interactions? Do we not tend to count the number of posts and comments in web-based communities?
Academic titles
Those who know me probably know how much I dislike academic titles. I am an Engineer because I studied to be one. What about those who never studied engineering but have worked on it all their life? Are they less knowledgeable as a result? I do not think so!
And if, as some say, the title is used to acknowledge the effort of those who had to endure the formal training at university, I strongly object to that as well. First, because who did not go to University, did not really have a choice: they had to work because they did not have the money to pay tuition fees. Second, because if you look at our universities you will find many students who look at it as a nice time to party at parents expenses.
But one of the many experiments described in the book emphasises the most important reason for my dislike of the use of academic titles – the fact that they convey (fake) knowledgeability to those who “wear” them.
“A series of experiments with military fliers who were asked to solve a logic problem, for instance, found that pilots were far more likely to speak convincingly in defense of their solution than navigators were, even when pilots were wrong and navigators were right.” (p 187)
Tools for the intelligent organisation
Looking at the enterprise 2.0 cases usually presented at enterprise 2.0 conferences, one can quickly spot the need for better integration. Integration, however, is hard. For many different reasons. A different approach is content aggregation: ensuring that all content is (or comes to) one central spot from where it can then be made sense of. What Surowiecki argues, though, is that maybe it is not so much about aggregating all information but rather about making it available to the community and allowing the community to make sense of it based on the knowledge of each member.
“the best tool for appreciating the collective significance of the information that the intelligence community had gathered was the collective wisdom of the intelligence community”
“what corporations should be looking for: ways to provide their employees with the incentive to uncover and act on private information” (p 209)
Adoption of tools in the organisation
There are different approaches to increase the chances of tool adoption in the organisation, or to improve knowledge sharing and collaboration. One of the ways is definitely by making the personal benefits perfectly clear for the individuals.
“for a collaboration to be successful it has to make each individual scientist more productive” (p 162)
Another approach is to create the scenarios (the tools), showing what can be done, and then letting people find out for themselves the best way of taking advantage of those contexts. And people, the crowds, can be great at coordinating themselves, often unaware that’s what they are doing.
“How can people voluntarily (…) make their actions fit together in an efficient and orderly way?” (p 86)
Cultural change
An interesting thread made me think of cultural change. It had to do with information cascade and the use of stories. Are we allowing organisational stories and information cascading perpetuate a culture which is contrary to the one we intend? How can we stop the unwanted stories? And how can we reduce the impact of top-down communication?
I am a strong believer that it is possible to instigate change from the bottom. I have been there and I have, in part, done that. It is not easy but it can be done. It is interesting to see some support for this in The Wisdom of Crowds:
“many coordination problems require bottom-up, not top-down, solutions” (p 86)
“what each person does affects and depends on what everyone else will do, and vice versa” (p 86)
(I am starting Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath so I will most likely come back to this topic in little while.)
The number of pages – 271 – and the small size of the printing font make reading this book seem a daunting prospect. However, I have to say it has been an absolute pleasure reading The Wisdom of Crowds. It is very well written, using simple language and clear reasoning. It was thoroughly researched, looks at things from different angles, challenges its own theories, and offers many, many examples that bring concepts to life. Surowiecki uses lots of academic experiments but also “real life” situations and events such as Google, decision markets, Linux, pricing process, flocks of starlings, the Quakers, the Columbia disaster, Zara, etc..
I have to agree that The Wisdom of Crowds is a must-read book for all those interested in information, collaboration, decision making and “social stuff”and an extremelly interesting read for all those interested in life.
“[T]he crowd is blind to its own wisdom” (p 36) and, I would add, and we are still very blind to the wisdom of the crowd!
