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The (Lack Of) Wisdom of Crowds
By Richard Nantel | November 12, 2008
In 2004, Tim O’Reilly coined the term Web 2.0 to describe the Internet as a software platform used for interaction and collaboration.
That same year, James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations was published. This best seller stated that decisions and information produced by groups are often better than those produced by an individual.
Four years later, the benefit of collaboration over individual effort has been embraced as dogma. It’s now difficult to find anyone who believes that the work of an individual can be better than what is produced by a group.
At the risk of being labeled as someone who “does not play well with others,” I disagree with the belief that the results of a group effort will usually produce superior results to the efforts of skilled individuals. Sometimes groups will produce excellence. Sometimes groups will produce mediocrity. Sometimes groups will produce disaster.
Disagree? Take a look at your investments. (No don’t. It’s too ugly.)
Take a look at the current financial markets, the ultimate collaborative environment. How much group intelligence exists there these days? Markets are gripped in fear, and investors are selling even their best holdings, driving down the indexes and vaporizing wealth around the globe. In the meantime, smart contrarians such as Warren Buffet are dismissing group think and picking up quality investments at bargain basement prices.
How well do groups behave in times of emergencies?
Here’s the supreme example of when collaboration is critical. Plane crash survivors describe madness as people claw and elbow each other to get to an exit first. Working together would save more lives. Instead, exits get overwhelmed, slowing the ability of everyone to get out.
How about artistic collaboration?
Handel locked himself alone in a room for 24 days to write his famous oratorio, the Messiah. Would it have been a more moving work had he written it at the local coffee shop with some other composers? Who knows. My bet is that artistic genius would get diluted in a group, unless all collaborators were at the same high level of ability and inspiration.
What about sports?
Why do teams with individual super stars often do better than teams that comprise average but well-rounded players? Hockey fans should think back to the Wayne Gretzky days in Edmonton. Sure, “The Great One” had other skilled players on his team, but Mr. Gretzky had a genius for reading plays and knowing where the puck would end up that others lacked.
Surely big ideas come through collaboration?
We’re living in a golden age of non-fiction books. It seems that, every month, new titles appear that change how we see the world. How many of these titles are co-authored? They are almost always written by one individual with a unique perspective.
It’s not that I’m anti group. I’m just very much pro genius.
Topics: Collaboration, Learning |
November 13th, 2008 at 8:05 am
[...] The (Lack of) Wisdom of Crowds | Brandon Hall Research | Richard Nantel | 12 November 2008 [...]
November 13th, 2008 at 9:35 am
What Richard raises is an important issue, but for each of his examples, one can find counter examples such as the wise choices made in the recent US election, the fact that everyone got off alive and without panic from a burning Air France jet that crashed in Toronto two years ago, and the beautiful playing of the Montreal Symphony. Of course individuals are important in these examples as well, as leaders and activists, but the group collaboration was also necessary for the positive results.
Richard’s article is an example of oppositional thinking. It is not one or the other type of production that is useful, but both, and usually a mix of each type in any given situation. We can be individual achievers, but we always need the groups around us for their performances in each human drama. It is, as David Bakan, my professor of religion in 1967, titled his book, “the duality of human existence”.
We do need strong individual performances, close collaboration among 3-8 colleagues (the situation at Brandon Hall Research), and the immersion into larger communities and gatherings just for their excitement. I feel blessed to work in a situation that allows all three modes of being.
November 14th, 2008 at 3:03 am
It might be better to make at least two distinctions that will save both theses. For breakthrough accomplishments - artistic, pragmatic or scientific - individual genius is required. Einstein, Poincaré and a few others were thinking along the same lines but were completely isolated from one another. And only one managed to put it together.
The wisdom of crowds through collaboration works according to a different principle: it promotes not so much innovation as cultural change, the spreading and acceptance of new ideas (good and bad) and best (or most opportunistic) practices to a wider group that continues collectively to modify current paradigms and clusters of associated ideas and perceptions. Groups rarely (or perhaps never) produce the spark of breakthrough innovations. But they provide the kindling by giving those innovations meaning and then engaging in the slog work of testing them against all the other elements of the current system. That’s how cultures - social practices… but also industrial and intellectual practices - evolve.
The comparison to the economy seems to me to demonstrate the problem created by assuming an equation between crowds and collaborative groups. The idea behind “wisdom of crowds” wasn’t that collaboration was good or that the end result of collective decisions was “wisdom”. The point of it was to show that statistically lots of people making individual decisions do a better job identifying “value” (as perceived by… the culture) than isolated individuals spending their time analysing it. The way the collaborative “crowds” of thinkers have treated the initial idea is a good example of how crowds actually function in collaborative mode: they change the perception of meaning. The financial crisis is different. It’s a case of non-collaborative individual decision-making on a massive (global) scale. The problem isn’t that the individuals didn’t make the wisest decision – they did in terms of the theoretical model of the system and its core value, the pursuit of short-term self-interest – it’s that the system has a cultural and historical logic of its own that contains some serious vices. Systemic vices always lead to some form of punishment and the possible but far from inevitable “collaborative” correction of the system. The system – in this case the financial market - is never as “wise” as the individuals or the groups that both rely on it for survival and “play” with it. I would even suggest that the idea of “playing the market”, which can’t decide whether it’s serious or fun, is part of the problem and contributes to the systemically organised evacuation of all ethical pressure tending towards social responsibility.
Any serious student of culture should know that the reigning individualistic ideology of the “developed nations” does not represent the fundamental pattern governing human and social relations, that it is indeed a curious exception, both geographically and historically. Most societies give priority to other forms of decision-making than short-term self-interest. Ours doesn’t. But if we step outside our western capitalist framework to form “thought experiments” the way Einstein did, we might one day discover the principle of relativity that seems so lacking in both our thinking and practice.
November 24th, 2008 at 4:20 pm
I think the popularity of the wisdom of crowds owes at least something to people who either dislike or don’t work well in hierarchies. Maybe it’s that tension between groups (with a common purpose that focuses discussion in a particular direction) and networks.
My belief is that many working in the training / learning field are artists, rather than artisans — they have individual visions, individual preferences, and prefer to create structure on an ad hoc basis. My own training doesn’t fit this all that well (which is why I list my religion as “Reform Behaviorist”); I’ve found a lot of value in shared terminology, approaches, techniques.
I’m a bit dubious about the genius part, though. As Joe Thiesman of the Redskins said, “the word genius doesn’t apply in football; a genius is a guy like Norman Einstein.”
I do think technology is making it easier for (some) people to connect, to form networks. But it’s also making it harder for some — witness the “blogs are dead” notion at the same time that some people are just taking them up. Six months from now, Twitter will be the hula hoop of web 2.0, with the cool kids having gone elsewhere (in part because folks within one sigma of the mean are arriving).
A colleague and I made a short presentation to a local ASTD chapter’s performance improvement group — talking about social bookmarks, blogs, wikis, and network sites. I was afraid we’d seem too basic; the reactions said that was a needless worry.
And it was a great reminder of two things: the value of emphasizing the result, rather than the technology, and the novice’s concerns about what looks like a huge learning curve.