Smart Meetings

I’ve just read the Wikipedia and Random House entries on James Surowiecki’s book The Wisdom of Crowds. These were pretty interesting, and I trawled around the net some more. So of course this makes me an expert…

The first thing that struck me was that Surowiecki’s argument makes sense, as far as it goes. In his words: “A ‘crowd’, in the sense that I use the word in the book, is really any group of people who can act collectively to make decisions and solve problems.” This use of the word derives from his writing on how markets work. He identifies four key qualities that make a crowd smart:

It needs to be diverse, so that people are bringing different pieces of information to the table. It needs to be decentralized, so that no one at the top is dictating the crowd’s answer. It needs a way of summarizing people’s opinions into one collective verdict. And the people in the crowd need to be independent, so that they pay attention mostly to their own information, and not worrying about what everyone around them thinks.

The next thing that struck me was the tangents and misunderstandings that many commentators derive from there. I suspect these come from two main sources. One is partly from Suroweicki’s examples of crowds, which include both people betting on a horse race and small teams working on a research problem.

The second source is the perspective (prejudice? predilection?) of the commentator. A good example of this is the set of criticisms that say crowds are more subject to ‘groupthink’ than to wisdom. This owes more to a particular soapbox, and ignores the fourth key quality above.

For me, it’s clear that Suroweicki’s ‘crowds’ are both similar and different to how I think about ‘groups’. This can be summed up in the difference between aggregating opinions and building consensus.

Funnily enough, good aggregation and consensus both rely on the qualities of diversity and decentralisation. The quality of independence is also shared, but used differently according to the methods used to arrive at a collective opinion. Aggregation works best when individuals don’t have much to do with eachother directly. They interact via betting pools, polls and the like. Conversely, consensus emerges from a process of dialogue.

The last thing that struck me was the confusion often shown between collaboration, consensus and compromise. But that deserves its own post.

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