One of the books I have on my reading lists is the one from James Surowiecki, with the intreguing title "The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations". I bought it at Calgary airport (I have to admit, it's the only time I thought about work during my holidays).
Surowiecki argues that large groups of independent people take better decisions than the best individual can do. And he write a lot of examples, very nice to read, to underscore the statement. One of the remarks that I found interesting is that we tend to look for "the" expert, but maybe we are wrong, and put too much effort in this searching: we better ask the group.
Now (being at one-third of the book) I have the questions: what is smart, and what is a crowd? For the last question, one of the chapters deals with teams, which is certainly not a crowd in my view.
The whole idea, if it is right, is interesting relating to the interest now on communities. But I'm still not (completely) convinced if the whole thought of the book is correct. I need to read more, I think.
And now I see the paper in Working Knowledge by Robert B. Cialdini, with a comparable theme. The first sentence could have been written by Surowiecki:
Group consultation has long been lauded as the best process for problem solving in organizations because it results in a wider range of solutions than most individuals can design on their own.
The paper is based on a research by P. Lauglin & colleagues at the University of Illinois. The explanation is different: a group can offer more perspectives than an individual can (which is not new), and the power of parallel processing (division of tasks, performed in parallel saves time). Again, something we already knew, from our own experience or CSCW studies.
The point here is the tendency of leaders and experts not to consult others in the teams, because they know less or are not as smart as the expert is him/herself. And another problem, which they call "captainitis", is a failure to collaborate: team members opt out of responsibilities that are theirs. The name comes from what was seen how members in an aircraft act when their captin makes a clearly wrong decision: they become passive and the error was not corrected. An action not only seen in the world of air travel. It seems to affect any kind of work setting, though I'm not sure if it applies to knowledge workers, who most of the time can make own decisions and don't have such an 'authority' as boss as in the air force. The hierarchy is not so strong there.
The problems described here are however still interesting, because we do a lot of team work here. A conclusion:
... the key to decision-making success is for the leader to avoind engaging alone in the processes that lead up to the final verdict. It is these predecisional processes that, when jointly undertaken, will benefit the sole dicision maker so richly.
Good point. Some people could learn from that. Maybe some (many, most?) leaders/experts are afraid to ask for opinions, to lose face. Others expect they know the answer.
From what sounded a similar problem in the book and paper, is worked out differently. In the paper, the leader's attitude is affecting the decision making process. In the book, there is no such dependency between the members (of the crowd, who make the decision). Well, maybe it stimulates me to finish the book (I know Henk wants to read it as well) and write about it. But with the Olympics on tv, I hardly have time to read!
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