Book Review: The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki

It's quite annoying to find out that groups make better decisions than you can as an individual - but a very powerful thought. However, the groups need to be diverse, independent and decentralised (so that may exclude a few crowds I can think of...)

We are essentially cooperative beings and meld our behaviour around that of others. One of the examples in the book is how crowds flow in shopping centres, how we move on staircases etc. We do all this even when there are no explicit rules. Mind you, as someone who regularly travels to the US from the UK I know what it is like to accidently move against this flow when I forget to walk on the "right". So maybe there are more socialised rules and logic than the author makes explicit.

One theme in the book which did appeal to me was the notion of the difference making a difference. While it seems inefficient, having a diversity of ideas seems to allow meaningful differences of ideas, especially at the early stages of decision making - and this is important. Groups also need to be able to distinguish good ideas from bad ideas and having more to choose from helps.

There is some helpful work about distinguishing the difference between situations which are easily defined by a single answer, such as the weight of an ox, and those which are more co-ordination problems, such as traffic manageemnt. Co-ordination problems come when all individuals want to go their own way. Here the wisdom of the crowd sound a lot like complexity science and simple rules and I wasn't totally convinced of all of his arguments. However, they were interesting.

A thought provoking book which much more to say that the few bits I have mentioned here.

The book's website is here http://www.randomhouse.com/features/wisdomofcrowds/ where there is a lot of detail and audio to download.

eLearning 1: 5 Resources for supporting online discussions

Creating and moderating an online discussion group requires more than sending out an email inviting people to join. In some cases it is not the cheap, quick fix you may be after. It's work. Treat it like a project - from strategy, planning, resource allocation through to evaluation.

Here are a few of my favourite resources on the topic:

1. Designing and Managing online discussions from Oxford Brookes University (PDF paper, with references - my favourite)
2. Teaching with online discussion forums - good introduction 
3. Online discussions: Tips for Instructors from the Centre of Teaching Excellence at the University of Waterloo. Web page with bullet hints
4. Using discussion boards to engage students 
5. How to avoid problems with online discussions - student guide. Short web page with more links on it. USeful because it is from the student/user perspective

NHS partnership working and improvement; we've been here before

A number of large scale programmes are running in the NHS in England where communities are getting together to improve health and social care services. The projects have a wide membership from mostly statutory public sector organisations but also some in the voluntary sector. As some of the strategies sounded familiar I checked the Department of Health website.

I was involved in partnership working in the NHS in the mid and late 1990's. At that time in England there were also Healthy Action Zones which seem very similar to many of the programs underway at present. It seems to topic is coming round again but with a new language and consequently a delay in making changes. There are many papers and documents available form around 2002 - 2004 which have self-assessments, methods, best practice examples, case studies and similar. I find it so disappointing that those who are responsible for the spread of good practice and large scale change feel the need to continue to reinvent wheels - thus not practising what they preach.

If you are interesting in learning what has gone on before and in adopting and adapting existing ideas for large scale change then try out these papers from the Department of Health:

Working in Partnership; developing a whole systems approach (notable because it covers productivity - and this was 2002...)

Governance in partnership checklist of good practice

If you only want what is new then try
Working with Stakeholders which is 2010

Crowdsourcing shifts us from what to how

"to improve" is a verb. A verb is a "doing word". Improvement is action. Collecting and storing examples of good practice is a displacement for action. Huge knowledge banks where the thing of the 1980's (yes, thirty years ago) and by the late 1990's were largely discredited as a mechanism for helping spread good practice. The few organisations that did manage to leverage the codified knowledge, did so because they institutionalised through clever IT systems, the search and sharing of knowledge. Note, this sharing was linked to the individuals with the ideas and not odd pieces of extracted information. The personal relationship mattered.

What does the modern day action to improve look like when we are aiming to avoid the reinvention of wheels?

a) We crowdsource. We call on the community for their ideas. However, asking for and then collating ideas is not crowd sourcing - it is a cheap way to create an ineffective database. Crowdsourcing works when participants rate ideas, decide which is best. Many organisational leaders fear crowdsourcing because the answers may not be what they want.

b) We get more active in presenting the problems and then asking people to provide answers - as an open call. The joy in this approach is it is not limiting the solution to the thinking and mindsets of employees. This has been around for at least a decade and the are many websites and systems to help make this happen. Some organisations even provide all their data so others, not part of the organisation, can use it to help solve the problem. The first step to making this happen s to give up control and to ask for help.

In the UK we are experiencing the crowdsourcing as the Government has set up systems to ask for ideas on solving problems. I like the way they are asking the citizens on ideas and not restricting it to Government employees only.

Crowdsourcing gives the vote to the hungry consumers and nto to the turkeys.

Some Crowdsourcing links and resources


1. Wikipedia: for starters

2. IdeaScale is where you can set up your own Q&A and ranking community for innovations. There are hundreds of existing web applications for crowdsourcing so if you are spending money creating your own then let's hope there is am excellent reason for doing so.

3. Fevote - place to make suggestions and get votes on them (great for research and tests of change)

4. Kluster: - stunning group decision-making tool

5. Good blog post on crowd sourcing resources

Learning is part of knowledge management

There's a good article in Harvard Business Review 08/08 Vol.36 No. 8 P.60 by Amy Edmondson, entitled "The competitive imperative of learning".

This article is about the global trend to move away from a product based organisations to those that are more knowledge based - that is where the value is now. A process called EAL - execution-as-learning is introduced as a means to support the organisational learning and knowledge management process.

I like this framework because it is action orientated (good for healthcare) and shows how competitiveness can be managed, challenged and leveraged, though collaborative tools. This sounds a bit like an oxymoron. My view is that competitiveness might be the overarching strategy but it is delivered, at the action level, by collaborative working, including the use of systems and tools to enable this. There is also an emphasis on evaluation and feedback as essential parts of the learning process.

Contributors, consumers and conduits of information

In the past few weeks I have been involved in a number of different virtual, web teaming activities most of which involve one or more of the following activities: the use of chat groups, uploading of documents to share, editing of a shared document using collaborative software, creation and editing of a wiki, telephone conference calling and webinars. It struck me through this process that the virtual world is no different to the face-to-face world. Some people are contributors, some are consumers and some are conduits.

There is a rule of thumb (rough, as I haven't found any research evidence to prove it) that for online chat groups you can expect around 1% of the signups to be active contributors in the sense they provide information, resources and editing effort, 10% to be participants in that they will discuss and use what is made available to them, while the rest, if they engage at all, will be passive. A small number of those who engage may also act as conduits of information for those outside of the participating system.

For online groups there are a number of techniques to improve and increase the rates of participation and good virtual facilitators and moderators will use these. Similarly in conference calls and other virtual web teaming tools there needs to be guidance and leadership to help those who may be unfamiliar with the techniques.

However, let's look at regular communication.

To spread good practice we need people who will contribute to the generation of new ideas, who will help adapt existing practices to new contexts. This takes effort. We also need conduits who pass information along. Then there needs to be willing consumers of the messages sent out. I'm not sure what to call those who are not contributors, conduits or comsumers - I know some people will fall into that category!

For the next project I'm working on in spreading good practice and encouraging others to adopt better ideas I'll do some analysis on how many and who we think in the specific system are contributors, conduits and consumers of the ideas. And then develop communication and action plans accordingly.

Creative Commons 2008 Sarah Fraser Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derviative

Spreading or sharing? Chicken or Egg?

If you share something with someone, then the idea will have a greater likelihood of being passed on to someone else than if you didn't. This must be a basic premise. Then is the dynamic of sharing the same as basic communication? Let's assume for now that it is. Sharing also encourages new discussion, new ideas, feedback, creativity etc. This can provide a fertile context for the growth and dissemination of ideas.

The language used for spreading changes, scaling up improvement, making large scale impact - whatever you want to call it - comes across as an all powerful notion, with someone in charge, coordinating activity. Yes, if you're responsible for a large organisation and there are benefits to be had from having all departments operating at the industry benchmark, then you may have a right to sound like you want to start coordinating some improvement activity.

It feels a bit like the second example is the chicken (no jokes about headless ones, please...) and the first, sharing example, is the egg. Sharing requiring giving something of yourself, revealing an inner centre. It also works well when true collaboration takes place - to get lost in the analogy, I'm thinking omelettes now.

However, what puzzles me most is if I want good practice and ideas to spread around my organisation then which of the chicken or the egg do I want to encourage the most, and which would I start with?

Without sharing, without breaking eggs, there's unlikely to be any impact whatsoever. Without structure and some force, chicken processing, the impact will most probably be limited to small areas and marginal, at best.

So thinking this through, I'm going to want to draw up plans for scaling up of ideas that take both perspectives into account. And I need to find a way to figure out which one comes first.

What do you think? Chicken or egg? Spread or share?

Creative Commons 2008 Sarah Fraser Attribute-Non-Commercial-No Derivative

Web 2.0 is an important spread medium; it is not just for geeks!

The real "geeks" are talking about Web 3.0 so let's just stick now to Web 2.0. The term loosely refers to a category of internet tools that enable users to actively participate with content on the web. This is so much more than just participating in a chat group. It is about being able to customise your interactions, join up two different programs, make the web a very personal space for yourself right from how it looks through to how it performs for you. Web 2.0 users operate from a personal and community perspective and use the technologies available to them to bypass organisational and social walls.

Both formal and informal organisations that remain stuck in the Web 1.0 world of passive web systems, of the "come and get our information" or "network only within our boundaries" will soon find themselves with a generation of deskilled staff and a customer / client base who drop out sight. If the organisation holds a monopoly for their service, like many public services, then the incentive to invest in Web 2.0 is often limited as the customer has no option. The loss here is the reduction in staff skills and the inability for the gains in knowledge sharing, community building and the sharing of good practice that Web 2.0 can bring with it.

So what can Web 2.0 are some of the benefits of Web 2.0 for spreading good practice, or just sharing good ideas round communities - how can it help?

Publishing and sharing information widely over the internet
a) Use blogs (this is a blog..); personal information is important and can have an impact. If you're really scared then anonymous blogs are possible and could even spark a bit of fun
b) Tag; basically this is booking your favourite sites and then sharing your favourites with others in your social or work circle. Think about the possibilities.
b) RSS Feeds; these allow you to subscribe to places on the web so the infomration is delivered to you when the site / page is updated. Incredibly useful as you don't have to remember to go looking. It shocks me how many important healthcare websites do not have an RSS Feed facility.

Networking and collaborating with others
a) Social networking sites are ten-a-penny. Each has its own flavour. Check out which ones your staff are using now and why. By limiting your organisation to only organisation-wide ones you may be limiting their network and community. My favourite is Linkedin.
b) Whenere does the real news come from? To spread good ideas do we send out newsletters or allow the citizen journalists to use the architecture of participation we have put in place to share their videos and stories?
c) Wikis are ways to allow the we-think teams to create and work together and produce output. This is about dissemination through to adoption (in our spread terms) all in one go and not as a linear process.

Sharing and showing messages and information
a) Photos; there are many different websites with a variety of functions to allow sharing with comunity functions.
b) Podcasts; not just to deliver information, but also to provide ways to manage the downloads and streamline the way that the receivers then use their time more effectively (no more email and paperwork)
c) Videos; U-tube has stolen the market maybe, though this is one of the most succesful methods to get a message across and is almost compulsory. Think citizen journalism though. In web 2.0 the citizen create and share the content.
d) Mashups; this is where information from different places is combined, like putting submitted videos onto a Google map so you can see the location of where entries for a competition are coming from.

I think using Web 2.0 is not so much as using a set of technology tools as engaging with a different mindset about how we do business. It's like not "how do I use MS Outlook", it's "how do I best use the concept of email to carry out my tasks and build relationships", or not "how do I use the @stdev function in MS Excel" but rather "are there some useful functions in MS Excel that may help me in my role as a quality improver"? So Web 2.0 is not "how do I blog" but rather "what can we get from the concept"? or ""how can we mash-up" but "what mash-ups will add to our business value and further spread good practice?"

The technical boffins will always be around to help us do the techie stuff. The strategic and tactical business thoughts and discussions around Web 2.0 need to take place for them to be able to implement and reveal their talents.

(c) 2008, Sarah Fraser