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.

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

Tips for making decisions in change programs

In Everett Rogers’ seminal work, “The Diffusion of Innovations” there is some very interesting suggestions on the importance on the decision making process as part of the innovation adoption dynamic. This decision-making focus is often left out of references to his work though I have always found it helpful when I am working with others to implement large scale changes in complex systems as well as the adoption of known best practices into more simple structures.

Rogers points out that the action of decision-making is the point of action in adopting a new idea. Others may try to persuade me, though nothing will matter until I have made a decision to adopt. You cannot make that decision for me. With this in mind, one of the most helpful questions I know to ask when encouraging the adoption of a new idea is “How can I help you make the decision?” This is starting with the premise that they are not forced into adopting the solution and I am open to helping in whatever way might be useful.

Rogers never got into the complexity of the decision-making process. One of the texts I find useful is “Crucial Conversations; Tools for Talking when the stakes are high” by Kett Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan and Al Swtitzler. They highlight four of the most common methods for making decisions and give ideas on how best to work with each.

Command; defined as a process where there is no involvement of others. This may also be a preference of some people who would prefer not to have to make a decision (or be responsible / accountable for making it).

Consult: is when you ask for input before making your choice. The essence is leaders still make the final decision, though with the ideas, opinions and views of others in mind.

Vote: work when everyone involved agrees to continue to support the final decision, even if they voted the other way. This works when there are a number of options.

Consensus; can be frustrating and time wasting unless carried out properly and with a focused intent. The authors suggest this option should only be used where the issue is high stake, complex and where everyone must absolutely support the choice.

So what has decision-making got to do with the spread of good practice and other large scale improvements?

In my experience, complex change programmes can feel very overwhelming. We spend a huge amount of time planning, working out what we want to get out of it and then how we might go about it. All programmes and especially the complex ones need a whole heap of decisions to be made before we even get to action, and then all those impacted by the change have their own decision making process to go through when the implementation starts. The problem for changes that are large in scale is the amount of detail, levels and complexity involved. The decision-making tactics need to reflect this.

So I use the following list as a diagnostic for the decision-making processes in a spread and large scale change programme. These can be used at the programme team level or the adopting team level.

1. For the programme itself, so we know what the meta decision-making process is (vote, consensus etc)? Have we agreed which issues need what type of decision process?

2. What is the key decision that needs to be taken in order for this new idea / change to be implemented in the workplace? Is this decision different for different people?

3. Who cares about the decision? If anyone cares about it yet they do not have to change their behaviour as part of the implementation process, how might we have a decision-making process that reflects this?

4. Who has to agree to the decision in order for us to gain benefits from the implementation? How does this affect our choice of the type of decision-making process we use as part of getting our work implemented.

How will you make your next decision?