 Last month I laid out a suggested process, diagrammed at right, for business to use the principles in James Surowiecki's book The Wisdom of Crowds
to make key decisions and solve key problems facing the business.
Surowiecki provides compelling evidence that, in every field of human
endeavour, when properly canvassed large numbers of people, even if
only modestly informed, consistently produce significantly better
decisions and answers than the wisest smaller groups of 'experts'.
Collective wisdom, he argues, could be a powerful surrogate for
expertise, perhaps even replacing management and hierarchy in
organizations, and eliminating the need for expensive consultants,
professors and other self-proclaimed professionals.
The implications of this are enormous, from the possibility of truly
flat, egalitarian business enterprises that would be vastly more
effective and efficient than today's hierarchical ones, to the
possibility that those who cannot afford expertise from experts (such
as those in countries with no access to affordable health care) might
be able to get even better counsel, diagnosis and recommendations for
action by simply tapping into the collective wisdom of large numbers of
sympathetic, free, people.
In my earlier article I suggested four points in the decision-making process where the Wisdom of Crowds might be tapped:
- qualifying and ranking in importance the component issues that need to be addressed in order to make an intelligent decision
- qualifying the root causes underlying each component issue
- qualifying and ranking in probability of success the alternative solutions or remedial actions that address each root cause, and
- critiquing and validating the implementation proposal for the selected solutions and actions
In essence, collective wisdom reduces the role of the solution team
from one of expert decision-maker or advisor, to a purely
administrative role of compiling the candidate issue components, root
causes, alternative solutions, and implementation plans for the 'expert
assessment' of the 'crowd', and then doing what the crowd 'decided'.
So, for example, if the Problem is the ineffectiveness of the corporate
intranet, the administrative solution team would assemble the candidate
issues underlying this problem (e.g. inability of users to find things
on it), the possible root causes of these issues (e.g. poor intranet
organization, lack of awareness, lack of training, lack of time, lack
of motivation), the possible solutions (e.g. more training,
reorganization or rationalization of content), and the action plans to
implement the best solutions (e.g. personal productivity improvement).
The 'crowd', consisting perhaps of a broad cross-section of users and
customers, would do the important work of selecting and rating the
alternatives and critiquing the action plans.
As unorthodox as this is, it's really nothing more than a rigorous
approach to what the best business decision-makers do intuitively
anyway: canvass users and customers before they make decisions
affecting them.
There is still, of course, opportunity for the dis-empowered solution
team to fuck up. This decision process relies on the solution team to
actually come up with the alternatives, hopefully (but not necessarily)
a complete and unbiased list. That requires the solution team to
understand the problem and to have sufficient analytical (deductive)
and creative (inductive) intellectual capability to create complete and
logical lists of alternative issue components, root causes, and
solutions. The 'crowd', unfortunately, cannot be counted on to identify
missing alternatives and logical errors in their determination. So the
Achilles' heel of this proposal is that the solution team, perhaps
annoyed by being replaced as decision-makers and relegated to an
administrative role, might deliberately (or through lazy or biased
thinking) sabotage the process by producing distorted or deficient
lists of alternatives. Of course, the decision teams can do this now,
by making their decision based on biased preconceptions or in the
absence of all the facts and then reverse-engineering the facts and
lists of alternatives to justify that decision and discredit or
discount alternative decisions. Surowiecki outlines several notorious
cases where over-confidence, ego, groupthink, haste, or personal bias
of decision-makers led to catastrophic decisions.
What I'm getting to with all this is that perhaps the above model could be the modus operandi
of a new 'think-tank' that would apply its understanding of some of the
world's most urgent and intractable problems to develop, for each
problem, possible alternative issue components, root causes and
solutions, and then subject those alternatives to global 'Crowds' who
would decide which are the really critical component issues, which are
the real root causes, and which are the most viable solutions, and to
critique the resultant action plan to solve the problem. This is not a
referendum: In a referendum the 'crowd' merely ratifies or rejects a
solution that the 'experts' have come up with. In this model, the
'crowd' actually determines what the best solution is, eliminating in
the process, through successive rounds of decision-making, solutions
that stem from false understandings of the issues ("Iraq has WMD"),
false understandings of the root causes ("terrorists just hate
freedom"), and inferior solutions ("removing Saddam is the best way to
make the world safer from terror").
This is not the way think-tanks (more prosaically known as Institutes
for Public Policy Research) operate today. There are hundreds of
think-tanks in the world, most of them being:
- funded by, and beholden to, wealthy private (usually
undisclosed corporate) 'members', or by governments averse to radical
solutions and harsh criticism, or by universities with a particular
self-serving academic agenda
- directed and overseen by partisan Boards, almost all of
whom are PhD's, who select other, like-minded, PhD's to do the
think-tank's research
- preoccupied with the production of research papers that
advance the think-tank members' political or professional agenda, often
using selective choice of sources (mostly other research papers written
by other PhDs) to achieve the pre-determined slant
In Canada, for example, there are about a dozen think-tanks, the best
known of which are the right-wing CD Howe Institute and the
arch-right-wing Fraser Institute, both of which are beholden to their
corporate members and both of which are really nothing more more than
corporatist lobby groups masquerading under a thin veneer of academic
respectability. (At least in the US lobby groups are required to
register and admit what they are). The largest Canadian think-tank is a
captive of the Government of Canada, and really acts as one of the
government's research arms. It is usually apolitical to a fault, though
it occasionally tips its hand, as it is doing in its meeting today,
which features disgraced anti-environmental wingnut Bjorn Lomberg as
its guest of honour. Lomberg, by the way, is now in the employ of the
largest global think-tank, the arch-right-wing corporatist World
Economic Forum that holds the exclusive Davos meetings annually, its
selected members sequestered behind barbed wire to protect them from
the Wisdom of Crowds demonstrating in the streets.
Most of Canada's other think-tanks are creatures of Canadian
universities, and I'm challenged to tell you whether they have a bias
or not, because most of their research reports are so esoteric and
obscure I'm not even sure what they're about. A refreshing exception is
the tiny IISD, a think-tank for sustainable development based in
Winnipeg, which appears to be unbiased and committed to producing
helpful, actionable research. It, too, however, is dominated by PhD's,
and doesn't use the Wisdom of Crowds.
So my proposal is to set up a global think-tank based on the Wisdom of
Crowds. Whoever funds it would have to have faith in that wisdom,
because the above process won't tolerate bad research or bias, and the
decisions of the 'crowd' are final, not subject to override by experts
with or without PhDs. I believe for that reason that such a think-tank
would have enormous
credibility with governments and political leaders and innovators and
thought leaders and the media, where today's mostly-biased think-tanks
have very little. It would not be terribly expensive to run or staff --
after all, its staff would be knowledgeable, intelligent 'average'
people, with no expertise required. It would have to do some work to
flesh out its modus operandi,
since Surowiecki, beyond identifying the enormous promise of such
decision-making groups, doesn't elaborate on precisely how an
organization that was built around The Wisdom of Crowds would operate.
But I'm sure, if we have some challenges figuring out these details, we
can always tap into the Wisdom of Crowds to help us decide.
Anyone have a contact with George Soros? I've got a proposal for him.
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