 Early in The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki makes this statement about decision-making:
"There
is no evidence that one can become expert in something as broad as
decision-making, policy, or strategy...or perhaps even management. ...
Large groups of diverse individuals will make more intelligent
decisions than even the most skilled decision-maker."
The
implication of this is that individual business executives, expert
consultants, investment analysts, learned doctors and heads of state
are not competent to make important decisions related to cognitive,
coordination or cooperation problems, and should always defer to the
collective wisdom of large diverse groups when such problems arise.
Surowiecki
identifies five types of decisions that qualified (reasonably informed,
diverse, independent) 'crowds' are especially competent at:
- ascertaining (all the) pertinent facts surrounding an issue
- predicting outcomes
- making a decision among a discrete set or finite range of alternatives
- determining an optimal process to follow (in simple or complicated situations, but not complex ones)
- assessing causality (in simple or complicated situations, but not complex ones)
Crowds
are not particularly good at imagining solutions to problems, or
knowing which tools and methods to use to solve them – creative groups
and individuals are better at these elements of decision-making.
Most
decisions involve some aspects that are best done by a substantial
diverse crowd, and other aspects that are best handled by small
creative groups or individuals. The chart above right shows how these
aspects could be combined to make an overall decision.
We make
decisions based on a judgemental synthesis of what we 'know'
intellectually, perceptually, emotionally, and intuitively. That
knowledge may be direct, from personal experience, or indirect, from
what we've read or been told by someone whose judgement we trust.
Indigenous
peoples tend to make decisions more holistically, rather than biasing
their decisions in favour of intellectual knowledge alone. They are
more tentative in their judgements and try to allow more time for all
knowledge, including that which is subconscious, to be considered and
integrated. They will place great weight on the judgements of those
they trust, but ultimately each individual will be trusted (given the
authority) and expected (given the responsibility) to make any decision
that affects them alone, without having to justify it to others. When
the decision affects others, they will make the decision-making process
a collective one, and will allow those who disagree with the decision
to opt out of it (provided that does not adversely affect the welfare
of others).
In today's crowded and massively interdependent
world, nearly every decision affects many people, and we rarely have
either the responsibility or the authority for making decisions alone.
And, as Surowiecki points out, when we do have the personal authority
to make decisions for others (because of our position atop the
hierarchy), we are likely to do so badly. So many important decisions
either are, or should be, collective decisions.
If you have watched decisions being made by a collective, you can see how this process can go terribly wrong. A particular vulnerability of collectives is the all-too-human propensity to be grateful that
someone else is taking on the difficult work of running the group and
making the tough decisions. The politics of collective decision-making
often comes down to the grabbing of authority and the shrugging off of
responsibility, until the decisions end up being made by a small
faction (or even an individual) willing to accept (most of) the
responsibility for the decision as long as they have (substantially all
of) the authority. It’s a copping-out process that allows the
power-hungry and indifferent to collude and bully the remainder, and
this invariably leads to sub-optimal decisions.
Collective
decisions also tend to give greater weight to intellectual knowledge
than perceptual, emotional, and intuitive knowledge, because of its
perceived 'objectivity' (and hence simpler process of achieving
understanding and agreement on its veracity). As a result, collective
decisions, even those we have acceded to, often leave us feeling
uneasy, since we feel (emotionally or intuitively, but in ways we can't
readily articulate) that the decision-making process was incomplete and
flawed.
Nowhere is this prejudice for intellectual knowledge
more evident than in the new field of "evidence-based decision-making'.
Evidence (=what can be seen or understood easily)
will not allow for the introduction of emotional or instinctive
judgement, no matter how valid it may be. It can be applied
tyrannically to overrule experience with the greater weight of
'empirical data' and so-called 'best practices', even when the result
may be catastrophic. It can also be applied helpfully to overrule
pigheadedness and short-sightedness.
So, for example, the egomaniacal doctor who 'knows' that prescribing x is always the best solution for every patient can be reined in and made more responsible when 'the evidence shows' that y
is usually a better prescription. But so too can the professional whose
insight into individual differences may cause him/her to occasionally
prescribe z because in a rare
few other cases in his/her experience, with a certain combination of
symptoms (too few to constitute substantive 'evidence'), z proved to be a better answer.
You can be sure the lawyers will weigh in consistently on the side of treatment y, to the advantage of the patients of the egomaniacal doctor doling out x, and to the detriment of the patients of the wise doctor, patients for whom z is a better prescription. The result is that every patient with the general symptoms will get prescribed y, and will be unable to sue even if the doctor knew z or x would have been a better prescription. And every patient prescribed z or x will be able to sue their doctor, even if that was
the best prescription in their individual case. We should all have
learned by now that in complex (human and ecological) systems there are no best practices – every situation is different, and the 'best practice' for dealing with it is unique.
Evidence
is, after all, a loaded word. What we call evidence is the data that we
personally find useful in a particular context, and in complex systems
we all have different contexts and perspectives, so we will never agree
on what is appropriate evidence, or on what the evidence 'means'. For
example, when a conservative politician reads crime news, he sees
'evidence' supporting a decision for more law and order. The liberal
considering the same data will see 'evidence' for a decision to improve
social welfare, improve education and strengthen gun control.
The
best sort of evidence is first-hand observation, since the context is
harder to omit or misconstrue, but even it must be filtered through our
personal worldviews, worldviews that are inherently subjective and
biased. And sometimes that's a good thing: unemotional, insensitive,
unintuitive decisions can be colossally bad ones.
Stories are the best second-hand
evidence, but we all know how subversive they can be, by selective
omission and emphasis. As for lesser evidence, lies, damned lies and
statistics, as they say. You can make the numbers say whatever you want
them to say.
So there are six major obstacles that interfere with our ability to make good collective decisions:
- Exclusion:
Not involving all of the necessary or appropriate people in the
decision-making process (e.g. excluding the patient from medical
decisions).
- Political Interference:
Precluding fair and equal participation of all members of the
collective group (e.g. by bullying, back-room deals, power games and
abrogation of responsibility).
- Personal Bias: In how our worldview filters and interprets the ‘evidence’.
- Bias Towards Intellectual Knowledge:
Because what we know holistically is subtler and more complex than we
can ever express in language and hence communicate persuasively to
others.
- Context-Free Evidence:
Some of the best 'evidence' can only be properly internalized when it
is observed directly, or at least understood through
exceptionally-crafted stories; without such context, mere data loses
much of its decision-making value.
- Consensus-Building Incompetence: Few
of us have learned the difficult skill of engaging other points of
view, synthesizing, working through differences instead of glossing
them over, trivializing them, or over-compromising – work that is
necessary to achieve true consensus. Most of us have little patience
for this process, which can take enormous time and energy.
The
solution, as with most complex problems, is to discover and follow good
working models. Open Space and its invitation process can help address
the problem of exclusion. So can simple humility: find the politician
and the doctor and the planner who consult genuinely with those
affected by their decisions before they are made. My experience has
been that informed groups with good facilitators can minimize political
interference.
Only good critical thinking skills, and
patience, can begin to overcome our most dangerous personal biases:
Things are the way they are for a reason, and we are oh so quick to
judge and oversimplify what that reason is. Knowing people who do think
holistically (hard to find in the corporate world, alas) can help you
acquire this capacity yourself, reducing your bias toward 'objective',
rational knowledge.
Getting out of your house and office and
seeing things first hand will increase your appreciation of the
complexity of issues and your insistence on creating a context of
understanding before jumping to conclusions (and decisions). So will
learning to tell better stories. And the only solution for improving
your consensus-building competence is practice. I know a dozen people who seem
to be able to achieve remarkable consensus, but only two of them (both
women) do so genuinely, and it's a skill that did not come easily (the
other ten are just great at sweeping differences under the rug, which
inevitably resurface later with greater virulence).
So, like
motherhood and apple pie, Evidence-Based Decision-Making is a great
idea. But what evidence, according to whose interpretation, arrived at
how, in what context, assessed through what decision-making process,
and including whom?
The devil, as always, is in the details.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
