Tapping the Wisdom of Crowds from The Global Knowledge Review, November 2004 James Surowiecki’s book The Wisdom of Crowds has provoked a great deal of controversy for espousing, and providing compelling anecdotal evidence to support, a blasphemous idea in a society with a cult of leadership and almost-unlimited reverence for grey-haired cognoscenti: Any large group of modestly informed, independent, diverse individuals will consistently and significantly outperform any expert (or small group of experts) in solving problems or making decisions. The book is so delightfully written that the implications of this message take a back seat to the entertaining and astonishing stories of how collective wisdom has triumphed over the greatest and most experienced minds on the planet. But those implications, for business managers in general and for those who work in the field of knowledge management in particular, are profound:
There is nothing remarkably new in the aspiration to gather collective intelligence: Lew Platt, former CEO at HP coined the now-famous expression ‘If only HP knew what HP knows’ a decade ago. But most KM practitioners took this to advocate the codification of everything that everyone in the organization has learned and written down, just in case that knowledge was useful again, and the design of search engines and community of practice spaces to increase the likelihood that, if it was, the people needing that knowledge might just be able to find it. But Dave Snowden has often made the point that even if the needed knowledge could be found, the loss of context that occurs in the codification process often renders that knowledge unusable, dangerous, or even unrecognizable. What Surowiecki is talking about is just in time knowledge, not just in case knowledge. It is the result of a knowledge process that I’ve coined knowledge canvassing – the ubiquitous and intuitive process of, when you don’t know the answer to something, picking up the phone or walking down the hall and asking someone you think might know the answer. I’ve long been an advocate of developing more formalized knowledge canvassing processes that could identify the best people to call, and simultaneously canvass a larger number of people to get additional perspectives. But Surowiecki’s book has emboldened me to think about casting a much broader net in the canvass. What if we were to create a new process that would automatically canvass everyone in the company and every current and potential customer of the company, whenever there was a critical decision to make or a critical problem to solve? Here’s what I think such a process, based on the classical decision-making process model used by organizations like NASA, might look like:
At each applicable stage in the process, employees, customers and prospective customers, most of them novices at decision-making, would be canvassed for their opinions: Are these the right alternatives to consider, and if so, in what order of priority? The Wisdom of Crowds answers could be benchmarked against the answers of both internal experts (marketing managers in our example) and external experts (marketing consultants in our example). My money’s on the crowd, and would have been even if I hadn’t read Surowiecki’s book. This raises all kinds of interesting questions and opportunities, of course. Some things to consider:
I confess to being something of an evangelist on this subject: I’ve written about it so often that when you Google ‘The Wisdom of Crowds’, my weblog How to Save the World ranks behind only the book’s publisher and Amazon in the results. But creating the infrastructure to capture collective wisdom would be inexpensive, and unless Surowiecki’s theories turn out to be discredited when they’re put to more demanding tests (which I don’t think will happen) the development of canvassing processes and technologies would seem to present enormous opportunities for companies large and small to reduce cost of failure and risk, and to innovate more effectively. These opportunities might even be enough to spark a resurgence in respect and demand for Knowledge Management. |
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