The Sharpest Tool in the Shed
Just over a hundred years ago, Francis Galton set out to prove that the majority of people are stupid. He devised a very simple experiment: take an ox into a public place and have lots of random people guess at how many pounds the ox weighed. He hypothesized that a few intelligent people would get close to the correct answer, but that the majority of people would be way off the mark.
Francis Galton was the scientist who, among lots of other things, started the eugenics movement. He held a worldview that believed intelligence among human beings was not only quantifiable in nature but that it was widely stratified among the human population. That is, in any population, he believed there were a few intelligent people amongst a lot of dummies.
The results of his experiment weren't quite was he expected. When he took the average of all the guesses that people had made and compared it to the actual weight of the ox, he found that the average of all the guesses was off by only a single pound.
What Galton had stumbled across was the tip of a much larger iceberg. The concept was explored more recently in a book called The Wisdom of the Crowds. According to the book, the results of Galton's experiment was not an isolated, freak occurrence. The book details several examples where the knowledge of lots of people was aggregated and found to be startlingly accurate.
The most surprising example is what happened after the Challenger exploded in the 1980's. Six months after the explosion and an exhaustive investigation into its causes, NASA concluded that a defective o-ring produced by a company named Morton Thiokol had caused the explosion.
Here's where it gets spooky: right after the explosion occurred, day traders and the stock exchange reacted immediately, knowing that the companies producing parts for NASA's space shuttles would fall in response to the accident. So, a massive selloff occurred. Guess which company was hit the hardest from a fall in its stock price's valuation? Morton Thiokol.
Of course, if you had asked any single stock broker or day trader who they thought was responsible for the accident, they wouldn't have been able to tell you. But the fact that the stock market was in place allowed the judgment of lots of people to be aggregated in centralized place and a general consensus to bubble to the surface.
The book has implications that reach far and wide, but the most important lesson I took away from the book had nothing to do with politics, economics, or the social sciences. The general idea in the book is summarized very well in the following excerpt:
"Under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them. Groups do not need to be dominated by exceptionally intelligent people in order to be smart. Even if most people within a group are not especially well-informed or rational, it can still reach a collectively wise decision."
In case you dozed off while skimming that paragraph, the important part is the first sentence: groups "are often smarter than the smartest people in them."
For me, accepting this conclusion was a perfect lesson in humility. When I'm in a group of people, my ego often tricks me into thinking that I'm smarter than everyone else. So when it comes time to decide on a course of action, my head convinces me I should strongly argue my opinion with anyone else who disagrees with me. The implication of the "wisdom of the crowds" concept is that if you're trying to reach the correct or best solution to a problem, the answer doesn't lie in ensuring that the smartest person in the group makes all the decisions. Instead, it lies in reaching a consensus among those in the group.
Cooperation is the key to making the right choice, not domination. It's not the first time I've ever heard that lesson. Socrates said that true wisdom lies in knowing that you know nothing. Insightful and wise advice, but a difficult lesson to teach with a single maxim.
If you're trying to prove you're smarter than everyone else, than maybe you should be telling everyone else they're wrong. (Although I don't think that works either.) If your goal is to reach the best possible conclusion, to get something done, to make things happen in the most efficient way, than you should be working to make the group arrive at a consensus.
In most cases, the most difficult part of leveraging the wisdom of the crowds is aggregation. Sure, it works when you're guessing something with a fixed numerical value, like the weight of an ox. But what about the strategy that your company or organization should take next? That brings to mind a conference table surrounded by people spewing their opinions, seemingly without listening to one another. It's hard to get a consensus out of that mess.
That's what a leader should be able to do. I don't think the best leaders are the most intelligent people among us. I posit that the best leaders are aggregators. They can take the opinions of many, dredge them together, and find the wisdom hidden in them. It's the difficulty of this task that makes it so valuable and so sorely needed. And it's something that almost anyone, smart or dumb, is capable of doing.
(By the way, if you haven't already, I recommend you buy the book now. It's a good read.)
Francis Galton was the scientist who, among lots of other things, started the eugenics movement. He held a worldview that believed intelligence among human beings was not only quantifiable in nature but that it was widely stratified among the human population. That is, in any population, he believed there were a few intelligent people amongst a lot of dummies.
The results of his experiment weren't quite was he expected. When he took the average of all the guesses that people had made and compared it to the actual weight of the ox, he found that the average of all the guesses was off by only a single pound.
What Galton had stumbled across was the tip of a much larger iceberg. The concept was explored more recently in a book called The Wisdom of the Crowds. According to the book, the results of Galton's experiment was not an isolated, freak occurrence. The book details several examples where the knowledge of lots of people was aggregated and found to be startlingly accurate.
The most surprising example is what happened after the Challenger exploded in the 1980's. Six months after the explosion and an exhaustive investigation into its causes, NASA concluded that a defective o-ring produced by a company named Morton Thiokol had caused the explosion.
Here's where it gets spooky: right after the explosion occurred, day traders and the stock exchange reacted immediately, knowing that the companies producing parts for NASA's space shuttles would fall in response to the accident. So, a massive selloff occurred. Guess which company was hit the hardest from a fall in its stock price's valuation? Morton Thiokol.
Of course, if you had asked any single stock broker or day trader who they thought was responsible for the accident, they wouldn't have been able to tell you. But the fact that the stock market was in place allowed the judgment of lots of people to be aggregated in centralized place and a general consensus to bubble to the surface.
The book has implications that reach far and wide, but the most important lesson I took away from the book had nothing to do with politics, economics, or the social sciences. The general idea in the book is summarized very well in the following excerpt:
"Under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them. Groups do not need to be dominated by exceptionally intelligent people in order to be smart. Even if most people within a group are not especially well-informed or rational, it can still reach a collectively wise decision."
In case you dozed off while skimming that paragraph, the important part is the first sentence: groups "are often smarter than the smartest people in them."
For me, accepting this conclusion was a perfect lesson in humility. When I'm in a group of people, my ego often tricks me into thinking that I'm smarter than everyone else. So when it comes time to decide on a course of action, my head convinces me I should strongly argue my opinion with anyone else who disagrees with me. The implication of the "wisdom of the crowds" concept is that if you're trying to reach the correct or best solution to a problem, the answer doesn't lie in ensuring that the smartest person in the group makes all the decisions. Instead, it lies in reaching a consensus among those in the group.
Cooperation is the key to making the right choice, not domination. It's not the first time I've ever heard that lesson. Socrates said that true wisdom lies in knowing that you know nothing. Insightful and wise advice, but a difficult lesson to teach with a single maxim.
If you're trying to prove you're smarter than everyone else, than maybe you should be telling everyone else they're wrong. (Although I don't think that works either.) If your goal is to reach the best possible conclusion, to get something done, to make things happen in the most efficient way, than you should be working to make the group arrive at a consensus.
In most cases, the most difficult part of leveraging the wisdom of the crowds is aggregation. Sure, it works when you're guessing something with a fixed numerical value, like the weight of an ox. But what about the strategy that your company or organization should take next? That brings to mind a conference table surrounded by people spewing their opinions, seemingly without listening to one another. It's hard to get a consensus out of that mess.
That's what a leader should be able to do. I don't think the best leaders are the most intelligent people among us. I posit that the best leaders are aggregators. They can take the opinions of many, dredge them together, and find the wisdom hidden in them. It's the difficulty of this task that makes it so valuable and so sorely needed. And it's something that almost anyone, smart or dumb, is capable of doing.
(By the way, if you haven't already, I recommend you buy the book now. It's a good read.)