Strategies for Surviving and Thriving in Challenging Times
Strategic Action #3 for Surviving and Thriving:
Adapt Your Life to Web 2.0 (Part 2)
The Role of Collective Intelligence
Experts own the world. No other classification of human mental output holds more sway over our lives.
Experts appear with predictable regularity in courtrooms, congressional hearings, corporate retreats, academic symposia as well as in our personal lives in the personages of doctors, lawyers, financial planners, spiritual advisors and a plethora of other roles.
Recently, the role of experts in our lives has been coming under sharp questioning. James Surowiecki’s book, The Wisdom of Crowds argues that “large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant – better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions and even predicting the future.” (From the front piece.)
The subject of the collective intelligence of groups of people is garnering growing interest. How is it possible that input from random aggregations of people can often outdo a gaggle of PhDs in choosing the best course of action in an undertaking?
James Shanteau offers some answers to that question in an online article, Competence in Experts: The Role of Task Characteristics.
Presumably, experts in a particular subject area enjoy considerable consensus among themselves. However, Shanteau’s research indicates that in a number of fields agreement among experts falls below 50 percent. These fields include stock-picking, livestock judging, and clinical psychology.
Raj Sisodia, my co-author of Firms of Endearment, and I were struck by how much FoEs strive to tap the “wisdom of the crowds” – that is, to enlist the collective intelligence in their organizations in problem solving.
Most companies do not permit collective intelligence to develop. It cannot thrive in the hierarchical social structures most organizations have. After all, people called CEOs, COOs, CFOs, CMOs and the like are a company’s in-house experts. Lowlifes on the front lines have neither the knowledge nor the thinking skills need to forge wise decisions.
Most companies are organized like a machine. They are made up of various moving parts that somewhat predetermine the general nature of outcomes. Each part has a designated function. The role of management is to see that each part is doing what it’s supposed to do, and to keep the moving parts working in harmony.
However, there is a better way to organize and operate a company. Instead of organizing a company artificially like a clockwork mechanism, organizing it more naturally as a complex adaptive system permits the wisdom of the crowds to form and express itself.
Like the self-correcting, self-organizing characteristics of Wikipedia, companies that are organized and operate along the lines of a complex adaptive system have an ability to make course changes far faster than mechanistically organized companies. They also more quickly spot and exploit new business opportunities.
Everyone agrees that the scale and pace of change that companies face today is unprecedented. Surviving and thriving have never been more challenging. On the other hand, so also are the opportunities unprecedented. And the companies that are being most successful in developing new business opportunities tend to be those that operate as complex adaptive systems that tap the wisdom of the crowds that flows from the operation of collective intelligence.
Finally, for a company to enjoy the greatest success in adapting to Web 2.0 (see th previous post), it is necessary to become less of a mechanistically organized and operating company and more of a complex adaptive systems organism. Hierarchical, command and control organizations are highly incompatible with the free-flowing, open source nature of Web 2.0.
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