One of us is smarter than all of us

You've heard the saying "none of us is as smart as all of us", and you've felt the pressure. A group of individuals working together as a team can do better work, reach better decisions, etc. After all, two heads are better than one. Right?

Given how much I can't stand (with a passion) that idea, I almost skipped the keynote talk by James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds. And that would have sucked. Because what he said was amazing, and I had his perspective (mostly) wrong.

He started with a few thoughts on how ants (and so many other creatures) are quite simple and stupid, but that their intelligence and complexity grows with the number of interactions between them. More ant interaction equals more sophisticated behavior. It's similar to flocking behavior, of course, where birds follow very simple rules but complex behavior emerges.

And that's all great and intuitive... until you get to humans. Humans, he said, demonstrate the opposite principle: more interactions equals dumber behavior. When we come together and interact as a group seeking consensus, we lose sophistication and intelligence. Ants get smarter while we get dumber.

So how does this track with the name of his book?

Where I had it wrong is that his book's premise (wisdom of crowds) comes with qualifiers.
The wisdom of crowds comes not from the consensus decision of the group, but from the aggregation of the ideas/thoughts/decisions of each individual in the group.

At its simplest form, it means that if you take a bunch of people and ask them (as individuals) to answer a question, the average of each of those individual answers will likely be better than if the group works together to come up with a single answer. And he has a ton of real examples (but you'll just have to read the book for them ; )

He makes other really important points including one that's related to my previous post on the lack of women at ETech--diversity increases the quality of the aggregated wisdom of the group. If you have too many people who are alike, then no matter how smart they all are, they may not come up with the same quality of answer than if you have less smart folks who have a very different point of view. Diversity brings new information. And that new information is valuable.

Which leads me to... my previous post where I talked about the missing women at ETech. According to Surowiecki's formulas, the more alike the attendees of these tech conferences are, the less likely it is that you have the diverse opinions and ideas that lead to better ideas.

In order for the crowd to have wisdom, the crowd has to be made up of individuals who argue! Or as he puts it in the book, "Diversity and independence are important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest, not consensus or compromise. An intelligent group, especially when confronted with cognition problems, does not ask its members to modify their positions in order to let the group reach a decision everyone can be happy with. Instead, it figures out how to use mechanisms--like market prices, or intelligent voting systems--to aggregate and produce collective judgements that represent now what any one person in the group thinks but rather, in some sense, what they all think."

And my favorite line that sums it up:

"Paradoxically, the best way for a group to be smart is for each person in it to think and act as independently as possible."

The last time I posted about individuals vs. teams in The Power of One, I took some heat in comments and other blogs for glorifying the person who is willing to stand up against the rest of the team. Although that wasn't my intention, I believe that group think and the overemphasis on happy productive teamwork has done more harm than good to innovation. Somewhere, there's a good balance, but right now it's too far in the favor-the-team-over-the-individual side. And this book explains exactly why and how the diversity and dissent--which are usually considered bad characteristics in a team, can (under the right circumstances--managers, don't freak out here--all disclaimers apply) lead to something much greater than what the team can do when everyone must agree.

Interestingly, others speaking at the conference had similar messages. Bran Ferren of Applied Minds talked about software development and made a point that "art isn't the product of a team." I'll leave that to you to think about what he meant by that. I have my own ideas... ; )