Energized Work

Wednesday, 6 August 2008

Agile2008: James Surowiecki on The Wisdom of Crowds

James Surowiecki kicked off Agile2008 with his keynote speech on Wisdom of Crowds . And he did it without a Powerpoint deck. "Awesome", as the Canadians say. I read the book about a year ago and the talk was still fascinating.

A group is often more intelligent than the most intelligent person in the group. This doesn't just happen. There are 3 conditions necessary for a group to be smart:

The group must be able to aggregate the judgments of individuals into a collective judgment.
The group must comprise a diverse set of people who demonstrate cognitive diversity, coming at the problem from different perspectives, to avoid everyone making the same mistake.
Individuals in the group must act independently, like individuals, and think for themselves to avoid groupthink . People need to offer up their own judgments and not succumb to peer pressure.

The more homogenous a group becomes the dumber it gets. A team that's been together long enough for people to become friends outside work is a group that is probably becoming homogeneous in some respects. I tweeted recently about seeing a team that has been together for a long time start to demonstrate familial traits like bickering and squabbling. The best group decisions emerge from constructive disagreement and conflict but squabbling is not the kind of chemistry needed to leverage the wisdom of crowds in a team. Regularly introducing new people to groups is an effective way to avoid ossification of the group so we've taken steps to break the team up and form a number of new teams into which we've introduced new people.