Wisdom of Crowds

James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds is another great page-turner like Malcom Gladwell’s Tipping Point and Blink. Surowiecki is the first writer I’ve read who actually makes me think there might be some value to diversity and teams.

I generally bristled with skepticism when I read about efforts to increase diversity. Someone decides that in order to make the experience better for everyone, we need to mix things up a bit. My skepticism puts me in bad company, because I don’t buy into meritocracy and reverse discrimination arguments either. I support the idea of diversity more on a fairness level–MIT needed more women and (still needs) more black students. But I didn’t really believe it made the Institute a “better place,” just a fairer one. And fairness is good, so that makes it better.

But Surowiecki makes the case that groups of diverse people can actually make better decisions. Granted, there are a host of organizational dysfunctions that, in practice, make things frustrating, but in situations where groups of diverse, independent people are asked to solve a problem…and their solutions can be effectively aggregated, the end result is better than even the “best” or most expert individual in the group. At one simplistic level, all the bad ideas randomly cancel each other out.

Another thing that impressed me about the book is the economic realism. When I was in college, economists worshiped the idea of rational choice. I recall many arguments with economics majors who insisted that people acted to maximize self-interest…yet, all around us, every day, we witness people acting contrary to that interest. Similarly, collective action and coordination problems sound great in theory, but in practice we observe behavior that defies the theory.

For example, for all my adult life, I have been hearing people extol the virtues of group projects and team learning, yet my experience has generally been that a few motivated people always do all the work. Diverse viewpoints are solicited, but then ignored if they differ from the leader. Cliques of people whose opinions matter in an organization and people who do the work for them form and reform with the inevitable turnover. This is reality and it is dysfunction.

Surowiecki goes into enough detail, acknowledging the realities of group dynamics, and still manages to make a case that convinces me that there is really something valuable here. We don’t need to accept the negative, dysfunctional environments. If we can work through the things that hinder teamwork, then perhaps something amazing can happen.

With respect to diversity, I think so many people are missing the point. We don’t need our company to be a model UN with a representative from every minority group based on age, race, religion, etc.

What we DO need is cognitive diversity. As an example cited in the book, the modern NASA team that failed to anticipate and prevent the Columbia shuttle re-entry disaster, although more diverse than the Apollo 11 team from a generation ago, was not diverse in terms of thinking. Those white guys with crew cuts came a very different background–working in industry, working in factories, etc. When they attacked a problem, they had a lot more perspective than a generation that has been educated to death and vetted through a competitive system that gives us teams of “the best and brightest” who are all very similar.

You need a few yahoos in the room–not just, for example, a black MIT graduate, an Asian guy from Stanford, a woman from CalTech, and an Indian from Harvard. You need people on the team who will say “why do we have to do it that way?” And you need leaders who will facilitate teamwork, who understand its value and are not simply fulfilling their allegiance to an agenda they imperfectly understand and halfheartedly support.