The Wisdom of the Crowds

Wouldn’t you love to get the best ideas out of your team? You can, if you use the wisdom of crowds.

In 1906, or 1907, depending on where you read, Sir Francis Galton attended a farmers’ fair in Plymouth, England. There was a contest to correctly guess how heavy a butchered and dressed ox weighed.

This wasn’t some sweet and innocent observation Galton was making. He was the father of Eugenics and he didn’t think that the average member of society had enough sense to make good decisions.

Galton was reportedly to have said “The stupidity and wrong-headedness of many men and women being so great as to be scarcely credible.”

Society Strike Back

Galton took the results of the nearly 800 entrants into the competition and ran some statistical analysis on them.

Some of the guesses were laughably bad. They were drastically higher or lower than the actual weight of 1,198 lbs. The average weight of the 787 entrants was 1,197 lbs.

Just one pound off.

This number was closer than the guesses made by cattle experts. Galton remarked, “The results seems more credible to the trustworthiness of a democratic judgement than might have been expected.”

How to have it work for you and your team

There are a few caveats to having it work though.

1. Team members need to be able to answer independently and not be swayed by other people’s ideas. They have to have come to their own conclusion about the issue.
2. They need to get their information independently. If everyone has the same information they will most likely think the same thing.
3. There needs to be a way to collect the decisions without others seeing, I talk about an anonymous collection for getting better ideas here.
4. The crowd needs to be large enough and have a wide range of opinions.

Expertise Still Matters

The wisdom of crowds is great to get a pulse on how things are going, but specific skills and knowledge are still important.

If was was about to go into surgery, I would want a world-class doctor than a group of people having hunches about what they should do after they cut me open.

Who would you put your money on, Michael Jordan in his prime to make a game-winning shot or a 100 people all trying to decide what to do?

Expertise matters in certain areas, but so does the crowd, it is about weighting the opinions correctly and for what reason.