Dave Pollard on The Wisdom of Crowds
There have been a flurry of blog posts on James Surowiecki's book, The Wisdom of Crowds. Dave Pollard's terrific review really encapsulated the issues that I'm paying attention to when working with distributed groups: how to avoid group think and individual arrogance while still achieving group goals.
Dave writes:
Groupthink can be prevented, he (Surowiecki) says, by ensuring the group has intellectual diversity, independence (from each other) and is neither too centralized nor too decentralized. A group with these qualities is inherently more knowledgeable and its judgement more sophisticated, informed and reliable than any CEO or 'subject matter expert' that business, with its cult of leadership, tends to rely on for making critical decisions.
In the distributed communities I work with, I see a need for constantly balancing control and emergence. Groupthink and singular control both sit at one end of the spectrum. At the other end sits another pair of unlikely siblings, chaos and inaction.
I agree that diversity, independence and the balance between centralized and decentralized is important to avoiding groupthing or tyranny by one arrogant individual. But for creating meaningful "work" -- output, convergence, creation, learning -- there also needs to be some bit of interdependence as well. Or perhaps it is more like letting go of ego. Listening. Being willing to change your mind and see another point of view. Distributed work cannot JUST be about individuality collected into a group. It also has to be able to embrace some part of the communal.
This balance is not just the science of process, but the art of thinking, feeling human beings. And it is very challenging online.
posted by Nancy White at 2:08 PM
6 Comments:
Nancy,
There is indeed a fine balance between diversity and distributed spaces that we need to explore. Blogs have their place and some of the tools are helping to make connection easier (trackback, blogrolls, technocrati, FOAF, RSS).
'Centralist' stnace & persistent space has many difficult to articulate advantages that we tend to overlook in our rush to advocate for 'voicing'.
Has to do with being 'situated', with establishing an identity, with having a space and place to navigate by.
Centralists gain by having a defined space to come to, pull vs. push as a filter, coherence, persistence, something about the surroundings that help with linking, connecting and recall. (Remember the extra points from learning in the same locale where you take the exam?)
As you are now a player across many mediums, I would appreciate your views.
Denham, yeah, you are echoing what I'm struggling to articulate. I think in the rush to embrace "social software" and the preferences and voice of the individual we do sacrifice something from the "collective." Now each context helps us discern where we land on the continuum of individual/collective - for sure. But I too worry we have thrown the baby out with the bathwater when we advocate soley on behalf of the individual. I think my experience in collectivist cultures outside of the US have influenced my thinking. We are SO individualistic in the US.
Hi Nancy, hi Denham, this is IMO one of the most important perspective there is, in the intersection of blogosphere and SNS-world.
I have decided to learn by immersing myself in Ecademy,
a Great Britain/Global Social Network, and blogging inside the social network.
If its ok with you, I will plug/blog you in my own blog, since i believe your knowledge, experience and insights are much too valuable not to be shared.
I cant help but make the thought/recontextualization experiment to translate your excellent balancing perspective into a chaordic/complex responsive context.
Right now in Ecademy there is a very interesting conversation about the rhythm of listening as well.
My 2c for now, good of you to blog Nancy,
Denham, excellent, as always !
John
John, John, John! You don't have your blogger profile enabled and I'm trying to figure out what John you are? Help!
Hi Nancy,
You've got a good point - the either/or approach doesn't seem to make much sense, or at least is slightly overzealous.
As I see it, there's a strong parallel between a) how the individual and collective interact , and b) all that good stuff about co-evolution and symbiosis, genes mutating and their survival being dictated by the existing territory.
Hope you don't mind me cluttering up your comments section, but EO Wilson put it quite well: "The ability of the brain to generate novel scenarios and settle on the most effective among them is called creativity. The persistent production of scenarios lacking reality and survival value is called insanity"
So may be we're trying to balance the two here? Groupthink stifles creativity, but without groupthink, creativity is insanity.
Ho hum :)
Piers
http://blog.monkeymagic.net
This is NOT clutter, Piers, at lest not for me! The Wilson quote is great and yes, hopefully it is not either/or!
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