Go With the Crowd, as Long as the Right People are in It
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Given the popularity of social media and the ease at which huge numbers of people can be contacted easily, there’s more news about the “wisdom of the crowd.” It’s thought that with enough people thinking about or working on something, the better the outcome. That’s not necessarily the case and something you need to watch out for if a group of people are making decisions for your client. You may be able to get involved and help your client head in the right direction.
This notion of group wisdom was recently discussed in James Surowiecki’s 2005 book The Wisdom of Crowds, but the idea goes back as far as an observation by Charles Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton in 1907, according to the BBC. He discovered the average of all the estimates in a ‘guess the weight of the ox’ competition was amazingly accurate, doing better than most of the individual responses.
When To Go With the Crowd
There are limits to this wisdom. Surowiecki found that for good crowd judgment, individuals’ decisions must be independent of one another. If not, there’s more of a risk the decisions drift to a misplaced bias and consensus, away from accuracy. Finding consensus is often extolled as important in political decision making or company decisions, but the end result might just be a herd mentality heading towards an arbitrary position.
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