The power of crowd....or the power of the collective

A few years ago I was part of a corporate function that included the speaker Lewis Pugh. A British national that has since moved to South Africa after marrying a local girl.
He became famous as a lawyer that left his day job, that held zero attraction for him, to try his hand at things that really made him feel alive, and achieved a real goal.

These feats included the following:

• Long distance swimming in EVERY ocean in the world
• North pole swim, to highlight the melting polar ice
• A glacial lake swim on mount Everest (which nearly cost him his life due to the lack of oxygen while swimming), and to draw attention to the issues surrounding the Himalayas
• Atlantic Ocean – across the English Channel in 1992
• Arctic Ocean – around the most northern point of the Island of Spitsbergen in 2005
• Southern Ocean – across Whaler's Bay in Deception Island in 2005
• Indian Ocean – across Nelson Mandela Bay in 2006
• Pacific Ocean – from Manly Beach through the Sydney Heads to the Sydney Opera House in 2006

He has been given a number of awards for his efforts and called the Edmond Hillary of the oceans, and has been left with permanent nerve damage in his hands due to the extreme conditions he performs under.

But this is not where the story takes us.

The story is this (and I have looked for the proof of the story but have been unable to verify it). I will use another to highlight the actual validity of the premise however.

He mentioned a story which will highlight something which is a powerful tool for business and people alike.
He spoke of a missing US nuclear submarine that was lost to the navy. After deploying the USA's considerable resources and wisdom from some of the brightest minds it had access to, they came up empty. We're speaking about tools that calculate the last known area the sub was in, ocean currents, possible decisions etc that would have influenced the outcome of where the sub would end up.
They gave up.

There was then a man in the Navy that suggested or requested to take ownership of the search and was given permission to do so. He then gave information to various groups of people from different backgrounds and asked them to guess as to the answers to these various questions posed to them.
We're talking about the the technical boffins that ran their networks, to unschooled people, to general average Americans. All of these people were given the information regarding the sub disappearance and asked to give their best 'bet' as to where the submarine was located.

No one had the information correct. However, as a collective, the information was almost spot on, 200ft from the actual wreckage that was then found by sonar or the like.
If this is the reference to the Scorpion, what a testament to this collective wisdom!

HOW? WHY?

Now because I cannot verify this story 100%, I would like to use a story we can verify to be true (this may be the USS Scorpion).

Francis Galton is a statistician that was alive in England during the late 1800's and was at a fair where there was a competition being held to guess the weight of an ox that was on display.
Now you must also know he was quite an elitist and believed that the world was full of idiots, had a few decently intelligent people and then a handful of actual useful human beings that got things done in the world.

The crowd was varied between farmers, general populace and even people like himself. He then did something that was important, he took the information gathered by all the people and took the average of the guesses to check the answer that would come about.
He fully expected to have the answer skewed badly towards the IDIOTS thoughts, since they were the majority of the people at the fair.

He was surprised by the answer. The OX weighed 11097 pounds, and the average answer was 11098 pounds!!
The crowd average was exactly correct!!

Again I ask, HOW? WHY?

This is where the power of crowds comes into play, and is not an unused phenomenon. Groups of people, under the right circumstances, can have a collective wisdom far greater than even the most intelligent person.

Picture if you must a problem that someone with the intelligence of Albert Einstein trying to figure out a solution to a problem. He uses certain methods to get to answers. These are methods that most people don't use. Even if you have a group of really intelligent people doing the same thing, they would generally use the same methods to come to the answer, as they are all similarly intelligent.
Simple people think differently, using completely different methods of getting to the answers. Men and women even use many different methods.
Generally when you are able to access the various methods of getting answers from different types of people, you start to untap wealth of knowledge and even intelligence that is far greater than the greatest among them.

I mean , do you know that if you have a jar of jelly beans, and then ask 1000's of people to guess the number, there would be almost zero people to get it correct.
However the aggregate answer is almost always within 2% of the actual figure in the bottle.

Gambling is an industry run on the collective knowledge of people. The odds are almost always 100% sure on the winnings....how? The power of aggregated knowledge across 10's of thousands of people making their choices, comes up with an answer that many gambling houses use to predict winners.
And it is amazingly accurate!

Can you now understand how important diversity is within companies, communities etc? If you are wanting to grow, then become diverse.
You cannot have only super intelligent people trying to run a company and expect it to grow as well as a company that is diverse across the board.

Scot Page wrote a few books on this, and in one he mentions how he took a group of highly intelligent and well schooled individuals, who's collective IQ was way higher than another group of diverse people. And when doing advanced mathematics and problem solving, the diverse group came out on top over 90% of the time!!

New and diverse users are a life blood in many ways. Of course it would not be diverse if the old steady people are not there!

An important part of these tests is this. That the people you have in this 'crowd' are independent thinkers, and not people that will mimic and follow simply because its easier.
People that are willing to think for themselves, and many of them in a crowd, are a valuable and clearly intelligent resource!!

This video has a part of it which highlights the value of diversity

So having this knowledge now, is it not now a little more obvious why companies and places put out surveys for the public to fill in?
What a great way to get information from the crowd!!

When I was running the IT Operations departments at 2 large groups in years past, we sometimes used surveys among the 1000's of staff members to gather information on the directions of the companies I was representing.
I can see this being a great tool for those that are able to, and willing to utilize the collective wisdom of people worldwide!

For now, we read this wisdom one by one on formats such as this :)

[Image and information credit Wikipedia, YouTube, conferencematters.nl, timeslive.co.za]