Johnnie Moore

Crowds and experts

Johnnie Moore

Johnnie Moore

I’m Johnnie Moore, and I help people work better together

I’m enjoying The Wisdom of Crowds a lot. The author knows how to write with lots of wonderful stories to illustrate his argument. (See Dave Pollard’s useful review here.) It provides powerful evidence of the value of diversity arguing that decision made by large, diverse groups are better than those made by experts. Sorowiecki says

Suggesting that the organisation with the smartest people may not be the best organisation is heretical, paticularly in a business world caught up in a ceaseless “war for talent” and governed by the assumption that a few superstars can make the difference between an excellent and a mediocre company. Heretical or not, it’s the truth: the value of experise is, in many contexts, overrated.

This is partly because expertise can be narrow; crowds can aggregate a lot more varied information.

There’s more on the trouble with experts: evidence that they are are little better at forecasting than laypeople (psychologists are worse at predicting behaviour than non-psychologists); and “studies that have found experts’ judgements to be neither consistent with the judgements of other experts in the field nor internally consistent”. What’s more

Experts are also surprisingly bad at… calibrating their judgements… much like normal people: they routinely overestimate the likelihood that they’re right.

Surowiecki cites surveys showing expert group after expert group overstating their knowledge.

And one more problem with trusting experts:

We think that experts will… identify themselves, announcing their presence and demonstrating their expertise… (but) experts are no more confident in their abilities than average people are, which is to say they are overconfident like everyone else… knowing and knowing that you know are apparently two very different skills.

It’s interesting to compare this view with the recent post by the ever-provocative Hugh at Gaping Void: Seek out the exceptional minds

I will spend the rest of my professional life working with visionaries. I know who they are, they know who they are. Everybody else I will toss out like old furniture.

Might not be such an exceptional strategy!

Share Post

More Posts

The joy of conversation

I’ve just had a delightful meeting with Emma Cahill co-founder of publishing house Snowbooks. They describe their approach thus: We publish far fewer titles than

Collaboration

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking – and worrying – about collaboration. I think the ability to collaborate effectively is becoming ever more essential

Thinking or Doing?

I spend too much time thinking. A friend revealed to me recently that he would describe me to acquaintances as a brain on a stick.

Denham Gray on the unspoken

No sooner do I finish my last blog than I stumble on Denham Grey’s eloquent thoughts: Wonder if you can really capture tacit knowledge by

Speaking the unspoken

I’ve been thinking a lot about what goes unspoken in the world in general and in my little slice of it in particular. There I

Communities of Practise

Further thoughts arising from my day in Brussels… Miguel Cornejo gave an interesting and touching presentation on his experiences with Communities of Practise (CoPs). These

More Updates

Emotional debt

Releasing the hidden costs of pent up frustrations

Aliveness

Finding the aliveness below the surface of stuck

Johnnie Moore

Film financing crowdsourced

I liked this: Buyacredit.com. Three British teenagers crowdsource the funding of a film of a little know Jules Verne novel. Hat tip: Neil Perkin’s recent slideshare.

Johnnie Moore

Difficult conversations. The clue is in the title.

Chris Rodgers writes: Life in organisations is unavoidably messier and more uncertain than the formal strategies structures systems and processes imply. And yet most discussions of organisational management and leadership

Johnnie Moore

Coaching to connect

I wanted to plug my friend Sue Glasser’s upcoming workshop, Coaching to Connect. It’s in London on November 18th. Sue has done pretty much a lifetime of work exploring how

Johnnie Moore

The management myth

I enjoyed Matthew Stewart’s polemic against management education in The Atlantic. He recounts his success in management based on a mixture of philosphy and… winging it. After I left the