by Jevon MacDonald
July 25, 2008 at 10:44 am
· Filed under Enterprise 2.0
Isn’t the whole premise a little off?
I have seen a dozen or so Digg-like decision making systems inside of organizations right now and every time I look at them I get a heavy feeling in my stomach. I see hundred, and thousands of individuals, thousands of smart people all reduced to one cumulative number mashed on to the side of the screen.
You, me, everyone. Just a number.
Lumping a mass of people in to an aggregate is not what Web 2.0 or Enterprise 2.0 is about. I believe more than ever that the excitement of the gospel of the Wisdom of Crowds was a mistake in judgment by many of us.
I also know why it has been successful in being piloted inside of organizations.
The idea of compiling all of the thoughts, emotions and aspirations of your workforce or customers in to one simple, easy to digest number is something that appeals to people who don’t want to deal with the messy thing we call humanity.
This is about the Wisdom of Me. The Wisdom of You. The Wisdom of Us.
I’m sorry, but this whole thing about being social is really messy. Messy like children, messy like love, messy like business. Messy like life.
Put on your rubber boots and an old pair of jeans. You are going to have to learn some names, you’ll make some mistakes and I can promise that it will hurt at times, but you can do this. It has already gotten started.
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Now prediction *markets* are another thing. Prediction markets have shown that if you put a monetary gain/loss into the equation, even a small one these crowds can often predict better than you think. This works I think by allowing the system to surface or more accurately weight higher the crowd members who are wiser than others. Google I’ve heard has used a tool like this internally (too lazy to look up link). The literature seems to suggest that crowds are less wise if they don’t have skin in the game.
Of course there are built biases such as company insiders/crowds consistently biased towards optimism (think for a second about how that affects your organization). But in a proper prediction market that allows the occasional savvy pessimist to take money off everyone else, but that’s just a market working correctly.
Thomas: Jeremy has written about Enterprise Knowledge Markets ( http://www.socialglass.com/archives/50 ) which are really interesting, and different that the WOC models.
Cool!
I just have this concern that people assume the same process is always applicable.
There are times when the collective wisdom is what we need. But what about those times when we need to make a strategic decision and only a few in the crowd have the necessary background and insight to help? How do we separate the knowledge from the noise? How do we know to whom to listen? How do we find them?
We need to recognise that we have taken a first step in a journey but there is a long road ahead. We are starting to understand the benefit to be gained from being social but there are many refinements required and there will be missteps along the way.
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seanJuly 28th, 2008 at 6:55 pm |
I think the idea of WOC is not that it provides THE answer, but rather that it provides decision makers with another stream of data to consider. Can you really argue with more info before making a decision?
More information may be good (but it may slow down the decision making process and it may have little incremental benefit) but having a mass of data and no knowledge of what is useful vs.what is useless is not helpful.
I recently spoke to the head of a large quasi government institution and he believes that some processes in society are breaking down because people have too much data and get swamped. This results in decisions not being made because people do not know how to access the pieces of data that they need.
I suggest that having access to more information is great so long as it is coupled with the ability to sift through the data and find the elements that are important to the decision.
I think the idea of WOC is not that it provides THE answer, but rather that it provides decision makers with another stream of data to consider. Can you really argue with more info before making a decision?
In my opinion, pretty much right.
I recently spoke to the head of a large quasi government institution and he believes that some processes in society are breaking down because people have too much data and get swamped. This results in decisions not being made because people do not know how to access the pieces of data that they need.
I suggest that having access to more information is great so long as it is coupled with the ability to sift through the data and find the elements that are important to the decision.
Having been paying attention to KM principles and concepts for about a decade, and involved in W2.0 “stuff” since late 2001 (before there was a W2.0), I think I’d say here that there are a number of ways that existing software and web services can help aggregate, filter, slice and dice and represent, textually and visually, what information is more or less useful to decision-making.
This assertion of mine also includes decision-makers learning more about “organic” or social filters (euphemistic phrase meaning that basically they could learn to listen and watch more, efficiently, to the bottom-up information pertinent to any given decision process that is sure to be flowing into and around the organization).
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