As a leader, how often do you appropriate the wisdom of the crowd in your decision making? How often do you rely on your intuition?
To be sure, part of wise leadership is ensuring you have the right people in your crowd: the right subject matter experts. I wrote about this in my last post, here.
Your crowd should include a variety of subject matter experts to form a collective opinion, rather than a single expert. If you have wise subject matter experts—if they have the abilities and characteristics I described in my prior two posts—research indicates that their aggregate knowledge would exceed the knowledge of any one individual expert. But there’s a caveat: diversity and process.
The Wisdom of the Crowd
As researchers from Duke University found, averaging cancels error when the crowd wisdom is based on two factors:
- Diversity: your subject matter experts should bring diverse perspectives. For example, one expert may focus on short-term goals, and the other on long-term goals.
- Process: your subject matter experts should not be influenced by others before sharing their findings.
When making decisions, you’ll also need to decide how much weight you give to their wisdom, as well as yours. This also comes in to play when you can’t find enough qualified subject matter experts, or when there simply isn’t a model or path to follow. That’s when wise leadership is put to the test.
In highly complex systems, when there is information overload or not enough pertinent data and analysis, how do you make high-stakes decisions?
In October 2019, Harvard Business Review author Laura Huang published an interesting article on the topic. According to Huang, it’s important to recognize two factors: what is the level of unknowability, and what is the context.
When there is just not enough information (when the level of unknowability is high), and, when there is not a proven model or schema (when there is not a map or context), you’ll need to use your inner wisdom.
The Wisdom of the Inner Crowd
Recently published in the American Psychological Association quarterly journal for research on judgment and decision making, researchers shared their findings on how the wisdom of the inner crowd can boost accuracy of confidence judgments.
“Analytical and simulation results show that irrespective of the type of item, averaging consistently improves confidence judgments, but maximizing is risky…our results suggest that averaging—due to its robustness—should be the default strategy to harness one’s conflicting confidence judgments.”
Litvinova, A., Herzog, S. M., Kall, A. A., Pleskac, T. J., & Hertwig, R. “How the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ can boost accuracy of confidence judgments,” Decision, February 2020
These finding suggest that similar to the wisdom of the crowd, averaging yields better results. Of course, most of the wise leaders I know have not navigated their way through a pandemic. But, they are keen observers, have learned how to recognize patterns, and rely on mental models. They challenge themselves to make tough appraisals and learn from the consequences. When it comes time to reflect on the information they’ve gathered and analyzed, they apply the wisdom of the inner crowd.
What do you think? How do you use the wisdom of the crowd in your decision making? What about the wisdom of the inner crowd? I’d love to hear from you. I’d love to hear from you. I can be reached here, on LinkedIn, or give me a call: 561-582-6060.
