For a long time the popular thought was that crowds were stupid. When you gathered a group of people together they became a mob and began to think as one, a phenomenon commonly called ‘mob mentality’. The more people there is, the dumber they become. Everyone’s individual ideas are squashed into one big idea that everyone consents to, meaning the end result is a mainstream idea.
This all changed with a book by James Surowiecki called ‘The Wisdom Of Crowds’. In it he revolutionised the idea of crowds and showed that they could in fact be smart. A bunch of individuals could in fact produce new, creative and innovative ideas, if the ideas were not ‘averaged out’, but instead nurtured.
...To Collective Mayhem
But this new train of thought was widely adopted and the collective intelligence trend boomed.
“I think a lot of people kind of went too far in the other direction, in saying, 'Wow, it's wonderful if we just let everyone participate on the web like in Wikipedia, everything will turn out great.', says Professor Thomas Malone, the Director of the Centre for Collective Intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
This saw the rise of a plethora of websites jumping in, eager to harness the power of collective intelligence, but not knowing how to go about it successfully. This meant many, many failures.
Trying to be all Organic
You can’t engineer collective intelligence by setting up an artificial situation, yet neither can you let the process be completely organic, and arise all on its own accord.
'There is the misconception that you can sprinkle crowd wisdom on something and things will turn out for the best. That is not true, it's not magic.' (Thomas Malone).
The answer, is that a middle ground approach is needed, as boring as that may be. The most successful types of collective intelligence require planning, rules, organisation and control first and then need to be let go and allow participants to contribute freely. This is a far cry from the sort of ‘melting pot’ mentality, where everyone’s ideas are thrown together and simmer automatically to generate an end product.
Too many Indians, not enough Chiefs
Then it is fair to say for quality collective intelligence to arise, some form of leadership is necessary. No matter how many people you have, nothing will get done if no-one knows what needs to be done. Some direction needs to be provided, otherwise all you gain is a bunch of loosely formed and competing ideas...a big indecipherable mess. James Gosling, the creator of software program ‘Java’ says that it is no coincidence that thousands of companies which use community knowledge are flailing and ineffective, while the company Apple is run by a “dictator with good taste” leads the way in technology design.
Use Me, Don’t Abuse Me
The web-based business ‘Threadless’ is a good example of how to use and not abuse collective intelligence. ‘Threadless’ gets users to submit their own artistic designs, which are then voted upon by other users and the top-rated designs are made into T-shirts which are then sold on the website. Collective Intelligence is about the community on Threadless, voting and discussing t-shirts designed by individuals. Dumbness of Crowds would be expecting the Threadless community to actually design the t-shirts together as a group. The following picture illustrates the 2 common results which occur when groups are asked to design something together, in this case the perfect dog:
Our Experiment
Our ‘Facebook as a way of generating ideas’ experiment fell victim to these common problems:
1. We got too excited too soon. We bought into the myth of collective intelligence as some kind of utopia where we would get a creative result with minimal effort by just ‘putting something out there’.
2. We created an environment that was in some ways too artificial (using a Facebook set up), but in other ways too organic (having little control over it). We modified and modified, but didn’t achieve the perfect balance which is needed to generate quality ideas!
3. We had no real leadership or direction to the collective intelligence.
4. This meant that the results gained were both types of ‘dogs’ from the above image. We got alot of average, mainstream intelligence in the form of viral videos. Whilst amusing, they didn’t generate any new ideas. If we attempted to put these ideas together we would have gotten the Frankenstein Dog - a mismatched collection of ideas with no glue.
For collective intelligence to work it cannot be left to its own devices, it needs work.
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