Kathy Sierra of Creating Passionate Users enjoys challenging assumptions, asking the questions others haven’t, and noting when the emperor has no clothes. She’s much like a very blunt mediator in those ways.
She’s done it again with The Dumbness of Crowds, a title takeoff of James Surowiecki’s bestseller, The Wisdom of Crowds. On the dangers of collaboration and consensus, Sierra says:
Clearly there IS wisdom in the many as long as you don’t “poison” the crowd by forcing them to agree (voting doesn’t mean agreeing). According to Surowiecki, even just sharing too much of your own specialized knowledge with others in the group is enough to taint the wisdom and dumb-down the group.
It’s the sharp edges, gaps, and differences in individual knowledge that make the wisdom of crowds work, yet the trendy (and misinterpreted) vision of Web 2.0 is just the opposite–get us all collborating and communicating and conversing all together as one big happy collborating, communicating, conversing thing until our individual differences become superficial.
I was drawn to her article because it raises important questions for anyone working with groups, including mediators like us. How do we assist a group with navigating differences and reaching decisions about the future, while not trampling, even inadvertently, the “sharp edges” of individual knowledge and creativity? If we’re not careful, we end up with Frankendogs (I’ve used that term for years to describe the mutts we adopt from the shelter, but Sierra puts an amusing new spin on it).
If you have thoughts about Sierra’s post, Surowiecki’s book, or my question, I hope you’ll leave a comment below.
Last 5 posts by Tammy Lenski
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- The Self-Conscious Mediator - February 27th, 2007
1 response so far ↓
Gary Horsman // May 10th 2007 at 12:44 pm
I’ve bookmarked Kathy Sierra’s article a while back and reread it again today. It confirmed my suspicions about reaching a collective consensus as not necessarily a good thing (and often terrible). Experience in an corporate setting serves many potent examples. The best of human intellect is produced when the individual is allowed freedom to express unique and informed ideas that are not washed away by a politically correct agenda that is too protective of people’s feelings as ‘egalitarian’ contributors.
However, I think Sierra’s emphasis is more about collaborative creation of a product and does not necessarily apply to mediation, which is more about conflict resolution, if I’m presuming properly.
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