James Surowiecki, journaliste à The New Yorker, a donné la conférence Comment mobiliser l’intelligence collective? chez Infopresse. Voici l’essentiel de sa présentation, qui a été donnée en anglais.
The Web is the perfect house for crowds. It helps to find a way to put knowledge all together. The wisdom of crowds is the idea that under the right conditions, a group of persons can have good judgment – better in fact than experts!
Tapping into the collective wisdom of organizations can radically improve your ability to solve problems, make forecasts and think strategically. For example, the Google search engine is impressive for how well it finds your data through a page rank algorithm, takes the search results and comes out with answers.
Hierarchies are good for getting work done, but they often make it difficult for information to get from where it is to where it needs to be. Tapping into the wisdom of crowds allows you to bypass the challenges that hierarchies create. Collectively, an organization knows a lot more than the CEO alone.
As we said, the wisdom of crowds works under certain circumstances. Diversity is key to making a crowd wise. The more diversity in a group, the better decisions it will make. With homogeneous groups, the more they talk, the dumber they become because of group polarization and emergence of leaders. Usually, you really need disagreement in a group for the crowd to be wise.
For these reasons, when talking about mass, you need to encourage disagreement and dissent. The decisions reached simultaneously (or close to it) are better than those reached sequentially.
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