Cherryflava

If there’s wisdom in crowds – why don’t we let the masses rule?

Posted on 06. Dec, 2007 by Jonathan Cherry in Uncategorized

What would happen if a company had no recognisable leader – or management structure for that matter?
Yikes – chaos most probably.

Imaging a company as big as…say… Vodacom where everyone was paid exactly the same and had no leadership structures, everybody just followed everyone else and as a group decisions where made for the good of the crowd.
Thats what ants, birds and bees do and they run remarkably fine tuned organisational machines. So why is it so far fetched to imagine that happening in a commercial human organisation?

An interesting, growing trend in the world of business is what’s known as crowd-sourcing or crowd clout and the theory is that ‘the collective wisdom of a crowd is infinitely more powerful than the efforts of one’.

But how far are prepared to put this theory to the test. So far every experiment has been web-based, things like Myfootballclub and Digg string immediately to mind, but what would happen if a large, real world corporate had to try this out?

Our hunch is that bees, ants and birds don’t have giant egos to feed – so they’re naturally more inclined to let go and make it work. Maybe working together in a team goes against our natural human instinct of individual survival and is fundamentally flawed.

Check this amazing clip of the coordination of a swarm of birds in-flight:

…and for more, read Swarm Theory on the National Geographic site and how the theory is being used by FedEx and other transport companies.

[thanks to Espen for the link to the clip]