Leadership is Hell: How to Manage Well - And Escape with your Soul by Rob Asghar

Author:Rob Asghar [Asghar, Rob]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Figueroa Press
Published: 2014-05-04T04:00:00+00:00

The Real Wisdom of the Mob

James M. Surowiecki, in The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, articulated a startling reality: The mob usually knows better than the experts.

That deserves some explanation. This isn’t praise for groupthink, which is deadly, when either a large mob or a small group of experts partakes of it. Rather, take the old carnival game of guessing how many jellybeans are in a jar. If you had a choice between relying on the best estimate of an expert on jellybeans or on taking the average answer of the larger, uneducated mob, take the uneducated mob every time. Their answer, averaged out, is often dead-on accurate. That’s because each member of the mob brings some distinct perspective or insight or knowledge. And aggregating that perspective often gives us the best possible view of reality.

In other words, a strong leader who thinks she knows her way around has a lot to learn from people far lower down the ladder. You see a similar group-wisdom dynamic on trivia game shows, when the average audience answer to a tricky question ends up being right more often than the answer from your brainy Uncle Andrew. (And if you ever get on “The Price Is Right,” pay attention to the crowd when it’s telling you to bid “higher, higher!”)

So Plato, that advocate for philosopher-kings and disrespecter of popular opinion, was wrong: None of us is as smart as all of us. Pericles was right: The boldest citizenry is the one that takes action based on its collective wisdom.

Yet the faith that we place in one powerful, godlike leader (or one small and powerful elite) is a resilient one within human history. Democracy would disappear for centuries until the right set of conditions resurrected it in the young United States.

Even still, most organizations ran in hierarchical ways. The democratic theory of modern management arose only a little over a half-century ago, to some extent as a result of social science research conducted by Warren Bennis and his colleagues. After the horrors of World War II, they searched for how to grow healthy organizations and healthy societies.

Bennis, for his part, conducted experiments that confirmed that, for simple tasks under static conditions, an autocratic, centralized structure is the most efficient. But for complex tasks under changing conditions, a decentralized and democratic model worked better. Whenever complexity was involved, it helped to have a free and open exchange of multiple viewpoints. The greatest reality of our time is an escalation of change and complexity—and the upshot is that democratic approaches are more important than ever in navigating complex and changing landscapes.

Ancient Athens made regular use of a kleroterion, a randomly selected group of citizens picked daily to gather, discuss issues and make decisions for the larger city. Stanford professor James Fishkin found that this approach to “deliberative democracy” works just as well today, in our more complex environment. “If people think

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