T H E W I D S O M O F G R O U P S A N D T H E S T O R Y O F A L O S T S U B M A R I N E

WA R R I O R S O F L E A R N I N G : L E S S O N # 5

1 9 6 8 : T H E S C O R P I O N

Back in 1968, a submarine, known as the “Scorpion” vanished in mid ocean on its way home to Newport News on its way back from a service of duty. No one knew how the submarine could have disappeared.

B A S E D O N L I T T L E O R N O E V I D E N C E

The Scorpion could be anywhere within a radius of 20 miles and hundreds of feet deep……

Nothing short of looking for a needle in a haystack.

A L O G I C A L P L A N :

Would have been to call in 2 or 3 of the smartest specialists to work out the “S” solution to the enigma

A D I F F E R E N T P L A N :

However, naval officer *John Craven had a different plan. First he put together a series of scenarios or suppositions for what could have happened to the Scorpion, to cause the disappearance.

* As documented in Blind Man’s Bluff: Sherry Sontag & Christopher Drew

B R I N G I N G I N T H E S M A R T G U Y S

Then John Craven & his team called in a wide range of specialists.

But instead of getting them all to work together to decide what could have happened, they did something else…

W A G E R S F O R W H I S K YFrivolous as it may sound, he got each specialist, individually, to put a wager on the scenarios they thought more likely, based on their specialist field and drawing on the local knowledge available to them. The wagers were bottles of Chivas.

THE BETS:

What problem had the Scorpion encountered?

What speed was it causing at?

What was its angle of descent?

…

A G G R E TAT I O NFinally, John Craven aggregated all the results using Bayes’s Theorem* to estimate a final location.

*Bayes’s Theorem is a way of calculating how new information about an event changes your pre-existing expectations of how likely an event was

T H E R E S U LT: F I V E M O N T H S L AT E R

A navy ship located the Scorpion less than 220 yards from where Craven’s team had estimated it was.

C O N C L U S I O N ?

The estimation given was the result of a collective judgement made by a group as a whole and not by individual judgement of the smartest individual.

The process did, however, satisfy the 4 conditions that characterise wise crowds:

D I V E R S I T Y

Each person should have some degree of private information, even if only in the form of a personal interpretation

I N D E P E N D E N C E

People’s opinions are not affected by the opinions of those around them

D E C E N T R A L I S AT I O N

People are able to specialise and draw on local knowledge

A G G R E G AT I O N

Some kind of mechanism exists to turn private judgements into a collective decision

S T O R Y A D A P T E D F R O M : – J A M E S S U R O W I E K I - T H E W I S D O M O F C R O W D S

“If a group satisfies those conditions its judgement is likely to be accurate”

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