wisdom of crowds - cognitive...

COGNITIVEEDGE

A leader’s framework for decision making

Copyright © 2007 Cognitive Edge. All Rights Reserved.

Wisdom of crowds

The jar of jelly beans at the county fair ...

... the average of the group is more accurate

No one must be aware of the guesses of others

So don’t confuse this with prediction markets

Mass consultation of citizens & interest groups

A simple test to prove the point

Three students with white shirts & three with black playing basket ball

Count the number of times those with white shirts pass the ball

There are two balls!

To avoid argument: if it leaves the hands of someone in white and arrives in someone else's, no matter how, it is one pass

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it seems that whatever we perceive is organised into patterns for which we the perceivers are largely responsible...As perceivers we select from all the stimuli falling on our senses only those which interest us, and our interests are governed by a pattern-making tendency, sometimes called a schema. In a chaos of shifting impressions each of us constructs a stable world in which objects have recognisable shapes, are located in depth and have permanence.As times goes on and experience builds up, we make greater investment in our systems of labels. So a conservative bias is built it. It gives us confidence

Mary Douglas Purity and Danger 1966

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Complex Adaptive Systems

Zeus & the Titans

Order; reductionism & rules, deterministic, observer independent (includes most systems thinking)

Chaos, independent agents operating without constraint studied through statistics & probability

Complex adaptive systems

Agents (fine granularity)

Operate in far from equilibrium situations

Upwards and downwards constraints

Principle of “locality” and constant adaptation

Highly sensitive to starting conditions

System level effects are emergent & non aggregative

A simple metaphor ...

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Joining up the dots .....

Do

tsL

inks

Pa

tte

rns

Number of dots Number of possible links

Number of possible patterns

N=4 L=6 P=64

N=10 L=45 P=3.5 trillion

N=12 L=66 P=4,700 quadrillion

L= N(N-1)/2 P=2L

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Traffic Control

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an aerial view

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the ordered alternative

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The Cynefin framework

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Simple

SenseCategoriseRespond

Best practice

Complicated

SenseAnalyseRespond

Good practice

Complex

ProbeSense

Respond

Emergent

Chaotic

ActSense

Respond

Novel


Thinking more radically

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Strategy in a complex situation

What can we change?

Of those things that we can change, for which can we monitor the emergent impact of those changes?

Of those things we can change and monitor which should we change (probe/amplify/dampen) in what combinations?

Any coherent idea can justify a safe-fail experimentused extensively in conflict resolution

Distributed Cognition

Leadership crews

Roles are ritualised & trained

Operate for limited periods of time

Sensing the landscape ....


Fitness landscape

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Liverpool museums

How do we measure our impact,

against a range of government

learning objectives, on children

who visit in school parties?

Issues with survey techniquesfigures without context, produce more

issues than they resolve

Delay between data capture and intervention means that minor issues

escalate to problems/crisis &

opportunities are not seized

Focus groups influence the subject too much

Need to create a knowledge

asset for teachers and other

museums about interaction with

children12

Real time monitoring of subtle

changes in indexes (NOTE: the

children index the story not an

adult of a computer)

Statistical significance in the

results

Numerical data with rich context

Knowledge database for teachers

Slavery museum: the stories

become part of a living oral

history

Ability to target improvement

narrative makes intervention

easier

Requirement Outcome


Leadership action: order

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Repeating patterns and consistent events

Clear cause & effect

Relationships evident to everyone, right answers exist

Known knowns

fact-based management

Sense-categorise-respond

Ensure that proper processes are in place

Delegate

Use best practice

Communicate in clear direct ways

Understand that extensive interactive communication may be necessary

Complacency and comfort

Desire to make complex decisions simple

Entrained thinking

No challenge of received wisdom

Over-reliance on best practice if context shifts

Create communication challels to challenge orthodoxy

Stay connected without micromanaging

Don’t assume things are simple

Recognise both the value and the limitations of best practice

Expert diagnosis required

Cause and effect relationships discoverable but not immediately apparent to everyone, more than one right answer possible

Fact based management

Sense-analyse-respond

Create panel of experts

Listen to conflicting advise

Experts overconfident in their own solutions or in the efficacy of past solutions

Analysis paralysis

Expert panels

Viewpoints of non-experts excluded

Encourage external and internal stake-holders to challenge expert opinions to combat entrained thinking

Use experiments and games to force people to think outside the familiar

ResponseDanger signalsThe leaders jobCharacteristics

Sim

ple

Com

plic

ated


Leadership action: un-order

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Flux and unpredictability

No right answers, emergent instructive patterns

Unknown unknowns

Many competing ideas

A need for creative and innovative approaches

Pattern based leadership

Probe-sense-respond

Create environments and experiments that allow patterns to emerge

Increase levels of interaction and communication

Use methods that can help generate ideas, large group methods, encourage dissent

Temptation to fall back into habitual command and control mode

Temptation to look for facts rather than allowing patterns to emerge

Desire for accelerated resolution of problems or exploitation of opportunities

Be patient and allow time for reflection

Use approaches that encourage interaction so patterns can emerge

High turbulence

No clear cause and effect relationships, so not point in looking for right answers

Unknowables

Many decisions to make and no time to think

High tension

Patter based leadership

Act-sense-respond

Look for what works instead of seeking right answers

Take immediate action to re-establish order (command and control)

Provide clear, direct communication

Applying a command and control approach longer than needed

“Cult of the leader”

Missed opportunity for innovation

Chaos unabated

Set up mechanisms (parallel teams_) to take advantage of opportunities afforded by a c chaotic environment

Encourage advisers to challenge you point of view once the crisis has abated

Work to shift the context from chaotic to complex

ResponseDanger signalsThe leaders jobCharacteristics

Com

plex

Chao

tic


Summary

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System constrains agent, agents unconstrained

system and agents co-evolve, mutual influence

Hindsight does not lead to foresight

retrospective coherence & premature convergence

From fail-safe design to safe-fail experiments

Managing & monitoring the boundaries & attractors

emergent beneficial coherence & distributed cognition

Bounded applicability: aspects of systems(including

the complex) can be managed as ordered

Categorisation, confusing correlation with causation

chefs not recipe book users


For to say that, assuming the earth moves and the sun stands still, all the appearances are saved better than with eccentrics and epicycles, is to speak well; there is no danger in this, and it is sufficient for mathematicians. But to want to affirm that the sun really is fixed in the centre of the heavens and only revolves around itself (i.e., turns upon its axis ) without travelling from east to west, and that the earth is situated in the third sphere and revolves with great speed around the sun, is a very dangerous thing.

Cardinal Bellarmine Letter to Foscarini April 12th 1615

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Reading

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HBR cover article & Editorial published November 2007

Multi-ontology sense-making(Snowden 2005)

New dynamics of strategy(Kurtz & Snowden 2003)www.cognitive-edge.com

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