Register: SCIP07

James Surowiecki is the foremost authority on how to harness the collective wisdom of your organization for competitive advantage.

He has written a well-received book on the theory and practice of The Wisdom of Crowds—Why The Many Are Smarter Than The Few And How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies And Nations.

In The Wisdom of Crowds, Jim describes systematic ways to organize and aggregate the intelligence available in your organization in order to arrive at superior decisions—often better than those that individuals would make, even if they are ‘experts’.

The book and Jim’s presentations based on the book are full of insights into how groups operate that are invaluable to business leaders. He also offers practical methods, tailored to his audience, for leveraging people and technology to learn what you need to know and make decisions that really serve the organization’s goals.

Jim writes a twice-monthly financial column for The New Yorker that is typically pegged to current events and incorporates the kind of insights from economics, sociology, and business history that make The Wisdom of Crowds so valuable.

He has written for a broad range of other publications on a wide variety of topics. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Wired, and The Wall Street Journal and other major publications. He wrote “The Bottom Line” column for New York magazine, and was a contributing editor at Fortune.

The Wisdom of Crowds

Under the right conditions groups can be remarkably intelligent and effective problem solvers—potentially smarter than the smartest person in the group or any so-called experts (think of how seldom individual portfolio managers outperform a market index). ‘Prediction markets’ can be set up to solve a wide range of other problems very successfully, as well. Collective wisdom also helps alleviate the problems caused by hierarchies, which are good at getting things done but terrible at getting information.

But what are the right conditions? The group needs

diversity—having access to a lot of different perspectives, sources of information and sets of knowledge is more valuable than individual IQ or expertise;
independence of opinion—if individuals can deliver their decisions simultaneously and blind to everyone else’s choices, you get real knowledge and superior decisions untouched by groupthink, peer pressure and other group dynamics; and
a method of aggregating information—here is where technology and system design come in.

Jim Surowiecki knows the theory and he’s studied dozens of successful examples of how to systematically tap this collective intelligence. He can help your organization leverage your knowledge resources to your collective advantage.

Keynote