The document discusses several principles of wise crowds and decision making: 1) Groups do not need exceptionally intelligent individuals and madness is more common in groups than individuals. 2) The best decisions come from disagreement, not consensus or compromise. 3) For groups to be wise, there must be diversity of opinions, independence, decentralization, and aggregation of private judgments. 4) Encouraging incorrect guesses can paradoxically make groups smarter by introducing more diversity of opinions.

1. My favoriteWisdom of Crowdsquotes Mixed byMaarten Cannaerts Images: www.sxc.hu– “The wisdom of crowds” was writtenby James Surowiecki

2. Groups do not have to be dominated by exceptionally intelligent people in order to be smart

3. Madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups (F. Nietsche)

4. The best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest not consensus or compromise.

5. There are four conditions that characterize wise crowds…

6. 1. Diversity of opinion (each person should have some private information, even if it’s just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts)

7. 2. Independence (people’s opinions are not determined by the opinions of those around them)

8. 3. Decentralization (people are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge)

9. 4. Aggregation (some mechanism exists for turning private judgments into a collective decision)

10. Companies have been surprisingly unwilling to improve their decision making by tapping into the collective wisdom of their employees.

11. What makes a system successful is its ability to recognize losers and kill them quickly

12. It is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.

13. Inventionis an individual enterprise, but selecting among inventions is a collective one.

14. Encouraging people to make incorrect guesses makes the group as a whole smarter.

15. One key to successful group decisions is getting people to pay much less attention to what everyone else is saying.

16. Paying taxes is individually costly but collectively beneficial.

17. Today’s complex problem solving requires multiple perspectives The days of Leonardo da Vinci are over. (E. Wenger)

18. Confirmation bias causes decision makers to unconsciously seek those bits of information that confirm their underlying intuitions.

19. Endless layers of management can make people less willing to take responsibilityfor their own work

20. [There is a] correlation between upward mobility and not telling the boss about things that had gone wrong.

21. Certain kinds of information can make things worse – not all information is created equal.