The power of conversation...

James Surowieki notes in his Wisdom Of Crowd's critique that diversity of opinion and experience is a prerequiste for a crowd to be smart. Next is independence, ie people who are not likely to be swayed by people around them. Then decentralisation, where "power does not fully reside in one central location, and many of the important decisions are made by individuals based on their own local and specific knowledge rather than by an omniscient or farseeing planner."

Finally aggregation, some means of determining the group's answer to the question, in this case: what might RSA Networks do and how might they deliver?

This last should begin to be determined through a number of outputs from the day, but the Open Space technology is a good match for Surowieki's first three determining factors. RSA Fellows, or at least this bunch here today, are indeed a 'smart crowd'.

At lunch time there was an incredible animated buzz with lots of conversations going on. Afterwards I drifted into and out of some of the open space sessions. You get a really strong sense of what happens when people who 'know stuff' get together with others who also 'know stuff' in the same area. For those of us working on our own, or as single innovators within a larger organisations, it is a precious commodity.

For instance, one group I sat in with briefly were talking about this issue of development in brown field sites. There were only four of them, but each was able to interject insight from different perspectives on and provide different sets of metrics to the same problem: how do you produce sustainable housing that works on a human scale.

One of the group, reflecting on what kind of utility an RSA Network might provide him suggested, that at the most basic level he wanted "other people to bounce ideas off: intelligent people with a depth of expertise in their own particular field".

Comments

[Roland Harwood]

Hi Mick,

Nice post and great event last week. I liked your link back to the Wisdom of Crowds so blogged about it here:

http://blogs.nesta.org.uk/connect/2007/11/network-effect.html

The mistake is to think that collaborations descend to the lowest common denominator. This can of course happen and frequently does, but with intelligence, diversity and independence, the whole can exceed the constituant parts. I think all three were present last week.