Collective wisdom, or ....?
I’ve seen a number of interesting tools to help organisations understand and harness the views of their communities over the past 12 months.
I am, however, just a little worried that organisations are seeing ‘the collective wisdom’ as the answer to all their problems.
Don’t get me wrong - crowd sourcing is a great way of tapping into ideas and feedback that would otherwise remain hidden. However, the view that has surfaced in some organisations that it should be the primary decision support tool is, I think, a classic example of the sort of over exuberance that can happen when a set of tools are developed that make something that was previously difficult, relatively easy.
Tools are still tools, information gathering techniques still gather information and even perfect tools and information does not get rid of the need for management judgement to be applied to the information and knowledge acquired.
Events in the Middle East nearly 2000 years ago are a great illustration of this.
If you were in Jerusalem, would you take the Palm Sunday crowd’s view that Jesus was the soon to be crowned King, or do you go for Good Friday’s crowd which yells ‘Crucify Him’?
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