Is the network smart or is “someone” smart in the network?

In this blog, I will summarize articles that I am reading from different books or from the web or elsewhere, partially because I want to remember them, and then I will talk about how I am trying to implement or understand them. My 1st entries in this blog will come from a book by Stephen Johnson titled “where good ideas come from: the natural history of innovation.”

Is the network smart? Or is “someone” smart in the network?

On page 57, Johnson begins discussing networked societies. point he makes is that “when economics systems shift from feudal structures to One the early forms of modern capitalism they become lesser hierarchical and more network.” He says “a society organized around marketplaces instead of castles or cloisters distribute decision-making authority across a much larger network of individual minds. The innovation power of the marketplace derives in part from the most elemental math: no matter how smart the authorities may be if they are outnumbered 1000 to one by the marketplace there will be more good ideas lurking in the market and in the feudal castle.”

On the next page, Johnson claims that “large collectives are rarely capable of true creativity or innovation. (We have the term herd mentality for a reason.)… This is not the wisdom of the crowd itself but rather the wisdom of someone in the crowd. It’s not that the network itself is smart. It’s that the individuals get smarter because they’re connected to the network.”

This is an important idea to me as a manager and also as someone attempting to lead and introduce innovations in an organization.

Using the entire team to make large changes: I lead a small team (under 20 people) and several times in the past 6 months we have had to make significant changes in the way that we operate and organize ourselves. In the 1st case we were changing the way we oriented and taught new faculty. We were changing from one training-certification program to a completely different program, but we had about 70 people in the pipeline for the older program. Our challenge was figuring out a way to introduce the new program and what to do with the people we already had scheduled for the old program. In order to solve this, everybody on the team got together for 3 two hour sessions. Without getting into details, every person in that room was necessary for us to consider different alternatives and to understand how any changes we made would impact the work that they did and the relationships we had with people in the pipeline.

This was not an example of crowd sourcing, but rather (1) the proposition that someone in the room would come up with new ideas and if we had 15 people in the room we would widen the pool for looking at new ideas. (2) Examining our rollout from multiple perspectives. We had to examine multiple options and multiple perspectives to create a project change system that would suit our needs as we continued operating. Having everyone in the same room automatically exposed us to multiple perspectives (and roles and responsibilities).

This was the first time everybody on my team participated in planning such a massive change. Standard operating procedure in the past would have had the director and the leadership team make the recommendations and/or the decisions and then present them to everybody else on staff. As it turns out no one person or 2 people could have forecast all the ramifications so bringing everybody together at one time was necessary and in this case successful.