Group Wisdom

 

"Susan helped us reach out to small business owners throughout the state, gathering their ideas and opinions about health care for their employees. A critical topic, often highly charged, and yet Susan handled the focus groups in such a professional manner. Her finely tuned design, facilitation, and analysis skills helped us deliver a quality product to the Governor's Office for statewide policy-making." --Carolyn Tressler, University of Colorado Health Sciences Center

 

Criteria for Wise Groups*

Grouping individuals together generally makes them smarter than the smartest ones among them. But not just any group will do. Effective groups are composed of a diverse collection of independently deciding individuals who are close to the problem. Groups must meet five essential conditions if they are to deliver wise and useful information.* They must be:

• Diverse
• Independent
• Close to the Issue
  
• Care About the Issue
• Smart in Aggregate

Diverse thinking trumps leaving the decision to one or two smart people. Individuals within truly diverse groups often come up with different possibilities, think in different categories and classifications, use different intellectual tools for solving problems, and make different cause-and-effect associations. Their multiple perspectives enrich and enlighten the collective thinking process.

Independence is important because the best group decisions are made as a result of disagreement and divergence, not consensus or compromise. Independence brings fresh information to the intellectual pool and keeps the mistakes people make from becoming aligned and leading the whole group astray.

The closer a person is to an issue, the more likely they are to have a good solution for it. Decentralization is also crucial for drawing out tacit knowledge that otherwise might not emerge. Sometimes we need the stimulation of group inquiry to shake loose information that is so close to us it becomes invisible and unspoken. Group results are more likely to be practical, reasonable, and doable.

People must care about the issue or circumstance to put their best thinking toward it. Without a vested interest, contributory remarks may lack relevance and depth. When people care about an issue they are usually dedicated to making decisions that transcend exclusive personal benefit.

Lastly, in order to make sense of group input, the information must be systematically aggregated and synthesized. Aggregation is the alchemical process that produces "group gold." It requires an unbiased approach that considers all comments, thoughts, and opinions as well as their frequency, intensity, variety and overlap.  Done with skill, it reveals the group's collective brain and composite wisdom.

 
Guarding Against Group Think

Intuitively we sense that it’s a good idea to check with one or two people in the know—we check with the Board, throw together an informant group, or draw on the intellectual talent of an existing collaborative. We know that more heads are better than one.

The problem is that we convene groups that are convenient but not necessarily diverse. People in our groups often know and like each other. In most cases that's a good thing except when we're asking people to think independently. Research shows that the more personally or politically connected group members are, the more influence they exert on each other often leading to group think. Group think refers to the faulty decision-making that occurs when individuals suppress true feelings and unpopular opinions to maintain group harmony. They all end up thinking the same way--often the wrong way.

Decisions made in harmony are not usually the wisest. When individuals disagree with each other and think for themselves they maximize the wisdom of the group. Within a diverse group of independent thinkers, everyone has a piece of the truth. Well-designed groups can be potent generators of meaningful information.

 

The Right Group Structure

Equally important to group composition is group structure.

Careful consideration must be given to question development, time and location of the group, information collection strategy (in-person, phone, email), expertise of the facilitator, participant confidentiality, availability and recruitment of participants, rigor of information synthesis, derivation of recommendations, and objectivity in interpreting the findings.

Understanding the importance of group composition and structure should prompt careful selection of group members and a deep appreciation of group usefulness. When thoughtfully convened, groups offer a wealth of information for solving problems, designing programs, establishing policy, planning initiatives, refining ideas, and unleashing innovations.

*Adapted from James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds.

 

An Example

Below is an example of a focus group study I completed that incorporates all the criteria for "wise groups." (See more examples of focus group work I've done.)

A Study on Inadequate Weight Gain During Pregnancy for the Colorado Department of Health and Environment

• Study Participants: Pregnant women- low income and middle class
• Use: Develop a social marketing campaign targeting weight gain in pregnant women

The Women's Health Section of the Colorado Department of Health and Environment discovered that the number one cause of infant mortality in their state was low birth weight babies. They also knew there was one major way to address that problem - getting pregnant women to gain adequate amounts of weight during pregnancy. In a society where food is plentiful, they didn't understand why that wasn't happening so they decided to conduct focus groups with women of different socioeconomic strata to find out. The focus groups I conducted unraveled several underlying issues to this complex problem and gave the Women's Health Section the information they needed to develop informational materials and public service announcements for a statewide social marketing campaign.