Wisdom of Crowds is the new Waterfall. Both get mis-interpreted by well meaning people that don’t have time to even read the cliff notes, and decide to understand the model based on one catch phrase.

In other words, bloggers like me :-)

When I said “glossed over”, I was referring to David H. Freedman (article), not James Surowiecki (book). I think David glossed over how bad crowds can be for making consensus decisions.

Like you said, when they’re not independent agents, crowds perform poorly.

So I sort of agree with the premise that collaboration software as decision making model has an inherit flaw: consensus.

But separately, most decisions are not even remotely related to crowds. If you’re a big company, that’s because you need a lot of people working on different tasks. And they all need to make a lot of independent decisions.

Think of the work you do every day: how many decisions you make as part of a group, and how many decisions you make so other people in the group don’t have to worry about the same thing?

I don’t think he “glossed over” them, as “The Idiocy of Crowds” suggests: in fact, he was very clear on the fact that “achieving consensus” was, in fact, the poorest way to make a decision.

He said that the crowds makes the best decision when there are lots of independant actors making decisions without feedback about what decisions the other actors are making. This is the exact opposite of achieving consensus in a business context.