I recently read James Surowiecki’s book “The Wisdom of Crowds”. Yes, I may be a bit behind the crowd on reading this one. Whether you have read it or not – I believe it has some words of wisdom for the Agile Executive, especially on the importance of diversity within a team.

Half-empty or Half-full?
There have been a wide range (positive and negative) of reviews on this book which made it all the more intriguing to read. The “glass is half-empty” people were negative about how the book failed to deliver by not presenting enough scientific analysis and allowing his bias to spin each result in support of his conclusion. The “glass is half-full” people appreciated the book’s collection of a tremendous number of diverse examples of crowd behavior and how he used them to show why crowds are so complex and how then can be used for positive and negative outcomes.

I see the “glass half-full” in this case – I learned from the large volumes of examples of group dynamics and which characteristics enabled them to make wise (or not so wise) decisions. I believe the general diversity of the examples (size, domains, industries, etc.) provide a great opportunity for others to gain insight for their own domain as well.

There were three basic tenants of a group that Surowiecki proposed to make a group wise – diversity, independence and aggregation (of decentralization). I will cover the first two from an Agile Executive perspective…

Why is Diversity Important?
Diversity is one of those politically correct words used over the past few decades that has taken on a defensive tone. Corporations are required to be blind in their hiring process. Government, in many cases, requires diversity in hiring and awarding contract bids. But beyond the social acceptance of diversity – Surowiecki does an excellent job of reasoning how diversity in groups increases the groups knowledge. The further away each member is from the group’s center, the more independent wisdom they can bring to the group.

As an Agile Executive, it is our job to get our crowd (team) to make the wisest decision (create the best product for our customer). Yet most organizations still use a product manager to define the best product, a development team to build the best product, and a quality team to test the best product. They are not allowing the diversity in their crowd (product owners, developers, testers, etc.) to collectively define, build and test the product.

Agile methods pull multiple disciplines together in cross-functional teams that increase the team’s collective wisdom through diversity – to create the best product possible. Beyond domain and role diversity, we should seek diversity in experience, background, age, gender and culture to bring in more independent knowledge into our teams.

Why is Independence Important?
Surowiecki proposes that independence is also required to avoid the “cascading” of ideas effect within groups. How often have you been in a group decision process where status and power influenced heavily on the groups decisions? Or where the first or last comments were used to steer the decision process down a particular solution. Surowiecki again shows how incorporating independent feedback raises the collective wisdom of the group while removing it has the potential to dumb the group down through reduction of ideas early in the process (read the book for numerous examples).

Independence vs. Collaboration?
How do we accomplish independence when we seek collaboration to drive innovation? Independence appears to be in direct conflict with collaboration and interaction – key elements of the agile manifesto and key to developing new, innovative products. Let’s look at an example of team estimating from Mike Cohn that combines independence with interaction and collaboration.

Team Estimating Example (from Mike Cohn) After an initial team discussion of a particular feature to develop and what it contains, the entire team votes simultaneously about how big they believe the work to be (using a pre-agreed upon sizing criteria). After viewing all of the responses, some of the high and low responses are given an opportunity to explain why they think it will be bigger (possibly technology is unknown or requirements are vague) or why it will be smaller (possibly they did this same thing on another project or the architecture is already developed) than the rest of the group thinks.

In this example, each member of the team contributes an independent assessment of the size of the work. Each member then has equal opportunity to discuss and collaborate with the rest of the team about their opinions. Without the opportunity for independent input into the decision process, less extroverted or lower status members may shy away from providing critical information to the team. Thus the team has less independent information from which to base a decision on and has a lower probability of reaching the correct decision.

Diversity, Independence & Collaboration
As an Agile Executive, we must seek balance between diversity, independence and collaboration. We must build diversity within our teams to increase unique ideas not present among others within the team. We must flatten and empower the team to allow for independent input from all members on the product and the process to increase the total information used to make decisions on features, estimates, quality, etc. Finally, we must build an environment of collaboration for those independent ideas to be shared openly among the team, with the customers and with the executives.

If you haven’t read the book and you tend to see the “glass half-full”, I encourage you to read it – you main gain some unique insight in how you lead or participate in groups. If you have read the book and you see the glass at all, I encourage you to contribute your thoughts to the importance of these characteristics in your teams and organization.