Double espresso for me, please have your own as you like it, today’s coffee talk is about the understanding of modern life decision making.

For over 20 years I’m investigating the field of “decision making”, either as a salesperson looking for customer pattern, as employees seeking to understand my managers or as a manager asking to influence my team and so on.

One of the interesting issues is the idea of getting decisions using “crowd wisdom” (asking the question a large group of people) that will lead to a better decision.  But here I found out it is less reliable than expected.  It was the point the difference between crowd wisdom and Flock foolishness hit me.

When the question was “open” like what do you think about…, it was easy, and usually, I got great ideas. But, when my question was more quantified like “should I ……” yes or no, it happened that after getting an answer from someone considered by my community as expert or leader all the following answers where according to his reply. Meaning that from this point on the responses were not reliable.

To make sure I’m not mistaking I done the following: sent a privet messages with a question to my community. After I had got a reply, the issue was published publicly once again. As suspected people changed their answer, after leader opinion response. I’m not getting in the psychology of way does it happen, let leave that to more reliable researchers than myself.  But, let’s understand the mechanism. When you ask people for an opinion you will get it; people will even discuss it.  When you need a cut and clear decision, once opinion leader is in, the crowd will act accordingly, not surprisingly, if you have two opinion leaders with opposite view, the group will divide by their appreciation to one of them.

Where does it lead us?  If you would like to have a reliable answer you can depend on, you must keep isolation between the individuals in your crowd, people are easy to influence by others which end in Flock foolishness.

Done with my coffee, hope you enjoyed yours.  Please feel free to comment and correct me if I’m wrong.

See you on our next coffee together.

Nachshon