A recent Radiolab podcast http://www.radiolab.org/story/91500-emergence/ deals with the idea of ‘Emergence’ – how patterns of intelligent behaviour emerge in the absence of leaders. A colony of ants will, for instance, farm their food, build air-conditioned homes and hunt; all through continuous trial and error, communication via pheromones, and, most significantly, without the benefit or otherwise of leadership.
Emergent Change
In his book ‘The Wisdom of Crowds’, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds James Surowiecki, illustrates the power of combining the thinking of large groups of people to do anything from accurately estimating the weight of an ox to underpinning the formidable power of Google to search the world’s information. Like ants, the wisdom of the many far outweighs the intelligence of the few, and all without the direction of a leader.
So how do we harness the wisdom of the many when it comes change? The first step is to hand-over Control to the crowd and see what emerges!
