Using the Crowd to Tackle Problems

Until recently, problems could only be tackled by small groups of experts within organizations or at universities. But now, with widespread access to the internet, problems can be put forward to a global crowd of interested minds who can see problems and solutions in new and unique ways. Andrew McAfee, principal research scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and Faculty Director in the Digital Business Strategy: Harnessing Our Digital Future online short course, outlines the three reasons he believes that the crowd will continually beat the core at innovative problem solving.

Transcript

There appear to be three main reasons why the crowd keeps beating the core, and why I’m really confident that the crowd is going to continue to beat the core in lots and lots of domains. The first one is that the crowd is just huge. There are billions of people.

What’s the saying that Linus Torvalds said? “With enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” 

And he actually got that from Eric Raymond, who’s another open-source software advocate. And what that means is if you bring enough people to look at a situation, someone is going to have the “aha” moment. Maybe a couple people in combination are going to have that aha moment, but just volume of attention, volume of contributions, is huge. And the core, no matter how large or how well established the core is, the core is not anywhere near as big as the crowd.

So, the first force is that with digital platforms we just have access to a lot more eyeballs than we did before.

More eyeballs that have ever been brought to bear on problems before in human history. I don’t think that’s an overstatement.

So, what’s the second thing?

The second thing is that the crowd is evergreen. The crowd is always fresh. The crowd just graduated from school. The crowd is doing the cutting-edge research on a topic. The crowd just finished up something where they got the absolute cutting-edge knowledge. The core can kind of get stale.

That’s one of the reasons why it’s fun to be at a university. You’re constantly getting a new crop of students who come in with fresh eyes, asking fresh questions – and often trained with some new techniques that I haven’t been up to speed on and, it’s good to hear from my own students.

So, I love how the crowd is both huge and just constantly reinventing itself and constantly evergreen. 

But you said there were three reasons.

And I think the third one is the most powerful of all. One of the most profound phenomenon is that over and over, the eureka, the solution, the breakthrough insight on a very tough problem comes from a domain very far from the home of the problem. In other words, here’s a problem, we think it’s a problem in genetics and along comes, I don’t know―

An oil fracking expert. 

An oil fracking, a crystallographer, a metallurgist, a gambler.

A geometric mathematician.

Look, who knows? Like pick a geeky domain and someone says, “Oh, well, it turns out, yeah, that problem looks really similar to this one that I learned about a while ago, or that I worked on and made some progress on.”

Just change the variables around.

I can mentally reformulate this problem over here. Everyone’s been thinking about it as a genetics problem.

But why weren’t the experts doing it that other way in the first place?

Because they were geneticists. They’re trained to work on genetics problems, in the specific set of ways of genetics techniques, and they probably have mental blinders on that make them say, “We know what kind of problem this is.”

It’s the curse of knowledge: that they know so much about a particular way of doing a problem that they become mentally blind to other ways of doing it. 

When I first thought about the core and the crowd, I was like, “Oh, it’s experts against the non-experts,” and that’s the wrong way to think about it. It’s one set of experts against a different set of experts. And often, the experts you have are not the experts you need. There are people from some other perspective and, to them, they’ve been trained in a way that makes the problem you’re working on really easy to solve. 

What we’re pitting against with the core and the crowd is one set of experts versus all sets of experts.

And what we have today that we didn’t have before is a platform, a set of tools, to reach all those other experts. 

To reach all the experts. 

For the first time in human history, we have a digital platform – the internet – that reaches not just thousands or millions, but literally billions of brains out there.

Kind of the entire community of human expertise, or a really good chunk of that.