Why You Should Push Authority Closer to the Front Line
Few would expect a butchering contest at a county fair to change how we think about leadership. Yet in 1907, one in England showed something counterintuitive: decisions may be better made on the front lines than in the C-suite.
Fairs at this time were designed to give city folk a taste of rural life. Rows of stalls showed off the best produce and livestock that farmers could offer. Competitions in sheepshearing and field plowing took place amidst the hiss of meat over flame and the brays of cattle at auction.
In the midst of it all stood a butcher’s booth with an ox on display. Attendees were invited to guess the weight of meat the animal would yield once slaughtered and cleaned. They would write their estimates on paper slips and deposit them in a box, where other attendees could not see.
The polymath Francis Galton took an interest in the event. After the winner was declared, he convinced the organizers to let him bring home the ballots. Galton was interested in democracy, but unsure if it was a workable system. Perhaps he hoped to discover how wise the masses were. To his surprise, the median guess was within one percent of the real figure. In fact, it was closer to the truth than almost all individual ballots. Galton concluded that a reliable measurement was available in the aggregate, but not in any one person’s guess.1
It’s a finding that’s been repeated. Groups of motivated people are, as a whole, more likely to be correct than are their individual constituents, even when some of those constituents are well-experienced and informed. Nevertheless, this power can only be unlocked under a few conditions.
James Surowiecki describes these conditions in The Wisdom of Crowds. Groups are wiser than their members only if their members are diverse, independent, and decentralized (that is, able to draw on knowledge which is not available to their peers).2 Averaging their responses combines this disparate information into a coherent whole. Groups that don’t meet Surowiecki’s conditions tend instead to confirm their existing biases.
References
- Galton, F. (1907). Vox Populi. Nature, 75(1949), 450–451. https://doi.org/10.1038/075450a0
- Surowiecki, J. (2005). The Wisdom of Crowds. Anchor Books.
- McCaffrey, M. (Ed.). (2021). The Invisible Hand in Virtual Worlds: The Economic Order of Video Games. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Schwarz, D. (2024). The Death and Life of Prediction Markets at Google. Asterisk Magazine. https://asteriskmag.com/issues/08/the-death-and-life-of-prediction-markets-at-google
- Smith, A., & Skinner, A. S. (1986). The wealth of nations. Books I-III. Penguin Group ; Viking Penguin.
- Morelle, R. (2025, August 6). Oceangate’s titan whistleblower: “people were sold a lie.” BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy0wpe9479wo
- Kimes, M. (2013, July 11). At Sears, Eddie Lampert’s warring divisions model adds to the troubles. Bloomberg News. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-07-11/at-sears-eddie-lamperts-warring-divisions-model-adds-to-the-troubles
- Van der Meulen and Cynthia M. Beath, N., & Beath, C. M. (2023, October 19). Guiding decentralized decision-making by acting on purpose. MIT CISR. https://cisr.mit.edu/publication/2023_1001_PurposeinAction_VanderMeulenBeath
- Centralized vs. decentralized decision-making. Material Handling and Logistics. (2003, January 1). https://www.mhlnews.com/archive/article/22036969/centralized-vs-decentralized-decision-making
About the Author
Zakir Jamal
Zakir Jamal is a writer and researcher based in Montreal. He holds a BA in Philosophy from the University of Chicago and is completing his MA in English Literature at McGill. He is currently working on a novel about how we understand chance. In his spare time, he enjoys photography and cross-country skiing.
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