The Submarine Experiment

To me it seems clear that in certain circumstances group intelligence based on the un-influenced opinion of each person in a diverse group, is far superior to individual performance. The question is how to harness this in a professional environment and what types of decisions are best suited to this method. The following extract is a striking example of such a situation, and is taken from "The Wisdom of Crowds" by James Surowiecki.

"In 1968, the US sub Scorpion disappeared in the North Atlantic… Although the Navy knew the sub’s last reported location, it had no idea what had happened to the Scorpion, and only the vaguest sense of how far it might have traveled after it had last made radio contact. As a result, the area where the navy began searching was a circle 20 miles wide and many 1000s of feet deep. You could not imagine a more hopeless task… A naval officer, John Craven concocted a series of scenarios… Then he assembled a team of men with a wide range of knowledge including mathematicians, submarine specialists, salvage men, etc. Instead of asking them to consult w/each other to come up with an answer, he asked each of them to offer his best guess about how likely each scenario was… He took all the guesses, and used a formula called Baye’s theorem to estimate the Scorpion’s final location. The location that Craven came up with was not a spot that any individual member of the group had picked… The final estimate was a genuinely collective judgement that the group as a whole had made, as opposed to representing the individual judgement of the smartest people in it… 5 months after the Scorpion disappeared, a navy ship found it. It was 220 yards from where Craven’s group had said it would be."