Roles

A major challenge of almost all organizations today is to find a way to integrate the knowledge and expertise of their personnel in decision making and forecasting.  In The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki shows that under certain conditions -- diversity, independence, and a particular kind of decentralization, the aggregation of judgments of a group will produce better decisions and forecasts than even the most skilled decision maker.  Expert Choice provides a process for such aggregation of judgments based on data, knowledge, and experience from people throughout an organization or population. By assigning roles for providing data and judgments, the conditions for creating the wisdom of crowds, rather than delusions of crowds (Extra Ordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds), can be achieved.  Assigning roles to decision makers is also important in terms of higher level management maintaining control where they feel it is necessary (usually by limiting roles for prioritizing the high level objectives).  Finally, assigning roles helps distribute some of the workload in gathering judgments.