Mastermind

About a hundred years ago at a county fair auction in England, auction organizers held a little contest to engage the crowds: guess the ox’s weight, and win a prize. 787 people guessed the ox’s weight; nobody won. But a visitor that day named Francis Galton, a scientist, discovered an amazing coincidence: He calculated the average guess of all 787 attendees and revealed the crowd’s answer: within one pound - half a pasture patty - of the ox’s actual weight (1,355 lbs). No individual knew the weight, but the crowd did. That’s a mastermind.

Today this phenomenon is better understood. The idea of ‘mastermind’ was introduced to me by my business coach who suggested that several business owners from different industries meet to sort out problems collaboratively. That group didn’t really gel, but the idea stuck.

In his book The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki outlines the concept more elegantly. Crowd understanding in problem-solving and insight is powerful, almost always more accurate than “the smartest guy in the room”. Surowliecki outlines three cornerstones to an effective mastermind: diversity, independence, and de-centralization. The result is foundational to democracy, the jet fuel for well performing institutions, and a powerful problem solver for any group with a common mission. Bayes theorem is the mathematical construct behind it, which Tommy Thompson employed in pre-internet days to locate sunken gold 200 miles off the Atlantic coast with 130 year old weather reports, bills of lading and newspaper clippings. Today Bayes algorithms power search engines and other machine problem solving.

Diversity is important for its variety: experiences, life stories, personalities and skills brought to the larger equation. As business influencer Simon Sinek points out, Diversity is for Perspective. In our business we measure personality styles for all employees, for effective engagement with differing customer and co-worker personalities, but also in hiring. We want more people not like we are. While we all tend to be more comfortable with people similar to us, if we hire similar people, our ability to engage with multiple spectra of customers and providers outside our walls suffers. We also like to hire people new to our business because ideas from outside offer more insight to a diverse world. Training takes more time, but it’s worth it since broader perspective helps us adapt better to change.

Independence is equally important. Results are undermined if top-down, peer-to-peer, or external factors sway the data set or the people contributing, just as the Scientific Method demands inclusion of all, not just supportive, data. This is one reason I object to the political myopathy in education today. From grade school through high school, students are taught to learn what the teachers teach; and in college they’re supposed to learn to think, to argue, to disagree. Too much primary school teaches dogma, and colleges and universities suppress right leaning perspectives. Today the academy embraces Critical Theory, a Marxist view of history and the humanities, and dismissive of contemporary historical perspectives. Rebuttals, in my experience, too often devolve into ad hominem moralistic attacks, revealing its shallowness. as well as its disconnect with what most people experience daily. No wonder students have such low regard for the lessons of history. Cancel culture is today’s most visible manifestation. How can we absorb lessons from history if we take such a limited, singular view? No masterminds permitted in the Academy.

Acceptance of independent information also demands a measure of respect for others’ views, a vanishing attribute of the public square where the absence of face-to-face engagement fuels course and provocative discourse. It is difficult to accept other perspectives amidst all the noise. It takes effort to hear beyond this noise.

Decentralization has its challenges also, but the threat here arises from personal choices we make: think Confirmation Bias. Today we face an information tsunami, and yet many of us choose the same sources of news, culture and entertainment. When we don’t choose these channels ourselves, algorithms feed us “just for you” content. What a waste of our most precious depleting resource, our time! We should be ever wary of feeding from silos of information only to remain within comfort bubbles, lock ourselves into stasis… while the world advances.

The Consequence of False Narratives

Extrapolating outliers, projected as representative, undermines experts and perpetuates false narratives.

False Narratives are the stories we hear to reveal or promote a message not representative of a true problem. They are anathema to mastermind solutions. We see examples in the media, on campus, social media, everywhere. Imagine an idealistic journalism student who wants to save the world from societal evils. She’s decided to attack the Evils of Capitalism because she believes capitalism produces inequality. She will seek examples to confirm the belief: places of work where employees are abused or workers underpaid; where landlords overcharge tenants; or other societal abuse, engaging outliers for effect, and projecting as representative. While these conditions exist, the reasons for inequality are far deeper, and predicted mathematically in Pareto distributions in nature, sports, business, throughout humanity. Empirical evidence strongly suggests the opposite to this ‘evil capitalism’ characterization, e.g. between 1990 and 2015 the world’s ‘extremely poor’ decreased by over a billion people (World Bank) from freer trade following the collapse of the Soviet Union and China’s introduction of capitalism, Facts like these, difficult to reconcile or contrary to the narrative, are intentionally, or sloppily, ignored.

False narratives also contribute to the oversized skepticism of experts today, which is unfortunate in the sense that experts synthesize complex issues for the rest of us. Today we suspect ulterior motives – axes to grind. False narratives are constructed precisely to put a thumb on the Mastermind scales, which is why so many people assume the news they don’t watch, CNN for some, Fox for others, is false. (Hint: neither are news organizations; both are entertainment organizations.)

Any construct that does not comport with what you see and hear in life – what actually exists – should be vigorously challenged, if not dismissed out of hand. Proceed with caution, and always believe your own eyes and your own experiences before believing what’s on a screen. Every screen, including this one, projects someone else’s curated content.

A final critical ingredient to diversity, independence and decentralization is a shared value, a common mission. Mastermind can’t find solutions without shared goals, objectives, or values. Our country was the first in the history of mankind conceived around a philosophy, one of limited government and equality before the law. That freedom of speech, assembly, press, and religious pursuit are enshrined in the Bill of Rights reveals the genius of our founding fathers and the documents memorializing their aspirations. They protect and produce mastermind solutions. Our national mastermind has us change politicians regularly as the country’s mood iterates. Absent these collars we get unencumbered but natural (Pareto) aggregation of power such as Putin’s Russia, Xi’s China, or an ayatollah’s Iran. As Winston Churchill remarked, democracy isn’t perfect, but it’s better than the alternatives. Thank the mastermind concept for delivering functioning democracies.

While the power and utility of mastermind is most evident in groups – political unions, businesses, institutions – we can employ its strengths as individuals too. As I suggest in Risk for a Rich Life, shared experiences with others, venturing into new places, seeking reward through risk, all new experiences, improve our understanding, make us more resilient to change, and connect us more meaningfully with other people. Variety of experiences, with people whom we don’t yet know, can offer better understanding, to synthesize the chaos happening around us. Such understanding lets us explore and discover more deliberately this rich, imperfect journey we call life.