Are you adding your “bit” of value to the Kingdom, or are you letting the expert do it for you?
I’m in the process of listening to the audiobook Crowdsourcing by Jeff Howe. It’s one of those rare books that offers a compelling look at a phenomenon as it is happening. Crowdsourcing looks at how ideas are developed through the wisdom and energy of the crowd. Think Linux and open source and mobs. Wikipedia is perhaps the best known example of crowdsourcing, but it has also impacted patents, scientific development, entertainment, and photography as well.
One of the fundamental tensions in crowdsourcing is the idea that the supposed “amateur” can add as much value as the “expert.” Crowdsourcing is proving that collective intelligence can add as much, if not more, essential value than the expert. But the idea is predicated on each person adding a “bit” of value instead of having to produce the whole. The expert model on the other hand contends that one person can add large amounts of value. The downside is that it takes the expert a long time, where the collective can reduce that time by magnitudes. The expert is also limited to the frame of the person’s expertise, where the crowd likely included that missing knowledge. Or it just needed to simply expand a “bit” to add the missing value.
The real power of crowds is in its diverse knowledge. Research determined that diverse crowds competing against experts produced a better result…every time. How references the work of Scott E. Page, who documented his findings in The Difference. Page said,
“Given certain conditions a randomly selected collection of problem solvers outperforms a collection of the best individual problem solvers.”
Think about that for a second when applied to orthodoxy, or some other important matter. The prevailing notion in history has been that smart white guys will get the job done if we just let them lead. But research proves the crowd consistently outperforms them.
Page’s reasoning was that the experts were trained at the same institutions and would thus think the same way about certain things. In other words, their background predisposed them to a certain way of solving the problem, which severely limited them when facing a problem they had not been trained to solve. The crowd on the other hand usually included someone who had some background in a different way.
This tension of crowdsourcing is that it potentially puts people out of a job. It doesn’t take a scholar to realize that collective intelligence that can figure out the answer in one tenth of the time is a better option than one person figured it out over a long period of time.
I would suggest that this tension between amateur and expert is also beginning to work itself out in the world of “church”. No longer are people settling for the traditional banking model of education where the expert painstakingly figures it all out for us and then downloads it into our brains on Sunday mornings. We’re wired. We’re connected. We’re smart. And we don’t have to figure it all out. We just have to figure out a “bit” of it. And then collective we can begin to learn together, sharing ideas. The Internet provided the means of connectivity. Blogs provided the means of conversation. Twitter even provides the means of thinking out loud.
The common concern with crowdsourcing is that the collective intelligence will quickly turn into anarchy. But the wikipedia model has revealed the remarkable willingness of the crowd to police themselves. Given the permission to figure it out, we will. And we’ll protect it diligently for the sake of the collective concern. In other words, permission didn’t produce the worst case scenario. It produced the best. What the critics didn’t realize is that the root of the word amateur comes from the word “lover”. In other words, the amateur is drawn to the subject because of a love for it. There is then a built in mechanism to add and protect value.
In many ways, crowdsourcing is Emergence on display. The scientific process of Emergence is essentially the idea that in chaos, the crowd will self organize in ways that at some point brings value to the system that were not present before the problem started. I think we’re seeing this happen in the church. We’re wrestling with questions of atonement, sexuality, discipleship, Kingdom, and some of the fundamental problems between the amateurs and the experts. And it’s causing a lot of tension.
What’s interesting to me is that Jesus seemed to prefer the amateur crowdsourcing model of leadership. He empowered the little guy to take responsibility for his own restoration. He called him to a non-banking model of education and instead called him to follow. Each added a bit of value to the larger Kingdom. Some would argue that Jesus’ declaration to Peter could be construed as a commission of ultimate leadership, but I would argue that it’s a flimsy grasp for power. Jesus released the disciples to “go and make more disciples”. He empowered them ALL.
Which brings us back to the original question. Are we adding our “bit” of value to the kingdom, or are we letting the expert do it for us? Because if we continue simply trusting the experts, we’re going to be missing out.
PS: A couple of days agao I ran into this short post by Tony Steward who asks are we willing to embrace the humility necessary to foster a larger vision for Kingdom. Experts tend to build small domains that must be protected, where amateurs and the crowd are contributing to a larger Kingdom that no one gets to control. In other words, it broadens the barriers in a way that is inclusive. And it looks like remarkably like what Jesus set up.
