Twitter Summary
Democratizing expertise. It is no longer enough to rely on experts.
Noreena Hartz the speaker and author of this article talks about the reliance on experts to make decisions. A study was carried out where over a 100 adults were asked a certain question with brain scan carried on them to see how much brain activity was going on. It was pointed that as soon as an expert started answering the questions, brain activity decreased and people were more dependent on the expert's opinion than theirs. This is just an example pointed in this article which goes on to say experts are not always right and relying on them for all answers strips us of some of our independence.
I find this article especially significant as we are moving into a society where knowledge is being shared and there is greater need for individual thinkers with different opinions. The internet has in a sense empowered us to be independent thinkers and giving us access to more information as demonstrated by social media, wiki leaks and crowdsourcing. Best buy is an example of one of the companies that consults everyone from CEO's to cleaners before making an important decision. This is valuable in terms of building the company culture and ensuring we continue on follow this trend of democratizing the decison making process and information.
Interesting article Peter - also I would like to say that I love the look and feel of the blog - well done.
ReplyDeleteWith regards to the infobit, I think one could make a case for doing your own research while still keeping an ear open to what the experts have to say. Sometimes I find that it is much easier and more effective to draw on an experts hours upon hours of experience (according to Malcolm Gladwell it requires 10,000 hours to become an expert at something. However, I am a strong believer in going out and figuring stuff out for yourself - we learn by doing, right?
From a business perspective most entrepreneurs tend to know either a lot about a little or a little about a lot. Either way, it is difficult to have a wide range of knowledge that extends both in breadth and depth. For this reason consulting an expert from time to time can provide knowledge from experience that cannot be learned from a blog or website.
Very interesting topic!
This reminded me of this study
ReplyDeletehttp://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/07/study-why-bother-to-remember-when-you-can-just-use-google.ars
Basically we are now using technology to get the information for us and we aren't actually able to recall it ourselves. It's become a world of digital experts and instead of thinking for ourselves we just remember who has the information that we respect the most.