Leadership Hint: Favor Collaboration

"Iron sharpens iron, and one person sharpens another." Proverbs 27:17

"Where there is no guidance, a people falls, but in an abundance of counselors, there is safety." Proverbs 11:14

New Yorker business columnist James Surowiecki in his book The Wisdom of Crowds, explains why it’s so important to collect opinions from people with diverse backgrounds. Surowiecki’s book opens with a story about British scientist Francis Galton, who attended a country fair in the early 1900s. While there, he stumbled upon a contest where participants had to guess the weight of an ox. According to Surowiecki, eight hundred people entered guesses. While some were experienced butchers and farmers, others were non-experts with little experience with livestock. After the contest, Galton collected the responses and ran some scientific tests. He was surprised by what he found. Galton thought the group’s average guess would be way off the mark. After all, mix a few brilliant people with some mediocre people and a lot of dumb people, and it seems likely you’d end up with a dumb answer - the lowest common denominator. But Galton was wrong. The crowd’s guess, when averaged, came in at 1,197 pounds. The ox weighed 1,198 pounds. As Surowiecki put it, “Under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent and are often smarter than the smartest people in them... Even if most of the people within a group are not especially well-informed or rational, it can still reach a collectively wise decision.”

A diverse crowd gives you more substantial insights than any single expert, and people from different backgrounds bring unique contexts to the issue. Applying this wisdom to leadership in the church is simple. Leaders should band together, share their best insights, and collaborate in decision-making. The sum of the parts is always stronger than the sharpest leader.