The Wisdom of Crowds for Software Teams

This Christmas break was very fruitful for me. I had a really good holiday which i am able to refresh and I was able to read some books which i had been in my mind last few months. The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki is one of them. The book is built around one powerful idea. When an ordinary group is set up in the right way, its combined judgment can be better than the judgment of a single expert or even a small team of experts. At first, this feels surprising, because many of us assume the best decisions usually come from the experts on that topic. But Surowiecki shows that, under the right conditions, a mixed group of people can be surprisingly accurate.

This idea stayed in my head because it applies so well to development teams. In software development we make decisions all the time. We decide what to build, how to design it, how long it will take, what risks to accept, and what problems to fix first. Many of these decisions are made with incomplete information. Requirements change. Systems behave differently in production than in our minds. Customers surprise us. Deadlines push us. In that kind of environment, decision-making is not only about intelligence. It is about using information well.

That is why I think this book is a helpful management book, even though it is not written only for managers. It explains what makes groups smart, and it also explains what makes groups fail. The takeaway is, build the right conditions, and your team can make better decisions than any one person.

Surowiecki describes four conditions that help a group become wise. Diversity, Independence, Decentralization, and Aggregation. I want to explain each one and show how I think it can help.

Diversity: Different People See Different Problems

A wise group needs diversity. This does not only mean people who look different. It also means people who think differently and who have different experience. The reason is simple, different people notice different things.

In development, different roles naturally have different viewpoints. Backend engineers often focus on data, performance, and scaling. Frontend engineers see usability issues and complexity in the user interface. QA engineers focus on edge cases and what might break. Support teams know what customers complain about every day. SREs and platform teams see reliability trends, slowdowns, and repeated failure patterns. Security engineers notice risks that others may ignore.

If you only ask one group of people, you will miss important information. And missing information creates bad decisions.

A very common example is feature planning. A product idea can look simple in a document. Add export to CSV. Many people might say yes quickly. But the support team might know that customers do not want any CSV, they want a specific format for their workflows. A security person might warn that exporting data increases the chance of data leaks. An SRE might point out that large exports can create heavy load and slow down the system. The team can still build the feature but now the decision is more realistic, and the design will be better.

As a manager, I think diversity means I should invite the right voices early. If we wait until late stages, diversity becomes feedback, and feedback is often too late to change the plan without stress.

In practice, when my team is making a big decision, I want to ask myself who is not in the room, but should be? Sometimes that person is in support. Sometimes it is in QA. Sometimes it is the engineer who is on-call most often. Their input is not a nice to have. It can prevent serious problems.

Independence: Protect Thinking From Copying and Pressure

The second condition is independence. This means people should think for themselves, especially in the early stage of a decision. Groups become less smart when people stop thinking independently and start copying the first opinion they hear.

In companies, independence is often broken by hierarchy and social pressure. Even when managers have good intentions, their opinion has extra weight. If a manager speaks first, people adjust. If a senior engineer speaks confidently, people follow. Sometimes we call this groupthink. Sometimes it is just human behavior, we want harmony, and we do not want to look wrong.

In development teams, independence matters a lot in estimation. Estimation is difficult because software work has hidden complexity. If one person says, This should take two days, that number becomes an anchor. Others may change their estimates even if they know about risks. Then the plan becomes unrealistic, and the team pays later.

A simple solution is to collect estimates privately first. You can do this with planning poker, a form, or even a quick message. The key is that people give their number before discussion. Then you reveal all estimates together. The most useful part is not the average. The most useful part is the gap.

If one person estimates two days and another estimates two weeks, you have learned something important, someone knows about complexity. The conversation then becomes useful. Why is there a difference? Maybe testing will take longer than coding. Maybe there is a dependency. Maybe the data migration is risky. Maybe there is unclear scope. This is how a group becomes smarter.

Independence also matters in design decisions. We should ask people to write their ideas before the meeting. Even a short written note helps. When people write first, the meeting becomes a place to compare and improve ideas, not a place where the first loud opinion wins.

A small habit that helps a lot is. If you are the manager, speak last. You can still guide the discussion, but you do not start by telling everyone the answer. You create space for real thinking. This is one of the most practical wisdom of crowds habits in everyday management.

Decentralization: Decisions Should Be Close To The Work

The third condition is decentralization. This means decisions should be made close to where the information is. In development teams, knowledge is spread out. No one person has all the information.

The engineer on-call knows what breaks in production. The person who maintains authentication knows its strange edge cases. The person who owns the deployment pipeline knows what steps are fragile. The person who built the payment integration knows what can go wrong with external providers. The support team knows which problems are hurting customers right now.

If decisions are made far away from this knowledge, we create plans that fight reality. We may commit to deadlines that ignore the true complexity. We may prioritize features while ignoring reliability work that is becoming dangerous.

Decentralization does not mean no leadership. It means a different type of leadership. A manager sets direction and boundaries. The team decides how to reach the goal.

For example, a manager might say, This quarter, we must reduce page load time by 30%. That is clear direction. But the team should decide whether to focus on caching, database queries, frontend bundle size, image optimization, or something else. The people closest to the code and the metrics can choose the best approach.

Decentralization also helps speed. If every decision needs approval from one person, the team slows down and becomes passive. In software, speed is not only about moving fast. It is about learning fast. Teams learn by shipping small changes, observing results, and improving. Decentralized decision-making supports that loop.

One area where decentralization matters most is incident response. During an outage, technical decisions should be led by the engineers closest to the system. The manager’s role is to support, remove blockers, reduce noise, coordinate communication, and protect the team. If leadership tries to control every technical detail during an incident, the response often becomes slower.

Aggregation: Combine Many Inputs Into One Clear Decision

The fourth condition is aggregation. Even if you have diverse and independent input, you still need a way to combine it into one decision. Without aggregation, teams either debate forever or they choose based on power.

In software teams, weak aggregation often looks like this, long meetings with no clear outcome, decisions that keep coming back, or decisions that are made secretly after the meeting. This creates frustration and reduces trust.

Aggregation does not need to be complicated. It needs to be clear. A few simple methods work well.

For prioritization, you can use shared criteria. For example, customer impact, effort, reliability risk, and time sensitivity. You do not have to turn it into a perfect math score. The point is to make trade-offs visible. When trade-offs are visible, the decision feels less personal and less political.

For design decisions, a short written decision note can help. It can include, the problem, the options, pros and cons, and the final decision. This reduces confusion later and helps new team members understand why something was chosen.

For incident work, aggregation can mean something different. Choosing the next best test. During an outage, many people have ideas. The right process is not to vote. The right process is to list hypotheses and test them quickly. This is another way the crowd becomes useful. It generates many possible explanations, and then the team uses evidence to narrow down.

Aggregation also connects to code review. Code review is a simple form of group intelligence. One person writes code, others review, and the result improves. But code review only works well when people feel safe to disagree and when the team values correctness and clarity over ego.

When Crowds Fail In Development Teams

The book also explains that crowds can fail. In development teams, the biggest risk is not lack of intelligence. The biggest risk is social dynamics.

Crowds fail when people copy each other, when early opinions become truth, and when disagreement is punished. You can see this in architecture discussions where the most confident person wins, even if the choice is wrong. You can see it in planning meetings where everyone agrees with an unrealistic deadline. You can see it in postmortems where blame causes people to hide information.

This is why the manager’s role is so important. The manager designs the environment. If the environment makes people silent, the crowd cannot be wise.

One of the best “crowd wisdom” practices in software is the blameless postmortem. When done well, a postmortem collects input from many people and turns it into shared learning. The team becomes smarter over time. When done badly (with blame), it creates fear and reduces honesty.

How You Can Use This When You Are Managing a Development Team

If you are managing a development team, the lesson from The Wisdom of Crowds is not that the team should vote on everything. The lesson is that you should design a process that brings out the team’s best thinking.

The first change you can make is to stop letting important decisions start inside a meeting. Meetings are often where independence dies. Instead, start decisions before the meeting. Share the question in advance and ask people to send short written input. This small step improves quality a lot. It also makes meetings shorter and more focused.

In planning and estimation, use independent input before discussion. Ask the team to estimate privately first. Then compare estimates and talk about the gaps. This reduces overconfidence and helps the team learn what they are missing. Over time, this also improves trust. Teams stop feeling like deadlines are random numbers. They start feeling like plans come from real thinking.

In technical decisions, focus on trade-offs. Ask for options, not only opinions. Encourage people to explain what they are assuming. For example, if someone wants microservices, ask what problem it solves and what operational cost it adds. If someone wants a big refactor, ask what risk it reduces and what delivery it delays. Your job is not to choose the most elegant solution. Your job is to help the team choose the solution that fits the context.

In prioritization, use a clear method to combine input. Define criteria that match your goals and repeat them often. When criteria are stable, decisions feel fair. People may still disagree, but they understand the logic. This is important because trust in the process is as important as the outcome.

In incidents, decentralize the technical decisions. Give clear roles, support the responders, and keep communication clean. After the incident, run a blameless postmortem and convert the team’s experience into improvements. This is one of the best ways to turn a painful event into long-term learning.

In hiring and performance decisions, protect independence as well. Ask interviewers to submit feedback before discussion. In calibration meetings, collect written examples before opinions spread. This reduces bias and helps you make fairer decisions.

Finally, one personal habit matters more than most tools. Speak Last. As a manager, your opinion is heavy. If you speak first, you may accidentally end the discussion. If you speak last, you collect more truth. You can still lead strongly by setting goals, asking good questions, and making the final call when needed. But you let the group intelligence appear before you shape it.

Closing Thoughts

The Wisdom of Crowds helped me see management as decision system design. Good managers do not just make decisions. They build the environment where decisions are made.

In software development, this matters a lot because complexity and uncertainty are normal. A team becomes stronger when it uses diversity of viewpoints, protects independent thinking, pushes decisions closer to where the work happens, and has clear ways to turn input into action.

Crowd wisdom is not magic. It is not everyone is right. It is a structure. And as a manager, you can build that structure.

If you do, you will likely see fewer surprises, fewer hidden disagreements, and stronger ownership. You will still make mistakes, but you will make fewer mistakes for the same reasons. Over time, your team will not only deliver more they will think better together.