Choosing Wisely

Humans are distinguished from animals by their ability to make
choices. When a horse gets hungry, he puts his head down in the grass
and starts chewing; he doesn’t try to decide between eating now or
later, or between grass and an apple. He eats what is in front of his
nose. But we don’t have to do that; we have the ability to choose–
between sushi and squash, between now and later, between good and evil.
Throughout history, individuals stumbled through the choices they had to
make to survive, quickly finding out that it is often useful to ask
advice, since groups can often make better choices than individuals.
They gathered in tribes and around campfires to plan the next day’s
hunt, sharing what Democrasoft
calls “the wisdom of we.” We didn’t invent this concept:  the
superiority of collective wisdom, has been apparent since men and women
lived in caves.

As time went on, decision-making became more complex: should I go to
college or get a job? Should it be paper or plastic? While those
decisions are practical or ethical, they have mostly individual
consequences. But when we get into questions like “should we expend
resources to see what is on Mars or reform health care or fight In
Afghanistan?” we come to decisions that may have far-reaching
consequences for humanity’s future. Even on a more localized level,
whether deciding on where to focus our company’s resources, or how to
most effectively prioritize the goals of our non-profit organization,
there may be significant impact on the future of many individual lives.

Between two classes of decisions — the individual and the global– lie
most of the choices or decisions we make every day, in business and in
families. The tools available to us to make individual choices have not
changed much over the millennium; in one sense, good choice-making
ultimately comes from the ability to be fully present, to be aware of
possible consequences, and at the same time to be able to refer
“inwards” for individual intuitive guidance. But when it comes to making
group decisions, while the tools at our disposal have definitely
evolved over time, so have the reasons why it is so important that our
good choice-making abilities keep up.

The importance of making wise choices has perhaps never been more
important than at this time in history. As a species, we are clearly
capable of jeopardizing our future in a spectrum of ways, which seem to
be expanding exponentially. Fortunately, technology has also been
evolving alongside of human consciousness. In just the last 20 years,
technology capabilities like computer processing and web-connectivity
have brought about exciting new possibilities. We have in modern times
used relatively modern communications tools to make our group choices
easier:  letters, conference calls, emails, meetings – even wikis. Human
beings have a greater potential to accomplish things together today
than ever before, because of all the available technology. But unless
this technology is also used to make wise choices, it will be wasted.

Connecting 350 million people on a social network has enormous
potential to do good, but only when social networking is purposeful.
That’s how I came to realize that Collaborize
could be used to facilitate an evolution in group decision-making. For
whatever benefits come from better choices on the individual level, the
level of “I”, they increase exponentially on the group level, the level
of “we.” Choices that benefit from the wisdom of “we” do so in part
because those choices benefit from different perspectives, they support
and have the support of those who helped make them, and in the end they
tend to be better choices or decisions.

So what is exciting to me, is that while Collaborize exists to help
us make decisions, it also
exists to make a difference. Used right, it has the potential to advance
the condition of humanity, to make us wise throughout our connections
with each other, and also wise in the important decisions and choices
that we make together.

This is a cross-post from the Wisdom of We blog at www.WisdomOfWe.com