>> up next on booktv "after words" with cass sunstein former administrator of the white house office of information and regulatory affairs in the obama administration and co-author of "wiser" getting beyond groupthink to make groups smarter. mr. sunstein shares his thoughts on a group decision-making can be flawed and offers ways to make better collective decisions. he discusses his book with susan cain author of the bestseller quiet, the power of introverts in the world they can't stop talking. >> host: i love this book. it was fascinating and i would love actually it was pretty complex ideas so can we start with the laying out the basic thesis? >> guest: if there are two parts of the book. the first is why the groups fail and the second is how can groups do better and on failure there

has been 30 years of work on individuals and how we sometimes make mistakes so we might make investment errors and we might make errors in our choice of consumer products. we might make errors in what we are scared about what we are not scared of. there's also been a burgeoning bit of research that hasn't been pulled together on how groups either aggravate or reduce the problems of individuals. that actually is a huge improvement over the idea of groupthink which is kind have been a popular conscious now. groupthink means that groups often suppress the individual ideas and creativity of their members and that is a real problem. but to figure out what actually lies behind groupthink, what are the specifics that make it happen, that's something where we really have made a lot of progress in the last decades in the book tries to figure out for ways that groupthink so to speak happens in firms and families

and governments and religious organizations and labor unions and student organizations anytime groups don't do so great. then there's an idea that we have learned a lot why groups fail about how groups can succeed. some of the three simple things that you can institute in a minute and others through more complicated things that require technologies. >> host: so i want to get into where the places groups go wrong and how can we fix them up before we do that what drove you to write this book? did you have personal experiences with your life? >> guest: i will tell you where it started. i was involved in a project involving juries. when do they get big and when did they get little? with a couple of co-authors we did a large study in what we found was it's not the case

which is what we expected that when you have a group of six people they will end up after deliberating arriving at an award that's in the middle of what the group of six thought. that is what we expected that you come up in the average. will be found in this very large study with hundreds of juries was that group jurors end up with higher awards, often much higher awards than the average or middle members so in terms of dollars juries got more punitive than individuals. we also measured how bad they thought misconduct was on a numerical scale of zero to six or something like that and if the average individual is at 5 in the jury came in at six. outraged people got more outrage. people who wanted to punish corporations with $100,000 awards. after they talk to each other they moved up to 200,000 and as i saw that groups and up much

more outraged than the individuals who compose them. what's going on there and that's what made me think there's something to learn about. >> host: that's fascinating. what's happening inside of those jury rooms? are the jurors egging each other on? >> guest: i think what's happening is two things. one is in a group if you put together people who are outraged about misconduct by a corporation being number of arguments they will here that will suggest the corporation is terrible or the award should be higher is high in the number of arguments they will here that suggest the company didn't do so bad for the awards should be lower will be relatively low. the fact that they start at our region you can think about this about anything. if you are outraged about the united states doing something you think is harming you or general motors is doing something that you think is bad or the president or the president's opponent. the group is inclined to think

that than the number of arguments that push with in that direction will be higher than the number of arguments the other way. i actually saw some tapes where you can see it happening happening in real time. it's about information exchange in a group that has a tendency towards outrage in these cases and we can talk about how groups of multiple kinds whatever their tendency as can amplified especially by the people who were speaking out and are disturbed. the other thing i think is this interesting is this which has to do with status and reputation. if you're in a group of people who think that what a corporation did is really bad and you think it's not so bad one of our cases companies sold something that was a failed baldness cure and while i have the time and continue to think that's really outrageous a failed baldness cure the standard person might think it's not that terrible. it's not like anybody's going to die but if in some of the

baldness cure failed cases the jury started out our rage. the people that weren't so outraged he could see them receiving an silence in because they didn't want to look like passive people. they didn't want to look like weak people. they didn't want to look like they were excusing misconduct. they wanted to preserve their status or their self conception within the group. so as people receive they are receiving away from the group norm and that can be really bad because it deprives the group of important information. now in the jury cases whether they should be getting higher or lower it's not easy to no one in abstract but if your group is composed of individuals who are silencing themselves because they are concerned about reputation status within the group than the problem is the

group is losing information. as soon as i saw that in our studies i thought -- that's about juries but it's about groups generally also. does that happen within a family? information is lost because people are afraid their reputations are at risk are people think i have something to contribute that's probably not as good as with the other people are contributing. >> host: so the effect of silencing its making me think of narrow scientific research. i have read that if somebody dissents from a group they experience in the match a lot of the part of the brain that were asked to fear, what scientists call the pain of independence. talking about that in the jury context can you talk about an example you gave of this happening in a political context? >> guest: when president kennedy gave the go-ahead to invade cuba at the bay of pigs

he said afterwards it was a terrible failure very damaging event for the united states where we had to concede in negotiations with cuba. that was not good and he said how could i have been so stupid as to let them go ahead kennedy said. the reason was that his advisers were engaged in something a lot like our jury determinations. that is they were going with the flow in the room so there were advisers after-the-fact is that i knew this was a mistake but i didn't say anything. the reason was either they thought for some of them their own dissident views are probably wrong because they felt isolated and i'm the only one that thinks that i'm wrong and the other point which is your point about the mode -- a move amygdala

amygdala if you say something in a group of people for purposes of national security or liberation if you say this may not be a good idea probably you are thinking to yourself i'm going to look really bad in front of my peers and i'm putting myself at risk. >> host: shouldn't it be the job of the leader of the group to do something about that dynamic and i want to just point out something you talk about in your book which i found fascinating. we hear so much about the power of optimism in general. the power of optimism to achieve success of all kinds and you said you divide the world into anxious and complacent people and you say when groups do well they have anxious leaders. >> guest: this is something i saw in the white house day after day. there is one leader, the president of the united states but they're also cabinet heads and heads of policy offices in the white house and if the

leader is anxious not in the sense that they are terrified of life but in the sense that they are constantly thinking what can go wrong, what is the problem i might be reading about in the paper tomorrow? what is the way the american people might be adversely affected by what i'm doing? that's great in the reason is great is that it's like a seatbelt or a safety belt that the nation has by virtue of that level of anxiety. if by contrast you have someone who is complacent and those people can often be charismatic there is a tendency often i think in the corporate world and in government too to engage in happy talk when you're talking to the boss. because you do want to put on the boss's shoulders more weight. they have enough to worry about so everything is going great and you got it and that's going to be a much easier exchange often

than if you say we have some other problems here and i'm not sure how to sort them out. a boss might think solve the problem. i have a bunch of my own. so the complacent person is often going to look more like the team player and often more like the person who has everything under control. the anxious person where the anxious leader i think shouldn't be full of woe and despair but should be thinking all the time. there are seven things are more that could go wrong and what are we doing to reduce the risks for each of the seven? >> host: so do you think that groups should be composed of a mix of complacent and anxious people or is it rather that each individual should have a little of both americares or? >> guest: it's a great question and the data doesn't ever find enough to answer that question. i will speculate based on experience.

for a leader to have a degree of anxiety i think is absolutely indispensable. not what it translates to an anxious workplace but in the sense that the leader who has basically a sense of well-being and is going to be okay is also thinking this might go wrong, that we have a plan to launch a product and am i now work for the following reasons and are we investigating that or a public official who is developing some environmental programs ought to be thinking this is going to have an adverse effect on small business and what can we do to cover that? is this going to have adverse effects on economic growth? >> we have the timing right? questions like that so for leaders to be thinking about downsides basically every day is really good so long as it doesn't swallow them up. it's going to be demoralizing. within a group there is probably

some importance in distinguishing among stages. if the stages of idea development have a bunch of optimistic people saying let's try this, let's try that that can be a kind of lets put a lot of things on the table or on the stage where optimism and deflation are opposites and you want to opt at that stage iv optimism. at the time you are refining which plans to undertake than to switch from the optimism everything welcome to looking at downsides is probably a good idea. it's true that for an engineer or a creative person or a constructor of something whether it's in politics or science, you have to put on hold your anxiety about how things are going to work out as a writer or scientist. you have to think this is going to work but to have the key

stages even for multiple team members a sense of how things can go wrong that is helpful. i can say for my own experience in the white house i had a staff of about 50 and they were all excellent. i wanted everyone of them to be thinking. i had an office that dealt with government regulation and i wanted them to be thinking all the time what could go wrong with a project that they were helping to oversee just so there wouldn't be a mistake that would hurt the american people. i didn't want them having any week where they thought everything was going great. if they did they probably were imposing risk some people. >> host: i'm fascinated by this because it runs so counter to the american ideal lease on its face. when you dig deeper i see it. digging deeper into leaders it seems clear that if you are a leader of a group you want to get the best of everyone in that

group and in that meeting and yet you say it's actually very unusual for leaders to create a climate where that happens. why is that? is it because leaders tend to be optimistic or are there other forces going on? >> guest: on the anxiety complacency scale it's important to emphasize that a kind of yes we can headline, that's good. so for a religious organization is trying to grow and help people or a charity or a nonprofit, to think that this is going to work. that's probably an indispensable foundation. at the same time you are thinking what can go wrong. in terms of leaders here's the risk. if the leader indicates a firm view at the outset that this is risk number one that can squelch the creativity and innovation as well as the mix that you want in

your group. so if you have a leader who is superb but it is declarative or early on that can be very bad in terms of eliciting information. one of our most successful presidents whether you like his politics or his politics or not is franklin donna was about. he was famous for giving everyone in sight of his own government is sense that he agreed with them or early on even if they had quite opposing views. some of his advisers forced done at the moment of the decision that roosevelt indicated great sympathy with their view actually thought they were full of nonsense. the reason he did that was you wanted to be a good manager and give everyone room to give their own ideas and develop them. one way a good leader can

overcome the creativity and innovation squelching character of stating a view is not too stated view. so to be very quiet so to speak at the outset and to be eliciting views with a sense of sympathetic curiosity. in government i observed that some of the best people are really great at that. they didn't give people a sense that they were stupid. they didn't give people a sense that they were on the wrong track until the time of decision when they would not say they were stupid but they would say we need to go another way. i will tell you a story about president obama. it was an early meeting involving what to do about the american car companies and famously help them and things are going well and he made the right decision. at one of those meetings the youngest person in the room the person with the lowest status made a comment that didn't go to

the core of the issue but an important subsidiary issue in the mixed up the letters that were forming some government term. so instead of an gp he said pgn or something like that. everybody in the room laughed and then people started to walk out. the hour was up on the ground that was a funny mistake he made made. the poor guy was very reaction on what the president said was -- and the reason that was terrific was not the obvious one which it was kindness to the person who is young but the person who was young with low status was really smart. if that person said something today whether or not he got the letters right they had an idea and the person wanted everyone around to hear the idea.

that is i think good leadership. it wasn't clear by the way. >> host: he just wanted to know what it was. >> guest: good leaders often think silence is golden. that's very simple to implement. >> host: okay so if you are the leader and you want to hear others' views but you also know the person who speaks the earliest or one of the earliest tends to have a lot of influence in their opinions. who do you get the flu -- the floor to first? >> guest: that's great and it does suggest the importance of leaders thinking of that. if a leader is pretty clear early on justifiably clear on what the right course of action is then there are two smart things you can do that are very different. one is to pick the person you think states the correct view.

that will issue say anchored the discussion at a certain place and create what you are stipulating for good reasons is probably right without having -- and creating a strawman for the rest of the group to target. that can be a smart strategy. it has a risk which is the leader knows that i myself am infallible i am directing the person who shares my fallible belief to start that could be squelching. so a creative alternative is to pick the person you think is both able and let them talk first. i have seen the private sector sometimes the second strategy be used by good managers who deliberately select the person they think is on the wrong track not because all things

considered that is incorrect to make sure that he was highlighted and gets the full airing. it's a little like what roosevelt did in signaling disagreement with positions that he thought were entirely wrong. another thing a leader can do by the way doesn't involve sequencing is to formally or less formally something that assigns roles to people. something i found in government that initially found very jarring was differences as there will forever be empress of government that have different institutional responsibilities. the environmental protection agency are concerned about the environment. they are not first and foremost on economic growth. the department of agriculture is focused on farmers. that is what there just is. apartment transportation is focused on the transportation sector.

sometimes there is a government term, one of the dozens and jargon called equities which does have its familiar sense of fairness is. it means the environmental protection agency will have its equities meaning environment and the department of transportation will have its equities in the transportation sector. >> host: is almost a concept of stakeholders. >> guest: yes they concept of stakeholders. initially it didn't seem harmful because you want everyone thinking what is best but it's actually really productive in the groups opposing that everyone gets to talk because of the group leader is doing business right they have different rules feeling entirely free to say what they know so the department of agriculture will think we are talking about the interest in they won't besides those and they won't think i'm going to shut up because let's say the department of energy has a view about

energy. we are talking about farmers and that's what we know in the environmental protection agency even if it doesn't capture the entirety of the public interest may have important equities so to speak in the effects on clean air and clean water and the beauty of that and this is no unique animal to the federal government but the beauty of it is after it ends the reigns of informational inputs that the brown gets his very wide. people haven't been identified as you are this department are that department. so what a leader can do that's less formal than not a syndicate look i know you have these expertise. you have this expertise and you have this perspective and i really want to hear that. that is a very informal almost

immediate role assignment. if the leader assigns people different roles the issue is about a product for example an engineer or a communications person or you have someone involved with the scientific issue if someone is a technology type, then all that information will be added which would be less likely if a group member were thought to be members of the team. >> host: that's because psychologically they have been given almost permission to talk about it. >> guest: as you say two things that begin in the jury which was also preserved by the way on political issues. the two problems are that people are often silencing themselves because they think of other people think something different their own views must be wrong or they think other people think

something different they risk their reputation if they speak out. if there is role assignment both of those are taken away because you think i know something that the others don't know. and you think it's not inappropriate for me to say from the standpoint of science or engineering or farming you are not risking yourself. that's what you are therefore. >> host: that makes perfect sense. i'm also thinking in addition the psychological freedom when you are advocating on behalf of someone else that gives people extra power to weigh in. you can imagine that happening in a jury too thinking about a presenter speaking for which sets the standard in them. that makes me think of something you wrote about devils advocate. i would have thought assigning some on the role of devil's advocate within the meeting would open up the dialogue because you are giving somebody the freedom to give a dissenting

point of view. you said it doesn't always work as well. >> guest: this is something i believe the intuition is pretty good and the notion of the devils advocate is in common conversation now. the problem is that it's a little bit of an exercise in reality. so let's say there's a group of people who have been dating what kind of investment to make and you were saying investing in energy or health and then say we are not sure. someone is the devils advocate and then they do it. they are going through the motions and a group that already has an inclination. it's not real so the appointment of the devils advocate unlike the appointment of the public defender where you are just playing the role of a lawyer here it's a group member who is playacting.

>> host: everyone else is for real. >> guest: the devils advocate does his or her job asked if he or she fails meaning in a group that's determined or inclined to do something the devils advocate is assigned to make the other argument. unless it structured very carefully the devils advocate if he or she succeeds is undermining the whole project. now if the structure of the devils advocacy arrangement is such that undermining the whole project in the end is an achievement the devils advocate did what was warranted and that was good. then the devils advocate did something a little different. a red team which is used in the u.s. military in the intelligence community and law firms sometimes do it is much more real than the devils advocate.

someone part of your group undertakes her group narrative to argue the other way. that can be a fake. the red team i did is to get a dedicated group that can be small and people whose job it is to show vulnerabilities, show what can go wrong. the line between the devils advocate which is the pen and paper exercise in the red team isn't set in stone. the difference is the red team is often independent people who have a mission and if they succeed in undermining the plan of the group that is what they are therefore. and the red team idea works really well. i use it informally and government in the sense that the if we are embarking on something but say it's a regulation designed to make sure the trucks will be safe from the highway

and you want to do that if the bounces justify the cost and if it's something that's expensive and not protected for people it's probably not a great idea. we asked people to devise the strongest arguments the other way. that would be a way that was more red-teaming figuring out where we are vulnerable in the sense that we are going off in the wrong direction. it wouldn't be in the nature of devil's advocacy. if you think of it in your own mind in the single human brain sometimes when we are thinking about a course of action we kind of know where we want to go on vacation who we want to date what job would want to take and we might do a devils advocacy exercise in our head but it's not real. or you can think i'm going to genuinely put in brackets the

question of the ultimate course of action. i'm going to put the strongest arguments i can to myself against that vacation or that job. that is more like red-teaming. >> host: so the red team doesn't depend on the fact that it's a team. you could be a red person. it sounds similar to a story told in the book about the intel chairman changing his course of action based on specific thought exercise. can you talk about that? >> guest: and tell a very successful company was having problems and the leadership was struggling a lot. one of the top people said suppose we just entered our current jobs today. what would we do? today was our first day what would we do?

>> host: if you were the new guy. >> guest: what would we do? that's a great question and for them it was completely -- the products that they had been selling that they have been profiting greatly from had run into trouble in terms of their own economic situation. if we were taking a company we would stop selling that. we would do something else. the brilliance of that idea which managers and people in positions of mid-level or high-level authority infrequently asked if i started my job this week how would i do things differently? reason that is great is it's a little bit like the idea of role assignment on steroids. you are assigning yourself a role of i'm doing this now. i don't have a history to which i have an emotional or some other kind of commitments.

i was at the university of chicago for many years and there was the faculty there, an excellent professor who any response to a new idea would say either we did that or we never did that. those two responses exhausted the universe of any idea was bad. but if he had said i just joined the university then you look at the view on the merits rather than looking through a gauze of the past. >> host: that's really interesting. why is it that you say if you take an investment club of tightly-knit people who know each other really well they are not going to do as well as investment to our not so well-connected. >> guest: this is very striking and surprising data. there are clubs all over united states. people get together and figure out how to invest. the worst-performing investment

clubs in the united states are the ones where people know each other and like each other, socialize and have dinner together come have wine together. they are buddies. the best performing ones are the ones that have distance. people don't know each other that well personally. they are there to talk things through. it's a lot like juries. if you know each other well and you socialize together than the likelihood you would say to your buddy the course of action we have embarked on over the last week is nonsensical so they suppress dissent and disagreement. i think is important for assessing group performance. it's related by the way to people of different personality types who is going to be helpful or not. parallel to the investment club is a surprising finding that the

close net ones are successful. data suggesting the most successful companies in the united states have contentious wards where people are arguing and fighting. what is good about that is not that they are uncivil. they are listening information. if you have a good board you have able people there and john stuart mill has this great book on liberty. one reason that freedom of speech is you can test truth and even if you are really sure -- a corporate boards that have smart people that is a little like our clubs they are not going to get the truth is tested. >> host: is interesting because you could also see going the other way. you could say people who knew each other very well will feel like we have the freedom to dissent.

>> guest: is a great point. what i'm wondering given what you just said whether there are some investment clubs in the united states or some corporate boards in the united states which combined grade knowledge of one another with a high degree of personal fondness with the openness to dissenting views. the date i described is aggregate data, close net but you could disaggregate by looking at close net ones where lots of disagreement is allowed because there is trust. so it's comparable i think within the family or certain workplaces read some of our places -- are probably like that where they are close and have a sense of the common mission. they may have lunch together and even dinner but to say you are full of nonsense is completely

acceptable because it's not socially destructive. you can say to someone with whom you have a close relationship with its charming rather than the end of matters. >> host: especially if you have created a culture where everyone cares about and gray. >> guest: that's a great point. here are some experiments that are closely associated with what you are describing. their experiments about whether people will cooperate under circumstances if it's in their economic interest to cooperate. if you call wall street -- game wall street they don't cooperate if you call the game cooperation they cooperate. it's a great point that if you have a workplace where the norm is one of expressing your own view and you think the company

is going in the wrong direction. there are some programs by the way where creativity is central and admiration as indispensable. it's just where you are describing. this is anecdotal and they are good anecdotes about intelligent programs where there is a high degree of trust and sideways to the investment club data where people do know each other. they feel completely free to say that's a terrible idea. >> host: if you were sitting down tomorrow and having lunch tomorrow with the leader of a company or new product line and a leader tells you okay we have meetings every monday morning but people feel inhibited and they are not really telling you what they think what would you do? >> there are a few things to do. one is to give clarity to what

it means to be a team player. it's not someone who's agreeable but instead to give a sense is one who tells the group information they want to know so to create a culture of information is absolutely essential. i think that would be number one. number two to have a leader who is as we have discussed a little recessive at the beginning not in the sense of being not warm but in the sense of saying i want to hear everything and having that be sincere of possible. a third thing to do is to see if you can consistent with the structure of an institution to have good assignment of roles such that people feel that they have something to contribute

because they are given a distinctive task. these are very informal things. a fourth thing you can do is think of two different kinds of people you want in your operation first that are obvious. you want people who are smart. general intelligence amazingly is a good predictor of performance. there is some work suggesting that there is a different form of team capacity you might call it that's even better than general intelligence. it doesn't really have a name. sometimes called factor c which means the ability to work in groups. these are groups that are generally collaborative groups which have people who are working on their own. factor c refers to a few things actually. one is the ability to read other people's emotions. this can be tested independently

through facial expressions. that is a good predictor of team performance. groups that have lots of people participating in one way or another versus ones that have small minorities participating great. >> host: by that you mean how many people are speaking in the group? >> of you have a group of five speaking in different ways it doesn't necessarily mean they're talking in the meeting. they might be sending an e-mail. they might be committed -- communicating their ideas from either way but making sure they get what they know in the third is women are a bit better at than. the data suggest that women are on average a bit better than men at contributing to better team performance. we don't know whether that's because women are just independently better at reading other peoples emotions which is apparently also true but whether there something else going on there.

those are three things that tend to be helpful. so for the good manager to have people who have a certain team capacity as well as people who have a certain ability. we need to know what is the executive exactly? what is the task so there are some tasks that it's good to have collaboration and there are some tasks where it's not so important and people can work on the own. and there are some other separate coordinating functions. sofas people working separately then to have superb people who are terrifically creative like jeeves -- steve jobs thought to have people like this is good. they are the information aggregation. as a centrally important and does it let them do their great work and let them bring that to the rest of the group at the relevant time and it

incorporated properly. >> host: i'm glad you are making that distinction because there are so many people that i have run across over the years who prefer to spend their workdays working alone but they want their work to serve the good of the people. can you tease out that distinction a little more about what working in the group actually means? it's not only that sitting down at a table full of people and could you bidding. >> guest: good. you could have someone whose job it is for example to invent something and lets think of that very broadly. it could be a commodity. it could be a text. it could be a visual product and it could be that what they need to do is to bring their

commodity, their product to the group's attention at a moment for the group's evaluation and incorporation. they are group members in the sense that let's suppose there are a lot of people producing that thing and there's a component. for some people they may be producing the cover for a book for example and they might be producing the core of a publicity campaign and they are great at that. to have them working on their own and doing it and introducing it to the group can be just fine. and i might even be ideal. there are other groups where creativity emerges best and i don't know if we have nailed exactly in advance which have and which haven't. there are other tasks where the exchange of ideas either face-to-face or on line is what

is most desirable for prompting ingenuity. and the jury i think has not come in yet and it maybe there is no unitary answer of which model is better. to have a flexible manager who is good at knowing both the personnel on the team and knowing that task and what suits their own capacity, that's really good. when i was in the government i had one person coming to mind and she was a terrific writer. if there was a memorandum that was going to go let's say to a group for her to sit down and write a first draft herself that was really good. and for her to work on that first draft with other people wouldn't be helpful. it would just slow her down so she would do the first draft and then there would be maybe six

people and they are good at that. they could check the legal aspects or some other aspects and eventually there would be more eyes on it. often it's based in that way. if you have a group that's trying to figure out what kind of product is best launched in the next year it might be to have some sort of information exchange among a diverse group of people with different ideas is helpful. in a government let's suppose you are thinking of sensible policy initiatives for the next six months. it would take a very large brain to get one person who could isolate a very large number of options for the group. it would probably be better to have a significant number of people either face-to-face or on line listing two things and to aggregate information that way.

>> host: if you are talking about the kind of group work where everybody is sitting together at the same time talking things through i came across a statistic that came out recently that said in your typical group and i think they might've been talking about groups of eight or so ended near typical group you have 50% of people doing the talking and you said that is one of the gains of the group that doesn't work as well. if you want participation so if you're the leader of a group that you see this is happening what you suggest? >> i will tell you what i have observed is they are really alert to that end up to 30% are dominating the group or 70% are dominating the group and need to get other people talking just do that. group presidents in our history have been very alert to this. there's a book to be written i think about this and compiling

historical materials would be a challenge. group presidents in our history have seen people talking and what do they actually think or if they have an expression on their face that suggests disgruntlement do they have something to add? so i have thought myself when i've had a managerial world that if two people are talking even as a teacher there's probably a bunch of people who are excellent to have different ideas who are talking and just asked them. now it might be they have some reason they are not talking that is a good one and they need to talk to me personally or to someone else one way rather than within the group. but if there is any group

talking there's a risk that there's a group dynamic that's not helpful, just asked them if it's a good idea. >> host: it's funny i was just at a corporate meeting yesterday where somebody made the point that sometimes it's hard for her to interject out of the blue but if you call on her she will be happy to tell you what she thinks. someone else said i don't want to be put on the spot so it seems that the leaders job is to figure out each individual needs. >> guest: yes, that's ideal at the leader can know the people well enough. if the leader doesn't have that knowledge then courteously to ask people do you have anything to add giving them the permission to say yes or no that's fine. but also giving them encouragement to contribute something.

>> host: i want to shift gears for a minute. i was fascinated to read something you have to say about innovation tournaments and i would love for you to explain that. we have heard so much lately about the idea of the wisdom of crowds and he talked about ways that companies are starting to implement that wisdom. can you talk a little bit about that? >> guest: what we have been emphasizing so far has been occasional madness of crowds and that is often because of how people have incentives to contribute nothing. groups don't get what they need. there are ways of enlisting crowds that are more easily feasible because of current technologies. we have seen a great growth recently in markets where if you have a big enough company you say instead of asking them

whether the products will launch in january have a market where they can bet on the day it's going to launch and they can maybe get a t-shirt or maybe get some sort of coins that they can use to buy some commodities that the product creates. the beauty of the credential market is that if you get the people betting it's typically eight -- until there's someone or loser so if you think the product is not going to launch ever you can bet that way and you are going to be rewarded so to speak once you have been proven right so you are not going to be a naysayer in fiber group publicly. >> host: would he be found at that moment when you are proven right? >> guest: yes you will be but they probably will say that person is smart, they knew the product wasn't that good. google has used them them and that's by his use them, hewlett-packard is use them.

what emerges has been highly accurate so publicly in the newspapers there's a discussion of markets for elections. iowa electronic markets in presidential elections in control of the senate. the british markets are terrific. believe them better than the polls. people are putting money on the line and if the market is going in a the wrong direction than other people are going to put more money on line and you are aggregating the knowledge of dispersed people. that can be a powerful tool. companies are doing it and it overcomes the problems we have discussed of someone saying i do want to speak out because people will see me as a dissenter and they will think less of me are people saying i must be wrong because the group is going the other way. you might think you know i'm

willing to do it if i have some economic reward coming. so that works. the tournaments which are increasingly feasible. it is a great one on line in a hurry are ones that says if someone has a better idea than we do they will get an economic award. netflix has a matching program where if you like "star trek" and star wars chances are you are also going to like twilight zone. there's a matching program created through netflix that was better than netflix old. they just want to crowds amass people can you beat our program? it turned out to work. what makes turnman to work really well as a company can go beyond a small crowd often working for it.

so netflix as many other companies that are doing this are able to go out and enlist the expertise and creativity of hundreds or thousands of people who are just out there. i expect in the next generation we are going to see a lot more of that partly because the economic reward will be very high in order to get lots of participants because the public recognition can justify the investment even if you don't have a lot of dollars. there's something the u.s. government does in many other u.s. government stood to which is a little analogous in the sense that it has a wisdom of future. if you are proposing a rule involving let's say cleaner or highway safety or immigration typically it will go out to the public for comments before it's finalized and what i observed in government is that this is a

terrific wisdom of crowds safeguard in the sense that the government will have excellent people that is to be hoped in often true of diverse kinds who work hard on figuring out food safety are reducing pollution of one kind or another that they want -- just because they won't know as much as hundreds of thousands or millions of tens of millions of americans. so the comments will come in saying this one is misdirected, this one is a mistake. in some cases the whole thing is a blunder in those comments can sometimes be convincing. that is the way of enlisting the information that people have. >> it's so interesting because really all of these different pieces you are talking about are all about finding out what people really think as opposed to what they say or what you have access to them saying.

>> guest: exactly. completely so one bit of work we did experiments in colorado. we got people from boulder colorado. we made sure they were liberals by the way, to talk about climate change same-sex relations and affirmative action just in small groups. we took their anonymous views before they started to talk had been deliberate to the verdict and after they talked. what happened was the diverse views relatively diverse that the people in boulder had almost three issues became much more extreme and unified as a result of talking to each other. so the group ended up being much more cohesive and unified and last than the individuals before they talked and did the same thing during the same period in

colorado springs which is a conservative place on exactly the same issues. they also became much more cohesive much more confident and much more extreme meaning more conservative than they were before. so the older people flipped to the left. the younger people flipped to the right of a boast -- both lost information within the sense within colorado springs and boulder it kind of fell apart the diversity as a result of discussions among like-minded people. i think that's a clue to a problem that comes from states in the tournament and a prediction market idea in the public comment idea all of those are ways of reducing the risk of loss of information. >> host: it's a similar place to where we started where you were talking about juries and the problem with jury starting

out with more diverse opinions and they get more and more extreme. so you have been able to amass an incredible amount of information and techniques into what i consider one of the great problems of groups and meetings and i'm curious how you did this. i just have to ask you this in closing as a fellow writer so you can ever loosely look at my point of view. you do this at the same time and apparently were writing the three other books in the past year. let me get these numbers. three books in the last year. you have written 20 books to date in your career plus another 15 that you have co-authored and then another 500 scholarly articles along with careers in government and teaching classes. i don't mean to embarrass you i just want to ask you how do you do that? ..