Despite my being in a vehicle and being superior in size and strength to any individual sheep, I was powerless to take on this herd.  And in this case, the power of the herd was both a noun (i.e. a large group) and a verb (i.e. to assemble or move).

 

One interesting application of the “power of the herd” is this phenomenon: when we come together as a “Human Swarm,” a concept called the “Wisdom of Crowds” can be tapped into.  The phrase “two heads are better than one” pales in comparison when it relates to the idea of even more people coming together to share their individual thoughts and ideas. In practice, it is simply stated as this, when forming a collective: the more the merrier!

 

 

In one study of this phenomenon, 800 people at a regional fair guessed the weight of an ox. The average of all the guesses was 1,197 pounds, and it was just one pound away from the ox’s true weight of 1,198 pounds.  In another study, 56 students guessed the number of jellybeans in a jar. The average of all the guesses was 871, and it was closer to the actual number of 850 than all but 1 of the other 55 guesses. 

 

This phenomenon has even been observed in more important items, like predicting the winners of sports tournaments, as well as the Oscars.  With the Oscars one year, the herd consistently performed better than even the most skilled experts and successfully predicted the winner in 15 out of 16 categories. In fact, since we are just finishing up March Madness, recently a herd of just 50 average basketball fans providing input through a software system that created a singular bracket, not only successfully predicted the national champion, but the completed bracket finished in the Top 8% of the 17 million brackets submitted to ESPN, even outperforming their highly-paid experts!

 

 

The power of the herd does more than just reveal the wisdom of the crowd; instead, it unlocks the collective intelligence of all the people present.

 

The Power of Rotary is truly that Rotary Opens Opportunities for all of us to come together to work towards eliminating so many problems that exist in the world.  For example, Rotarians flocked together back in 1979 with the idea of administering the polio vaccine to all the children in the Philippines.