The Columbia Disaster And How Small Groups Can Be Made To Work

Decision Making Instead of making decisions independently, now people always rely on others, such as groups or computers, to help them make a decision. Small groups often gives people different points of view and let people understand their situation much more clearly. However, these opinions from others may not be suitable for everyone. James Surowiecki uses the story of the Columbia Disaster to discuss efficiency of small groups. In his essay “Committees, Juries, and Teams: The Columbia Disaster and How Small Groups Can Be Made to Work”, Surowiecki tells us how the small groups can work properly instead of making people “dumber”. Even though, the small group contains people with great

In every groups, there are leaders who guide their members to work and solve the problems. However, in the small groups, the position of the leader is different from that in the big groups. Surowiecki describes that, “Investors do not think of themselves as members of the market. People of the MMT thought of themselves as members of that team” (474). The leader of the small group does not consider himself as a part of members, and they think they are more wiser than other members. Moreover, others also contain the same idea that the leader is greater than them. Decision that the leader makes would be difficult to change by other members for two reasons. First of all, people consider leaders as the center of the groups and they are always right due to their knowledge. Secondly, the absolute power of the leaders makes members have no right to be opposed to them. Therefore, making decision in the group is difficult for normal members because the relationships between them and leaders are unfair. The relationship online can be much more complex than that in the small groups, since there are so many people using it. No one can make sure who they talk with online and usually their identities are hidden by the Internet and themselves as well. Therefore, you may talk to the same person twice with any consideration and Christian says that, “If my finger slips off the tab, if she hits the wrong button on her console, if there if some glitch in my phone provider’s network or hers-i am anonymous again”(105). While people talking with someone unknown online, the information each of them get can only be provide by others. They cannot get the rough ideas about the person by others’ appearances and behaviors since what is really next to them is the computer. Therefore, to build any relationship with an unknown person depends on others and people can easily end up this kind of