A crowd is likely to make wise decisions if the individuals decide individually. To me this sounds very critical of our current ability to design organizations. If we're better off coming to individual estimates and decisions, and that's the whole story, then there would be no point in forming organizations whose function goes beyond averaging individual beliefs. Internally communicating organizations would simply endanger their opinion diversity. If current organizations can be improved by discouraging communication between members of the organization then we are very bad indeed at designing decision-making and communication-processes. The message of the research so far seems to be: A crowd is as wise as it gets if it is nothing more than the sum of its individual members. Communication leads to less wise crowds.

The wisdom of the crowds, James Surowiecki