The annual New York Time's feature covering "The Year in Ideas" an interesting read and highly recommended.

But there was an entry on the success of Massively Collaborative Mathematics that particularly impressed me ... and is relevant to the wider goals of this site. This entry describes how, as an experiment in collaboration, a mathematician challenged the readers of his blog to tackle an intractable mathematical problem .... which they amazingly went on to solve!!!!

Now, that is food for thought. If we can solve something like a mathematical problem maybe this whole "wisdom of the crowd" is not so far fetched. Maybe in future the expression "group-think" will start to lose it negative connotations?

Thinking how one might use this technique to solve enterprise management issues I came up with the following:

• First there has to be the availability of the individual "brains". The mathematician concerned (Timothy Gower, a Cambridge mathematician and Fields medalist) had a very select following on his blog and so had the necessary "processing-units" available.
• Second, not all problems can be expected to be suited to massively collaborative techniques. Gower's thesis was that mathematical problem-solving was largely a process of elimination and so many brains could reduce the possible outcomes until the final solution was reached. Much like computer architectures, not all types of computations are suited to parallel processing so we have to have a suitable problem.
• Next, and most importantly, you have to have some coordinating body to keep track of the parallel results from all the different processes and to essentially direct/initiate the next set of processes. This of course sounds a lot like "central control" which some people might think is an anethama to collaborative techniques. But I see no contradiction here, and think this is a great example of the facilitative management that is essential to get the coherence needed in all the massive-parallelism that is taking place. So the challenge is to have just enough control to ensure the collaboration is coordinated and directed to the problem at hand.

This is not far off all the experimentation some businesses are doing with Social Media - both internally and through better engagement with their customer-base. Other examples of successful collaboration of indepenent groups is of course all those open-source initiatives that are around.

So presuming we can find the necessary processing-units through a site like this, and we can achieve the facilitative management approach working, the question that remains is: What activites geared to Enterprise Coherence could be suseptible to this approach?

An interesting challenge to contemplate.