United States Navy

The United States Navy is presented not only as a military institution but as part of a larger argument about how organizations can turn scattered knowledge into sound collective judgment. In the search for the lost submarine Scorpion, naval officers assembled independent estimates into a location no individual had chosen; elsewhere, the Navy figures among the influential users whose adoption helped a standardized screw gain momentum. Together, these examples distinguish effective coordination from simply concentrating authority: organizations need ways to make distributed knowledge useful without assuming that a central decision-maker can replace it.

The Scorpion Search

In May 1968, Scorpion disappeared while returning to Newport News after a tour of duty in the North Atlantic. The Navy knew the submarine’s last reported position but did not know what had happened or how far it had traveled after its final radio contact. The initial search area was a circle twenty miles wide and thousands of feet deep, leaving the Navy with a problem too large for a straightforward search based on a few experts’ guesses.

Naval officer John Craven chose to collect judgments rather than convene a group to settle on one shared theory. He devised alternative scenarios for what might have happened and brought together men with different kinds of knowledge, including mathematicians, submarine specialists, and salvage men. Each independently estimated the likelihood of the scenarios, with bets for bottles of Chivas Regal. Their estimates addressed separate elements of the submarine’s fate, such as why it had run into trouble, its speed as it sank, and the steepness of its descent.

Craven combined these fragments using Bayes’s theorem, a method for updating prior expectations in light of new information. The resulting location was not one that any individual member had selected: it was a collective estimate formed from the group’s separate judgments. Five months after the disappearance, a Navy ship found Scorpion 220 yards from the predicted location. The book emphasizes the contrast between the sparse evidence available to each participant and the accuracy of the combined estimate: no individual knew all the relevant details, yet the group’s judgment brought them together.

Influence and Standardization

The Navy also appears as an influential customer in William Sellers’s campaign to standardize American screws. In the 1860s, Sellers promoted a screw of his own design at a time when screws were handmade by machinists, a practice that limited mass production and kept customers reliant on individual craftsmen for repairs and replacements. The proposed interchangeable screw promised a faster, cheaper way to serve an economy increasingly organized around speed and volume, but its adoption threatened established business practices.

Sellers understood that technical merit alone would not determine whether machinists accepted the design. Over five years, he targeted influential users, including the Pennsylvania Railroad and the United States Navy, helping create momentum around the screw. Within a decade it was on its way to becoming a national standard. The book connects that standardization to the prospects for assembly-line production: without interchangeable screws, such production would have been difficult or even impossible. The Navy’s role here is not as the inventor of the standard, but as one of the prominent users whose adoption helped make broad acceptance more likely.

Distributed Knowledge and Coordination

The Scorpion case serves as an example of a wider organizational principle: independent contributions can produce a judgment that no single expert possesses. The successful result depended not on the group discussing its guesses into consensus but on keeping those judgments distinct long enough for them to be combined. In this account, the Navy’s search demonstrates how an institution can make limited, specialized information collectively useful.

The book also warns that decentralization by itself does not ensure that useful information will travel across an organization. People close to a problem may have valuable local knowledge, but without mechanisms for sharing and aggregation, that knowledge can remain isolated. The distinction is illustrated through the U.S. intelligence community: agencies had specialized information and perspectives, yet lacked a means to aggregate judgments across them. The proposed remedy is not simply to move every decision to a central authority, but to enable information to flow while preserving the independent knowledge that specialization provides. The Navy’s examples thus belong to a broader account of organizational intelligence: effective coordination joins local expertise to collective judgment rather than treating central command as a substitute for either.