Steve Dimmick, co-founder of the online polling platform Doopoll explains how anonymous crowdsourcing can help businesses make better decisions.
On a daily basis we each make hundreds of decisions, some are small choices, others could determine the path of the rest of our lives.
As in life, decision making is one of the most important activities in business. Every move we make is the consequence of a choice, unknowing or not.
However, all too often when it comes to business, organisational hierarchy can make reaching even the simplest decision feel like crossing a minefield.
I’m sure everyone reading this has experienced this frustrating workplace scenario. A meeting is held and a course of action agreed, only to be overturned shortly after it’s sent up the management chain, by people who were not part of the original discussion and unaware of the reasoning and rationale behind the decision.
The technological revolution
Today, technology is revolutionising the way businesses operate.
Data mining, improved remote communications and the cloud are all widely used to inform modern corporate strategy.
Yet, most businesses still choose to operate as a hierarchy when making decisions.
In the average business there is a single CEO who is rarely involved in the day-to-day operations of the company, below them are several managers who are slightly more involved.
At the bottom we have the team who actually interact with customers and deliver the work.
Crowdsourcing decisions
So who in this arrangement really best knows what the customer wants?
We tend to accept hierarchy as the natural order of things, after all once a business gets to a certain size it’s simply not efficient for everyone to be part of the decision making process.
Can a crowd actually make a better decision than an individual expert?
One of the world’s largest video games creators, Valve Software, attributes its success to empowering its entire team of over 330 people to have a say, voicing their opinions and deciding what the company’s millions of customers want.
The company rejects the idea of traditional management structures. Valve’s CEO, Gabe Newell, put it best in an interview with the Harvard Business Review “What if we all had a shared objective to do the right thing for the customer?”.
But Valve’s crowd approach goes further than idea sourcing or empowering employees, there’s a real business model here that increases speed and reduces waste.
If you’re thinking this ethos is all a bit ‘90’s Dotcom Bubble’, you should take a look at Valve’s figures – equity in the region of $2.5bn usually indicates a company is doing something right. Right?
So there you have it, proof that the group works.
The challenges
However, crowdsourcing decisions in hierarchical businesses and organisations is challenging.
Valve’s crowd approach dates back to its founding in 1996, but changing a company’s decision making process all together will inevitably be trickier.
In order to get results it’s vital that everyone in the decision feels able to voice their opinions openly, without fear of recrimination or bias.
In the workplace that’s often a problem. More often than not, the people with the loudest voices or the most senior position are the ones who are listened to in meetings.
If you disagree with your boss, are you really sure you’re safe putting your neck on the line and speaking up? Would you even be heard at all? Today, technology can provide the vital solution to this problem: anonymity.
Recently, I listened to a Freakonomics podcast that illustrated this point perfectly. A large American company (which will remain nameless) had spent five years planning to launch the brand in China. It was a big risk that could open up an enormous market.
As the launch drew closer the company’s leadership asked the project managers responsible if they were on track to launch in a month? The answer was yes. It’s always good to say yes to the boss, isn’t it?
At the same time the company then decided to run an experiment and asked all of its employees to give anonymous answers to the same question. The result was that 90% voted that “NO – we won’t open on time” and they were right.
Unfortunately, the company in question decided not to listen to the majority of their employees. It’s not known how much that decision cost them, but you can be sure it was a lot!
If you’re not sure if using technology to crowdsource answers to your business’ questions, ask yourself this – If your travel agent suggests a particular hotel for your next holiday, but 80% of the reviews on ‘TripConsultant’ say it’s terrible, who would you trust?
Now why shouldn’t businesses consider a similar approach?