Unfortunately

Ilona

As I see it, there are two different E2.0 approaches described in your anecdotes: structured and unstructured. The structured approach equates in this instance to voting. Whilst this has potential to avoid bad individual mistakes and to create a degree of coherent action, it shares at least one problem with voting in the political sphere: poor turnout. It might seem that employees would be at least as motivated to vote as electors, but I doubt this, unless they can see and believe that action based upon their vote will directly follow. It is a major challenge for business leaders to create this belief.

The unstructured approach that which you illustrate by the ‘publish and be damned’ internal blogs. A corporate culture in which blogs (and bloggers) criticising the strategy can survive and thrive is, I suggest, a rare thing. Call me a pessimist, but I expect it to continue to be so.

I really do wish corporations could adopt both types of intiative that you mention. But I remain sceptical.

Very interesting post and the reason why organizations arent using the collective wisdom of the employees is probably also from the basic needs of humans to be important. The reason why a CEO will like to keep that decision making with himself is because it fulfills his need to feel important. As soon as you hand over that to a mass you become one of the masses. You might still be using that mass information to make decisions but since you have exposed yourself to a bigger mass your importance within that group takes a hit. That is why you want to restrict that information gathering group to a select few whom you call your Vice Presidents and Directors. These people in turn maybe be having Managers within there groups for information accumulation who in turn will actually have a 10-15 workers each and those 10-15 people together for each team are the real mass. So you still end up getting the same information but you setup a structural information routing path which helps people filter information at each level which they find unimportant. This very act of filtering out unimportant information gives the feeling of importance (and a purpose and motivation) to people at each level.

Great post.

The example of the company with a post on misguided strategy is almost incredulous. And therefore, impressive.

The key questions that come to mind, and perhaps you could address in future posts:

1. Can existing organizations change and adapt especially if they are highly profitable, or will this only happen at new-age companies?

2. Are there certain sectors where this is more applicable (retail) than others (banking)?

3. How does the incentive structure need to change in light of new ways of doing work? After all, if the techie can now help find a customer and close a deal- should he get compensated on it like a salesman? If the salesperson suggests a product feature, should she be given a bonus?

Thanks for a very interesting post. One point I wanted to mention was the one about James Surowiecki wondering why more managers are not interested in the preiction market.

One of the reasons, I think, is that in organizations, usually managers tend to develop a comfort zone, and it becomes an area which they are reluctant to move out of. Which means, that the accepted policies, or norms, are what they would go by, and its not necessary that all information is processed either.

Thanks, Atul.

You certainly got it right in this post. Prediction markets and similar “Wisdom of Crowds” tools are able to provide decision makers with a wealth of data from their employees and industry partners. This data is consistently better that data generated through other means.

However, I spent several years as a submarine officer in the US Navy, and you cannot run a nimble organisation and make decisions by committee. While prediction markets and other tools provide better data (and more importantly, communicate major mis-understandings between employees and executives), decisions cannot be delegated this way.

So again, thank you for a very coherent message. I hope more companies start taking advantage of collective intelligence tools!

Best regards,
Jed Christiansen
Managing Director, Mercury Research & Consulting