Future Here Now: Crowdsource Wisdom
Signals
One of the huge changes of the past 50 years has been the decline of the belief that business or political leaders can be trusted to have all the answers, and a growing belief that making the right decisions requires the input of a cross-section of people. We see this trend play out across the spectrum, from the emphasis on team collaboration in business to the expectation that everyone of all walks of life should be welcome to participate in a public meeting. It’s easy to forget, but mid-1900s businesses expected employees to do the tasks they were told without question, and anyone who showed up at a public meeting with the wrong clothes, or gender, or speaking skills would have been thrown out of the chambers.
The problem, though, is that the systems that underlie our businesses and government were built on those old assumptions. And they work against us without our even realizing it.
You can read more about the idea of crowdsourcing wisdom in this piece. And if you’re interested in breaking through those old systemss hold in the public sector, my book Crowdsourcing Wisdom may help. Here are a few examples of how we fail to gather the wisdom of the wide range of people whose insights we need today, and how we can do that better.
After all, we can’t afford to let our old habits close off our access to wisdom. Especially now.
Getting Broadband wrong by not listening to the people who will use it.
The 19th and 20th centuries are full of stories of do-gooders who launched huge, expensive initiatives based on what they thought the recipients needed, only to find years later that their grant ideas caused a whole new set of problems for the people they were supposed to help. This report from the Institute for Local Self Reliance on the results of the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) sounds far too much like same tune, different lyrics:
This report finds that RDOF, on the contrary, became yet another lesson in the dangers of investing significant sums of federal money into new Internet networks on Tribal lands without regard to local knowledge or priorities. Tribal governments were made to spend their own time and resources to fix broken processes.
By this point in our history, there is really no excuse. But when you’re accustomed to being The Expert, you often cannot see your own blind spots.
Which is a big reason why crowdsourcing wisdom is so crucial.
Doing good thinking
One of the biggest challenges of crowdsourcing wisdom is often us — us who are used to being the Experts, or respected, or the decision-makers. Because we’ve pretty much all come of age in the command-and-control, Trust the Experts world view of the Industrial Era, we veeeery easily default to that approach, even if we consciously don’t intend to. And reworking that wiring takes work, as this article from The Conversation demonstrates.
The author begins with the premise that being able to recognize and admit when we’re wrong is how we build good thinking skills - the kind that we need to get out of damaging command-and-control reactions and be able to draw from the insight of a diverse range of others. But he soon realizes that he needs more skills in the mix:
Being a good thinker involves confronting multiple challenges beyond being humble about what you know. You also need to:
Be sufficiently motivated to figure out what’s true.
Focus on the pertinent information and carefully seek it out.
Be open-minded when considering information that you may disagree with.
Confront information or questions that are novel or different from what you’re generally used to engaging with.
Be willing to put in the effort to figure it all out.
Yeah, that’s a lot. But without these skills, we cut ourselves - and our work - off from the wisdom that we need. Like so many other challenges of this transition period, our biggest challenge often lies between our ears.
Tactics for non traditional collaboration
As we just saw, crowdsourcing wisdom takes some significant work to break our old habits. But as we saw yesterday, we can make conscious changes to the systems and tactics we use to help new approaches take hold. In this post, Chris Heivly identifies five pretty specific tactics for rewiring one of the most crucial arenas for crowdsourcing wisdom - the collaborative work team. Here are the bones of his tactics:
Take time to sit back and collectively view and discuss the big picture. (Don’t couch this around creating common goals or a vision statement or mission. Just have an open discussion.)
Be oblivious of created or perceived competition. (This is not a competition game and energy spent with that in mind is wasted effort in my opinion. This is not a zero-sum game both internally and externally.)
Show up vulnerable and have honest discussions on what is working and what is not working in your community. (This culture of honest auditing will be SO beneficial to your team and the founders you serve.)
Get shit done. There are 3 states you can rally around (sitting outside of these three states creates confusion for everyone in the community):
You get the work done
Your team members get the work done
You enable others in your community to get the work done.
We all have baggage we bring to the table. Your baggage is not less or more than others. Recognize that and exhibit a bit of empathy for others and look for empathy from them.
Again, easier said than done, but I can envision laying these tactics out as ground rules for a team meeting (or a public hearing!) and empowering the participants (all of them) to enforce them. As every good teacher knows, peer pressure changes behavior like nothing else!