Reading The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki is a lucid reminder of the value of decentralization and diversity. Surowiecki identifies several methods of integrating diverse viewpoints in an organization, such as decision markets and aggregate voting. One I'd like to suggest is a wiki.
One of the major problems we are facing in the era of the Internet and intranets is that we have moved to a decentralized world without any good way to aggregate what each of us in the organization are doing. Surowiecki complains this makes humans like lost ants, and he's right. Decentralization only works when it is a decentralized system; still an integrated whole system. Otherwise, it's just a bunch of competiting smaller systems.
E-mail is the ultimate decentralized information system. We all go to e-mail because it's quick, it's easy, it's anytime, it's anywhere, it's anyone. That means that whenever the IT system we are mandated to use gets in our way, we jump directly to e-mail. Some of us only have e-mail, and so we have lots of little conversations, all over the place. The best part of e-mail is that everyone in your organization can use it, meaning that it's where a large part of your organizational creative sparks are flying.
But how do those conversations get integrated, or aggregated in Surowiecki's terms? In somebody's head, which for any of us at the best of time is a pretty crowded and busy place. Typically it has to be your manager's head, or your manager's manager's head, or whomever the ultimate decision maker is. If that decision maker is busy, carbon copying her on every e-mail and hoping she gets it is bound to annoy her. Instead, all that information gets lost in people's inboxes, forgotten as time marches forward.
The solution is really very simple. Just use a wiki. The wiki is also anytime, anywhere, and anyone, just like e-mail. Except the wiki doesn't forget. Your organizational creative sparks get stored in a wiki until it has enough juice to power up an organizational lightbulb. With a wiki, it's so easy to integrate everyone's opinions. Just edit them together, exactly like writing an essay from point-form notes.
The key is that a wiki's brainstorm-point form-reform model is open to everyone in your company. Because it is accessible to everyone, it allows you to tap into the full collective intelligence of your entire company. Because you can reform and condense that intelligence down into knowledge and decisions, it helps push the whole organization forward just like in The Wisdom of Crowds, rather than just small parts of it. And the best part is that it doesn't overload manager's heads because everyone can do it. It's so easy.
If you don't believe it can be done, just look at Wikipedia. Every article there is a representation of this process. The whole Internet is invited to contribute what it knows, and it is all integrated into one article at a time.
It's pretty amazing what happens when everyone can pull together for the common good.
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