The People in the Room

Crowdsourcing at the Highest Level

I recently made a career change, joining Fleishman Hillard in their Chicago office as a Digital Strategist, primarily working on B2B accounts. As chance would have it, the company-wide FH Digital group was holding a Digital Leadership conference in Washington DC shortly after my last day with ARENDS, wherein they assembled as many of their best and brightest Digerati for a meeting of the minds. Through sheer dint of fortuitous timing, with a little on-the-fly schedule adjustment, I was able to attend this conference on my very first day on the job.

It was literally a global event, with attendees from Milan, London, Toronto, and Hong Kong as well as a number of other US cities and the large digital hubs in Washington DC and St. Louis. I found it simultaneously exhilarating and bewildering to be thrust deep into this community without much preamble or preparation. On the one hand, it was a tremendously valuable exposure to this deep and multifaceted network. An office like Chicago can tap into many resources across the world, with specialist skills available for any tactical or strategic need. Case study after case study was presented demonstrating the breadth of capabilities we can offer clients. It was great to meet these team members, and to be able to have a face with which to attach a name as we interact in the future.

On the other hand, there was a good deal of discussion relating to policies, processes, and procedures to which I was unable to add much (given my relative unfamiliarity with the agency). Even this was instructional, of course, exposing me to nuanced discussion of how things really work in an agency this large. It was especially illuminating to see so many brilliant minds, literally at the peak of their profession, bending to the topics at hand.

In fact, the leadership of FH Digital were quite open about tapping this talent mass to help solve (or at least inform) the challenges facing the practice. There were many exercises specifically designed to elicit quality input on business problems, such as how to market ourselves and how to describe the value we represent to our clients. These are things that traditionally come down from management on high; in this case, we were helping build them from the ground up.

Which struck me as being both obvious and inspired. The concept of crowdsourcing is pretty well-established at this point in the interactive space. Wikipedia is the most obvious example, but others abound. The entire Open Source software movement, for example, is based around the idea of presenting a concept to a talented and capable group, and having them dive into it and bang it around so that changes will be found to improve and expand on the original idea. Similarly, some web sites have sprung up that facilitate the outsourcing of graphics projects. Members of these networks review online requirements for a particular need, such as a logo or an illustration, with a posted budget. If the members choose to participate, they submit designs that they develop on spec with the hopes of winning the project. They are then paid the posted price for their work. Most people agree this process is less effective for complex creative projects, but it is a good way of leveraging the web to expand on the traditional creative process of submitting three options for the client to choose one.

However, I am not sure how many companies utilize the strength of their own people in a similar way to approach the challenges of business operation. Collaboration is encouraged and supported in many, of course, or at least in theory. Large manufacturing technology companies will use intranets to facilitate sharing of ideas and information between design engineers, for example, and the growth of blogs and wikis as tools for feedback and data-gathering is certainly part of this. But these are all based around support for the effort of the individual member to address his or her individual problem; for a company to use the collective abilities of its own people to work on corporate challenges is a little more unique and maybe even visionary.

It’s not hard to hypothesize why corporate leadership might not leap to the concept of using its own workforce to advise on strategic or even tactical challenges. Leaders are supposed to lead, after all. In any industry, the managers are charged with the planning and vision to direct the company in all areas. The worker bees, no matter how sophisticated their abilities or extensive their training or how broad their experience, are the ones who have to actually do the work. It is difficult to imagine that management of any company would willingly cede their authority and control to labor.

But it makes enormous sense to realize that the ones “in the trenches” have a depth of practical knowledge that can be keenly valuable in planning and strategy. And if one has the capability of mining information from each of thousands of persons who do a particular professional task every day, and do it very well, then the sheer aggregate of data will likely produce insight that can point to solutions. Statistically the crazy or poorly considered ideas will be minimized and can be ignored, but any broadly-suggested concept represents the collective wisdom and would merit support. A smart researcher can devise poll questions or other methods that will produce optimal results; technology is available that can make it very easy, and very rewarding, for subjects to participate.

While the FH Digital gathering was limited to the people in the room, and the data collection was not rigorous in methodology (admittedly, according to the FH Digital Research Group which was well-represented), it still revealed the value of approaching an executional work force (in this case dedicated to interactive communication strategy and tactics on behalf of clients) for input on organizational challenges. The feedback received by our leadership will go a long way toward crafting worthwhile strategy effective tactics that represent real-world conditions.

A common trope is to talk about the “smartest people in the room;” if you have a situation where everybody in the room is smart, then it is a smart idea to tap into that talent, especially if the “room” can be metaphorically extended across your company. That’s crowdsourcing taken to a higher level.