Is a culture of giving staff more control over their project priorities a simple way to statistically leverage the hive-mind of the organization? A natural form of prediction market?
Prediction markets are a powerful tool to harness the wisdom of crowds to peer into the future. In a bottom-up fashion, the individual instincts of people who are closer to the customer and/or technology are given a voice — which can provide a healthy balancing force to temper the otherwise top-down vision, plans, and predictive beliefs of the company. And from a lean perspective, these are sister concepts to Kaizen continuous improvement and many other techniques to close your feedback loops.
All businesses would love better insight into the fuzzy future. Here are 10 ways to harness the wisdom of crowds in your organization.
- Launch an internal idea market
- Give your engineers something equivalent to 20% time
- Give your staff more discretion to choose their next project / group
- Systematically analyze and prioritize feature requests from your sales pipeline
- Use group quality techniques like Capture-Recapture analysis in reviews (look for a posting from us on this soon)
- Use group prioritization techniques like Multi-Voting
- Use group estimation techniques like Wideband Delphi
- Use group decision making techniques like Pugh Concept Selection
- Provide frequent, regular pre-releases of your product during development
- Systematically collect and analyze customer feedback from all releases
The particular techniques used are important — the good ones systematically reconcile core personal instincts and discourage committee-style groupthink.
We’ll look at many of these in more detail in future posts. But feel free to beat us to it in the comments if you like, ye crowd of wisdom.
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