Crowdsourcing for Dukes

Care for some management speak, your Grace?

Let's start with an anecdote. The night before the Battle of Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington was asked a question by one of his junior officers. "What are your plans, your grace?" the officer asked. “To beat the French” was the Duke's curt reply. When the questioner went on to suggest that the Duke might be well advised to share his more detailed plans with his men in case he himself were to be injured the Duke tersely replied, “If I thought my hair knew what my brain was thinking I’d shave it orf and wear a wig”.

How times change. This morning, an e-mail newsletter arrived in my inbox from the McKinsey Quarterly . It contained the sort of thinking that would have the dear old Duke of Wellington ripping out his hair and which would have curled his toes inside his now famous boots.

The McKinsey article talks about “Crowdsourcing”. According to wikipedia crowdsourcing is about "outsourcing tasks to a distributed source of people".  In terms of strategy formulation, as McKinsey put it crowdsourcing is about “opening up [the] strategy processes to constituents who were previously frozen out of strategic direction setting”. So rather than the Duke telling the army what to do the army tells him. Yikes. But whilst the Duke might choke on his Beef Wellington, the modern manager, with his or her head filled with ideas of empowerment might feel their pulse race with excitement. The idea certainly has appeal. It allows management to perform a ‘sense check’ of their own thinking, and maintains a connection to reality (the shop floor view) that may help to keep the strategy grounded. It also encourages that golden combination of empowerment  and buy in that most modern observers argue ares essential and good thing in the 21^st century workplace (in their piece McKinsey label this more directly as enthusiasm and alignment).

All good stuff then. But, to fall in line with the old Duke, I’d urge caution here. And so too, to be fair, do McKinsey, suggesting that not all organisations are ready for what they term “social strategy setting”. They discuss how organisations might be well advised to start off ‘carefully’, perhaps by “trying it out in a few areas or creating meaningful opportunities for participation in the context of a more traditional strategy process”. Testing the waters if you like. The article then goes on to give some fascinating examples of companies who have tried this out.

Although this was all good stuff, I was disappointed that the piece did not explore the relationship between crowdsourcing and organisational decision making. Those who know me know this is one of my favourite areas for inquiry. The dissertation for my recent Masters in P&OD from Roffey Park looked at decision making. Each of the forty thousand words still stick in my mind. One aspect of decision making that fascinates me is the idea of decision avoidance. For me the idea of ‘crowdsourcing’ made my decision avoidance spidersense tingle. My curiosity was raised.  McKinsey say that it takes courage to allow others to take part in the decision making process. I understand what they mean but I don’t necessarily subscribe to that view, and here’s why.

Managers often believe that one of their key roles in organisations is to make decisions (for instance see here). Making decisions is not easy. We want information before we make decisions, but we don't always have it. Organisational decision making is fraught with uncertainty, and uncertain situations tend to generate anxiety. Strategy, that wonderful area of decision making concerned with looking into the future is, for some, a scary thought. Peering into the crystal ball isn't everyones cup of tea. It’s quite a weight to take that responsibility onto ones own broad shoulders, especially if you are at the top of a struggling or chaotic organisation and are already feeling exposed. Most of us don’t like to feel anxious, and when faced with anxiety will consider any options that seem to offer reduced stress. Sometimes then, it might be easier not to decide. When this process is experienced, consciously or otherwise, it can result in a decision being avoided altogether. And that would be my fear with ‘crowdsourcing’, a concern that it might be a breeding ground to for decision avoidance among senior execs. Companies that are thinking about ‘crowdsourcing’ would do well to be sure they fully understand both what they expect to get from it, and that their adopting of this practice is not the manifestation of their own subconscious decision avoidance preferences.

What, I wonder, would the man who finally defeated Napoleon have thought of all that?

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