Encouraging a meritocracy of ideas is an aspiration for most leaders of companies and organizations. It’s been demonstrated in study after study that the best decisions are made by channeling the insights and knowledge from a diverse population. Yet traditional process of decision making in large companies tends to ignore or reject ideas that don’t originate from the top ranks.
The future of the successful business demands a radically different approach to strategic decision making. That process needs to promote a true meritocracy of ideas, one in which employees are rewarded rather than ignored for their insights. Business leaders and human resources managers need to structure ways not only tp recruit but also engage employee voices.
Engaging employees and your ecosystem in conversations requires five steps:
- Defining your community, including inside and outside the organization. This means engaging customers, investors, and experts as well as employees.
- Framing questions that lead to other questions. This creates a deeper conversation, revealing the reasons behind an insight or opinion.
- Keeping the identity of participants anonymous to each other to eliminate bias introduced by gender, ethnicity, rank, or other reasons.
- Ranking and rewarding those with the best ideas that produce results for making decisions by leaders of the organization. This creates a true meritocracy of ideas within the workplace while at the same time eliminating bias during the conversational process.
- Finally, and essential to the process, use artificial intelligence that can yield results quickly from the conversational process and that is easy to use.
We at CrowdSmart have developed such a system of conversations that uses AI to go beyond simple surveys and polls. This is about creating online conversations that build more learning and engagement as they create powerful insights and alignment in real time. Unlike the early 20th century ‘rating and ranking’ surveys, the foundation of these online conversations is the use of AI that is deep and unique in its ability to yield results, quickly enabling leaders to make decisions with predictive accuracy.
Nobody has offered interactive conversations at scale before because they have lacked any method of facilitation. The idea of AI using human inputs instead of training data, coupling them with advances in natural language processing (NLP) to parse the inputs accurately enough to calculate semantic distance and conversational themes, and then layering in learning algorithms to move a group to conclusion is predicated on a combination of major advancements in deep learning and AI that only appeared in the past four or five years.
So it is that confluence of advancements that make it possible to build a system like CrowdSmart that is super powerful yet open frame while also reducing bias and delivering a meritocracy of ideas.
