Social media has neutered our voices and destroyed collaborative conversations
When it comes to making yes or no decisions -- will a product launch on time, will sales revenues meet projections, or will a certain job candidate work out best -- groups tend to deliver the wrong decision, according to a Harvard Business Review study. Yet companies and organizations continue to frame business decisions in terms of yes and no, mirroring the way social media has limited out conversations to either liking or disliking someone’s comments online.
We all know that emoticons don’t lead to collaborative conversations. Instead, they end in polls of likes versus unlikes. In effect, they neuter our voices, especially when this model is extended to the workplace. In fact, what happens when workers are asked to choose yes or no, the strongest voices usually prevail, and more often than not, this leads to the wrong decision.
What happens when the collective intelligence of the workforce and outside stakeholders are managed in a way that brings out insights and knowledge that go beyond happy and sad emoticons? That’s the approach we’ve taken to develop CrowdSmart’s SaaS solution, which was designed from the ground up for distributed work environments to enable decision makers to rapidly integrate insights from team members, partners, customers, and experts.
Rather than yes or no polls, we help companies, investors, and organizations frame questions that might identify opportunities for cost reductions, create new analytics to forecast markets, and discover hidden innovative products or services to drive competitive advantage.
Our model then harvests the collective intelligence of your stakeholders by encouraging people to share relevant information and their insights, while doing so anonymously. This allows everyone to collaborate on ideas without any bias reflecting on the identity of the contributor.
A unique feature of our model – and one that incorporates patent-pending AI – is the dynamic ability of the conversation to yield new insights, as participants respond to inputs from others. From this iterative process, which captures a diversity of opinions, ideas, and knowledge, CrowdSmart’s AI software aligns the optimal insights to help form the basis for making a smarter, more accurate decision. That’s why we like to say that CrowdSmart is the intelligence that keeps on giving.
