What’s the Solution?
Effective inter-team collaboration gives you something beyond what you get with engaged employees – there is a multiplier effect. By working together, individuals can be even more productive than they would be on their own. Effective utilization of collective intelligence gives organizations access to creative problem-solving and distributive brainstorming. Any problem that an organization has can be better solved with the wisdom of a broader set of minds than a leader would normally consult. This invites more creativity, more innovation and more fully utilizes the resources innate in the workforce.
With ForecastBridge, employees can provide a leading indicator of what is going to happen at the company. Employees can let senior leaders know if a problem is emerging, facilitate discussion on how best to address an issue, or help prioritize revenue opportunities. Learn More
With InnovationBridge, employees can co-create solutions (think Wikipedia) and can prioritize among those options by crowdfunding the best ideas (think Kickstarter). Learn More
Employees love using these tools. Participation rates are in the 70% to 80% range, compared to 30% for annual engagement surveys.
Practical Ways to Get Started:
- Example 1: After a project fails, many companies implement a “post mortem” to look back and determine what went wrong. As an alternative, try a “premortem” in which a team imagines itself in the future, and a project has already failed. From that future vantage point, the team works backwards to determine what led to the failure. This technique avoids group- think by facilitating a positive discussion on threats, thereby increasing the likelihood the main threats are identified and mitigated.
- Example 2: At your next large gathering of employees, do a simple crowdsourcing exercise. Sit everyone in groups of 8 people. Ask everyone to identify one improvement they made this year. Have the table vote on the best idea. Have the person with the best idea from each group give a one minute presentation to all employees. At the end of the presentations, have all employees vote on the best idea in the company. Have management agree it will fund whatever the crowd decides (up to a pre-determined limit). You’ve just crowdsourced your first idea.
Then ask what your company could do if you went digital and scaled this process.
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