Management by committee has always had a negative connotation. In the physical world, communities are very good for social connection but fairly bad at governance and decision-making. Why?
- Understanding all the concerns and issues of various constituents is time consuming and often asynchronous.
- Getting consensus can require multiple conversations with a variety of stakeholders - some of which get on board with a decision only to change their mind and then need to be convinced again. This process is typically fragmented and time consuming.
- Decision-making is often exclusive. Because inclusion and mass consensus is so costly, small exclusive groups often make decisions for the entire community and this drives a lot of political maneuvering. Those with the best political skills often are the ones to get decision-making authority regardless of experience.
How does online technology change this?
- Transparency: anyone in the community can see discussions and, critically, relationships between people.
- Inclusiveness: More people can be involved in vetting ideas because the discussion can be centralized, structured if necessary, and ongoing over time.
- Persistence: Decisions and the concerns that are vetted are available as long as needed and can be referred to by everyone to ensure that execution is consistent with the original decision.
- Conversational: Roughly 70% of information is unstructured...being able to capture conversation is critical to knowledge management and knowledge retention and comes with layers of meaning (tone, participants, etc.) that formal documents may not.
- Low Barriers to Participate: Online people can lurk, they can rate, they can comment, or they can create substantive content - whatever they are comfortable with and ready to do. This has huge value in getting more people involved and engaged.
Technology enables organization by committee in a way that is not long and torturous and thus, opens up the floodgates for more input, better decisions, and more engaged participants.
If you are and IDC client and interested in hearing more, I will be giving a presentation at Directions in San Jose on March 11th and in Boston on March 19th based on a research piece I wrote called The Social Enterprise: How Social Networking Changes Everything.
What is your perspective on this? Why does technology matter?
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