5 Tips to harness the collective wisdom at work
We all have the benefit of being a part of networks, virtual and offline, which contain a goldmine of collective wisdom, ideally full of diverse perspectives. Many are savvy about how to tap this wisdom in our personal lives. Have an upcoming kitchen renovation? Ask your local social network group for referrals! Having trouble getting your toddler to take naps? Scour the tips from your mom mail group. But tapping into the advice from your colleagues and professional networks at work isn’t always easy. For one, who wants to admit you need help? Sure, it’s a great marker of a learning culture, but it’s not easy to raise your hand that you aren’t sure of the best approaches to a challenge.
Yet if you really think about it, tapping into the knowledge base of your colleagues is not only good for you, it’s good for your company’s bottom line. You learn faster, drive innovation and build community. So, with that in mind here are 5 ideas (plus a bonus) with tips and experiments to try as you build a learning culture through crowdsourcing at work.
ONE
Ask for feedback. Start small by stepping out of your immediate team and asking someone you admire to spend a little time giving feedback on an idea, deliverable, project or even challenge you are tackling. Choose a person who is outside of your world that you think is smart. Tell them how much you admire them and give them the sincere reason you want to learn from them. Then be sure to listen with focus and positive energy. People are happy to share their insights if they know we are listening and getting something out of the advice.
Who is someone you admire outside of your circle you want to learn from?
How can you quickly share the context and challenge you want feedback on so you leave the bulk of the time for them to talk and share? (Think 10% establishing the context/90% hear from your expert.)
What question do you have that you want their help with?
TWO
Tap into the wisdom of your clients/users. We often look internally for what we think our customers want and need. But what about going straight to the source for feedback and wisdom? Better yet, what about becoming a customer and asking some colleagues to also live and breathe the customer experience as you open an account from your personal email to get a sense of the onboarding process? If we ask a client to go through a 10 step assessment, take the assessment with your team and feel what is hard and easy about it. And then armed with this knowledge dig deeper with colleagues and customers what they think and feel. I am always blown away by how many employees are so focused on building their widget, they aren’t connected to the bigger pain points and missed opportunities from our customer’s perspective.
What process or experience is out there for me to “try on” and experience?
How can I engage with team members to get closer to our customer experience and hold discussions on what we observe?
THREE
Try peer coaching. I have gotten so much fulfillment and learning thanks to the generous advice of my brilliant colleagues. And there are lots of terrific models out there you can leverage to do this (Troika Consulting from Liberating Structures, FeedForward from Marshall Goldsmith). Whatever you choose is totally up to you. Find smart colleagues, even better if they are from diverse backgrounds from you in terms of race, gender identity, geography, parts of your company, thinking style, generational, etc. to further enrich the quality and depth of perspective. Peer coaching can be transformational for you and your colleagues.
Who might be good partners to engage in peer coaching to help me learn and get different perspectives?
How can we structure the conversations so we have productive sessions for each person?
FOUR
Be a giver. It’s great to ask for help, sure. And it’s also great to offer help and offer to partner and collaborate. If you see someone is working on a big, thorny challenge, offer to brainstorm and give support. What’s in it for you? It will help move along an idea or initiative that might be stuck. That’s great for your company and the individual. Selfishly it sets you up as a thought leader and all around good community member and that’s always a good thing. And for those of us who don’t want to “toot our own horn” for an assignment we just finished, it is very likely that that person you helped will share with people how much your help mattered to them. Most importantly, I have always learned way more than I’ve “given” when I help someone else out because by helping a person I must be polished and bring my “A” game, so it’s super gratifying to do.
What are some interesting projects or initiatives I’d like to pop in and lend support on?
Who are people I would love to collaborate with that I haven’t been able to work with recently?
FIVE
Go big with techniques like Lean Coffee. The first 4 tips and ideas were largely based on small scale (1-3) engagement ideas. Here’s where you can hit 20-30 people in an easy to run, always a crowd pleaser facilitation technique that harnesses the collective wisdom of your group. I love the facilitation technique, Lean Coffee, and it’s so easy to run in person or virtually. Pick a topic or challenge you’re trying to tap into as a theme when you invite people. Here’s how it works. Ask people to share topics or questions they’d like to discuss around the theme. (In person you can give people post-it notes, virtually you can use a whiteboard). Then the facilitator goes through each item and asks the person to fill in some details and context for the group. Spend 30 seconds to 1 minute on each item. Then have people vote (using dots on the topic whiteboard or the post it note). Then reorder your topics so that the topic with the most votes goes first, and so forth. Each time you open the topic you start and display a timer (5 minutes per topic works). Sometimes people end sooner. Sometimes people may vote and say—we need a few more minutes— awesome! Trust the crowd to tell you what they need and adjust the timer to make it happen. At the end of your meeting get through what you can get through. Ask people to share what they learned. It’s awesome because the group shares and drives the agenda!
What theme might be a great draw for a crowd?
How can I prepare to facilitate the session?
BONUS
When you have that all running, run an open space meeting. This is something that sounds wonky on paper, but once you do it you will not stop talking about it and want every person you meet to do it. Here’s why it’s special. It’s like a Lean Coffee in its ability to let the crowd self organize and share knowledge, has an easy to facilitate model and can serve a much larger crowd. This means you can go way deeper on topics and can build lasting learning connections in your community. So definitely think about finding partners to help you co-facilitate this type of session and harness the wisdom of your community.
