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In this segment,
we're going to talk about moving from hierarchy to collective wisdom.
In other words, we're going to talk about examples of companies that have so,
of sorts to move from a more traditional top down approach to making decisions,
to one that gets greater input from the masses.
And just as with the previous dimension around coordination,
we've got a similar sort of schemer going on here, which is to say,
on the one hand, hierarchy and collective wisdom can be seen as opposing principles.
But on the other hand, it is actually the case that many organizations get
a reasonable balance between them whereby they actually get
the benefits from hierarchy, and also the benefits of collective wisdom.
So they're kind of a hybrid models, that you see on the chart here,
are about essentially trying to get that best of both worlds.
I'm going to give you a couple of examples of organizations which have done this and
we're going to have some links to some of the materials in the course room,
to provide a great, a greater detail on these.
So let's take IBM.
IBM is a big company, one of the biggest companies in the world.
And we're going to look at particular example from a decade or so ago.
Whereby they used their intranet, their corporate intranet as a,
as a vehicle essentially for mobilizing tens of thousands of
people across the company to offer their views, their inputs.
And we've got two parts to this story.
The first was in 2003.
When Sam Palmisano, the chief executive at the time,
decide that they needed to kind of reinvigorate and rethink their values.
The corporate values of IBM, the things that they all hold dear.
And so using the corporate internet they created a, a mechanism.
They called it a jam.
Which was a 72 hour online forum where literally
tens of thousands of people around the company would collaborate and
share ideas about the, the old IBM values, the emerging values,
what people thought about each other's ideas.
And over the course of that 72 hours they had a, a massive conversation.
There’s no other word for it,
a conversation between people in different parts of the IBM world across the world,
about what the values are, what they should be.
And coming out of that, there was an agreement on a new set of values.
And the case study I provide will give you details of exactly what those were.
And because 10,000 people had become involved,
it was much easier of course subsequently to endorse and believe those values.
So that was 2003.
In 2006, they tried the same sort of technology, but
with a different idea, and they called it an innovation jam.
And here they said we're going to do something even more adventurous,
which is to say, can we get a bunch of IBM technologies,
a bunch of stuff that we're working on in our labs, put it online.
And then get people to use those technologies and
use those ideas to build their own ideas on top of that.
That's a very ambitious undertaking.
They used the technology.
It, it works, meaning they got lots and
lots of people involved in sharing their views.
They got up to 150,000 participants in total.
To at least look at the conversation that was going on there.
I think fewer actually posted,
I think 46,000 people actually posted comments through this 72 hour jam.
And they went through a two phase model, phase, phase one was basically throwing
lots of ideas out there around the technologies which were put online.
And then they went through a sorting process.
And then they went through a phase of trying to kind of whittle it down to some
focus areas.
Julian BirkinshawProfessor of Strategy & Entrepreneurship
