Crowdsourced Strategic Planning the big experiment by Wikimedia
Earlier this week the
Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that supports Wikipedia put out a call to action for help in developing its
strategic plan:
If everyone who cares about Wikimedia — from the casual reader to
active volunteers — could come to a shared understanding of where we
want to go, we would have a much better chance of actually getting
there. See the call to action
Known for bold statements and large goals since its founding this call to action is not surprising and could be very interesting. As with all new approaches it will come under some scrutiny and cause a number of questions to be asked:
- What drove this unconventional approach? - in this case it's a pretty simple answer and that is, the culture of the organization. Wikimedia is an incredibly open largely volunteer effort that is responsible for millions of pieces of information being available over the Internet, one might argue that its strategic planning process could take no other form than to be crowdsourced
- How will it work? - drawing on their core strengths they will use the same wiki process that drives their core activities. I think though that unlike their information editing process for knowledge the potential for a flood of information to develop will pose some special challenges
- Is it possible? - who owns the vision, the mission (leadership vs rudderless wandering)? - As many who have facilitated or developed strategic plans will know sometimes the greatest skill in the planning process is keeping people on track and that involves lots of culling of ideas and opinions.
In big organizations the information gathering process is handled in two ways; one is by running surveys that tap the majority of the organization in an attempt to understand large groups of people's opinions and the other is by inviting individuals that represent subsets of the company to participate in group discussions. The purpose of course is to try and make the incoming information manageable. It is very difficult to hear the shouts of thousands and this will probably be the biggest challenge faced in this approach by Wikimedia.
- How will the strategic plan be implemented? - to me the biggest question of all is how will this strategic plan ultimately be "actioned"? In the corporate world the success of strategic plans generally rely on two things; buy-in and actions. It takes buy-in because people need to believe in the end plan and it takes actions because people actually have to do something.
I think the buy-in question will be interesting because it will come down to who has to buy-in. In traditional companies, smaller groups of people develop the plan and then the buy-in has to happen from the whole organization. In this experiment, a large group of people will be coming up with the plan and the buy-in will come from the foundation members (smaller group). This is the same with the actions, potentially the actions will come from a large group and then implemented by the foundation members. Both of these situations are sort of the opposite of the traditional strategic planning and implementation environment.
In the end this will be interesting for people looking at strategic planning on two levels:
- How does the wiki process for information collection and process transparency work with a large number of contributors?
- Does a crowdsourced strategic plan take an organization to places that it's core operators agree with, are they ready and willing to live by the will of the crowd? (I suspect with Wikimedia the answer is yes)
Ed Loessi