A couple interesting items today…
First of all, it was announced publicly that my son will be trying out for a position with a soccer team in Germany. This particular team, Fortuna Köln, has an experiment underway. For the price of €39.95/year, anyone can become a member of the club with voting rights. And all important decisions related to the club are voted on – from starting line-ups for a match to the design of the uniforms for the team. Can this use of the wisdom of the crowd manage a soccer team for success? Over 13,000 paying members surely hope so.
Well, that gets me to the second interesting thing from my day, a talk by technology product guru, Marty Cagan of the Silicon Valley Product Group. Part of his mantra is “lead your customers” as opposed to being “led by your customers”. Although I quibble with some of his perspectives, on this topic we are aligned: breakthrough innovation nearly never comes from letting your customers specify solutions.
There are proponents of crowdsourcing who squawk at the mere mention of skepticism about it as a model for decision-making. To be sure, there is merit in using consensus-based choice tools for refinement of an existing product or to reduce risk in choosing a path forward. For these tasks, the input of many will take off the sharp edges espoused by the few.
The many, however, can’t refine what they’ve never imagined. And it’s through imagination that innovation is delivered. Ask, “What if?” and go from there. Crowds don’t do this. Standing up against the crowd is what’s required.
For many businesses, even the ones that started from the spark of innovation, getting to a stream of on-going mold-breaking, transformational innovations is a huge challenge. Customer-centricity can help, but not in the sense that “customers will tell us what to do.” Indeed, to think in this manner is to abuse the idea of insight leading to inspiration.
Listen to and observe customers, consumers, users. Figure out what problems they have, what desires they express; these are the key insights. Use the insights as touchstones in the process of inspiration, ideation, and evaluation of options. Make sure not to lose the insights; they ensure that the innovations will be valued.
So, how are Fortuna’s fortunes these days? Well, the wisdom of its crowd has guided the team to 10th place in a 19-team league, hardly the height of success. And, it begs several questions: How long will voting members stand for their own mediocrity? Will folks choose over time to drop out and go back to a less-expensive, less-empowering option? Do fans truly want on-going middle of the pack performance, or would they prefer the risks required to reach lofty heights occasionally but mixed in with moments of bitter disappointment? Whether in soccer or business, I prefer to take those risks.
It will be very interesting to see how this experiment goes. It is the first I've heard of Crowdsourcing, and it smacks of "the law of averages" to me. It seems that the team, theoretically, could do well if the players are especially good hand picked players. But, if the parents are the voting entities or have sway over them (the players)...that excellence will be muddied.
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