Abstract
Inefficiencies naturally form as organizations grow in size and complexity. The knowledge required to address these inefficiencies is often stove-piped across different organizational silos, geographic locations, and professional disciplines. Crowdsourcing provides a way to tap into the knowledge and experiences of diverse groups of people to rapidly identify and more effectively solve inefficiencies. We developed a prototype crowdsourcing system based on design thinking practices to allow employees to build a shared mental model and work collaboratively to identify, characterize, and rank inefficiencies, as well as to develop possible solutions. We conducted a study to assess how presenting crowdsourced knowledge (votes/preferences, supporting argumentation, etc.) from employees affected organizational Decision Makers (DMs). In spite of predictions that crowdsourced knowledge would influence their decisions, presenting this knowledge to DMs had no significant effect on their voting for various solutions. We found significant differences in the mental models of employees and DMs. We offer various explanations for this behavior based on rhetorical analysis and other survey responses from DMs and contributors. We further discuss different theoretical explanations, including the effects of various biases and decision inertia, and potential issues with the types of knowledge elicited and presented to DMs.
Highlights
As organizations grow in size and complexity, it is natural that inefficiencies form
In the context of this study with Visual Argumentation for Resolving Inefficiencies (VARI), crowdsourced information needed to be of substantial quality to move the Decision Makers (DMs) away from their original understanding and perceptions, which would otherwise be a conceptual anchor for their thoughts
While quality was assessed via rhetorical analysis, we explored the outcome-based measure of whether exposing DMs to CT argumentation had a significant effect on DM voting
Summary
As organizations grow in size and complexity, it is natural that inefficiencies form. Design thinking methods are hinged upon the concept of eliciting knowledge from a diverse set of participants to rapidly identify and solve inefficiencies. These methods have proven to be scalable, adaptable, and effective across a variety of applications, there are several nuances to be considered when implementing a crowdsourcing solution for something as context-dependent and subjective as the identification and resolution of organizational inefficiencies. We developed the Visual Argumentation for Resolving Inefficiencies (VARI) crowdsourcing platform as one approach to solving this problem, using it as a test bed for numerous experiments regarding the collection, processing, exploitation, and dissemination of organizational knowledge from a crowd of contributors (CTs) to organizational. Because of the relative esotericism of argumentation and the success of design thinking to enable effective communication across large groups of diverse stakeholders, the VARI prototype was designed to serve as an online and asynchronous version of an iterative design thinking framework described in reference [15]
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