Crowdsourcing and Collaboration

Something that interests me is crowdsourcing. Examples that get thrown around include Threadless and The Innovation Exchange. The basic idea revolves around leveraging the diversity of experience, opinions and talents in the populace to deliver an outcome, generate a solution, design a product etc.

Crowdsourcing is a bit of an internety/connected world peice of jargon, which I agree with in part because of the ease with which the internet allows teems of people to connect, communicate and contribute. It allows crowdsourcing scale, and means that it can be monetised as a business model due to the cost of connecting each additional contributor being essentially zero, and the value of the output generally being related to the number of contributors available. Im not suggesting that many chefs in the kitchen will make a better cake, but more that value can be created by leveraging each individuals strengths and experience.

So crowdsouring at the macro level is enabled by the internet.

But what about at the micro level, in each and every one of our everyday lives? I think this idea of crowdsourcing is as old as when the first primates started to group together into tribes. Humans are social learning creatures, learning not only from our experience but from the experience of others around us. Underpinning Human survival and success is leveraging the skills, experience, knowledge and opinions of others, which is effectively crowdsourcing on the micro scale.

All of this seems rather obvious, and logical, however I often see people failing to utilise the 'power of the crowd', particularly in a professional setting. Successful people professionally in my experience generally are the people who understand that the best way to achieve an outcome is to leverage the talents of others around them. Its not about the "teflon desk", re-allocating work to others, dodging action points in meetings like you are back under fire in "Nam", but about collaboration in order to achieve the optimal solution. Its about sharing effort and opinions, ideas, beliefs and experience amongst a group of people.

So why dont you try it? Make a constant effort to seek opinions on your ideas, and take the time to offer yours when people are looking for it. Collaborate.