You’ve been to industry or association conferences. They are organized “top down.” The challenge for the conference organizers (the top) is coming up with topics and speakers that will be interesting and relevant to the attendees (the bottom). Not surprisingly, they frequently miss the mark, making the “meetings in the hallways” the most valuable part of attending.
There’s a relatively new, growing trend towards unconferences, sometimes organized using open space technologies (http://www.openspaceworld.org/). An excellent “how to” book on organizing this type of conference is Conferences that Work by Adrian Segar (http://www.conferencesthatwork.com/). What makes an unconference unique is the agenda, and speakers, are chosen by the audience when the conference starts.
A hybrid approach, combining attendee topic selection, but with the agenda defined in advance, allowing speakers more time to prepare (or to find appropriate speakers), is illustrated by the various “camps” (named after the first barcamp) on almost any topic that are organized in almost any major city in the world (http://barcamp.org/w/page/402984/FrontPage has a list of many barcamps).
At Defrag (http://www.defragcon.com) in the middle of a talk about one of the sponsoring companies was a nugget to think about. The CEO of BrainPark described using open space technologies for their corporate planning.
I had just finished reading The Seven Day Weekend, the hard to find follow on to Ricardo Semler’s Maverick. Both books describe his Brazilian company Semco. It has grown 500% over the past four years to over $200 million on sales employing unorthodox management techniques. Most of those techniques involved enabling employees to manage themselves.
I used some of the ideas from Maverick. My daughter, who works for Whole Foods, was telling me about how they hired her new supervisor. The team that supervisor was going to manage all interviewed the candidates and had a “vote” in the hiring decision.
Historically strategic planning has been done by the senior management and delivered from “on-high.” It is a very top-down approach and frequently is disconnected from the employees actually servicing the customer. More often than not the results are bound in a 3 ring binder, never to be looked at again.
Imagine a bottom up approach. Employees would gather for an unconference. The first rounds might focus on the traditional SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opporunities, and Threats) analysis. The difference between this approach and the traditional one is input from the employees closest to the customer.
Once the environmental scan is complete, the group would move on to tactics. Again, because the inputs are coming from the line employees, what needs to be done should get flushed out quickly by the unconference process. New ideas with merit will attract support and get implemented. And there should be more buy in from the employees since they developed the plans.
The question is “can this idea be adapted to work in your company?”
This probably isn’t the technology column you were expecting. Sometimes a competitive advantage can be found if you are willing to look at how concepts outside your normal industry practices might be adapted to your business.