All Our Ideas

All Our Ideas is a website that enables crowd sourcing evaluation of different concepts - letting the wisdom and views of the many emerge in a valid way.  Historically organizational decisions have been taken by representatives or leaders who, 'surveying' their publics, drawing from their own experience, consulting 'experts' then apply their own judgment to the decision.  The problem with this is bias:  we tend to hear the views of people like us.  We tend to talk far more often to those who agree with us and think us to be wonderful fellows and avoid critics and those whose life experiences and perspectives are far different from ours.  This self referential 'loop' tends to reinforce our world view, rather than challenging it.

The result:  all groups tend toward group think and make poorer decisions than they would if they had a truly broad perspective.  Part of the answer is to use valid tools such as All Our Ideas to test the leadership's thinking far and wide.  Structured conjointly, the approach has been successfully used in consumer research for decades.  Internet enabled, it becomes extremely inexpensive (well free, actually) and easy to execute.

For anyone that truly wants to know what their public thinks, that is.

Here's an example that I ginned up for our Church:  "What type of music should we use during worship service?"