Hack:
The FreeSpeak System: The Self Perfecting Organization

By Matt Shlosberg - Managing Director at Hanna Concern

June 13, 2010 at 7:37am

Management

Leadership

transparency

effectiveness

Moonshots

Embed the ethos of community and citizenship

Increase trust, reduce fear

Reinvent the means of control

Summary

The FreeSpeak system is a simple but powerful method to force the organization to self-improve and become more competitive while eliminating reliance on management.

Problem

This hack solves several problems:

1. Many organizations find it tough to solicit feedback from employees for one reason or another.

2. In most organizations, decisions are made at the top. People on the bottom aren't empowered, aren't consulted, and their knowledge is wasted.

3. Some organizations find it hard to hold senior people accountable.

4. Companies often don't know how to use the breadth of internal knowledge to innovate or improve

5. Others...

Solution

First create the system and follow these four steps:

1. Create a simple web application called FreeSpeak. Allow any employee, any customer, or any partner to go into this web site and post an anonymous question, comment, idea, or concern. For every item posted, allow the author to specifically direct the item to a specific person or group in the company.

2. Require recipients of these messages to respond to each one individually. Hold them accountable for each response.

3. Make this system transparent, so that every employee, customer, and partner could see every comment and every response.

4. Have the CEO of the company read these messages. Turn every message into an action item that needs to be reported on to the CEO or some other very trusted senior executive.

Now that you have the basic system in place, watch the magic happen. First, there will be no change. People will post messages and nothing will be done about it. Then, these messages will get to the CEO and he will hold team members accountable. He will require responses to be posted on FreeSpeak for everyone to see. If responses are positive, the firm will get energized and submit more ideas. If they are negative, one of the two things will happen: (a) If the firm has the right people in the right positions, they will be guided by "the invisible hand" to improve and solve the problem, since their actions, decisions, and performance are now transparent to the rest of the organization or (b) employees and customers will get reassured that no one cares and the firm will go out of business; in this case you had the wrong people in the wrong positions.

Practical Impact

The basic premise here is that people don't like it when anything negative is said about them or their work. When such negative information appears, they usually try to solve it. This system forces them to solve problems they otherwise ignore or unaware of. If they don't act, they will lose their jobs.

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June 25, 2010 at 12:41pm

Francesco Collova'

Interesting crowdsourcing method, have you any feedback from field's implementation?
An improvement could be to define community by self enrolement (also anonymously) discussing on specific arguments as happen in forum. Of coure is needed also a reputational system to let rate posts from the crowd and increse the valence in the ecosystem of any contribute.

June 14, 2010 at 9:39am

Matt Shlosberg

David,

Thanks for the comment. I can see how this system can be abused. At the same time, if someone really wanted to settle vendettas, they could always find a way without the system.

I haven't seen this EXACT system at play. I've seen two flavors though. In one of them, employees spoke freely but their comments didn't appear until they were answered. Because executives refused to answer half of these comments, employees stopped submitting them. To employees, it looked like these things went into an oblivion. Senior management saw this system as a liability and pretty much discontinued the system.

The second flavor I saw (which was successful) is described in a story I submitted separately (see http://www.managementexchange.com/content/force-change-bottom). In this case, employees created their own system and made it publicly available. It worked very well and the organization re-organized.

June 14, 2010 at 9:23am

David Sims

Wow, Matt, this is a pretty interesting proposal. Is it accurate to say that in a system like this, the accuser remains anonymous while the accused must publicly answer the charge under the gaze of the CEO? It would seem like a system like this would be ripe for abuse-- people using it to settle vendettas, or even just to weaken the reputation of someone that they may be competing with. Have you seen this in real use? I wonder how it plays out.

I also wonder if it would work as well (or better) if the accuser wasn't completely anonymous but rather their identity was known to a moderator, like an ombudsman, who can't reveal the identity but also acts as a reality check for the posts. --Dave

June 14, 2010 at 9:23am

David Sims

August 9, 2010 at 9:09am

Matt Shlosberg

Hi Raj,

Thanks for the note.
You are right! This would probably be a great tool in government, except no politician would ever dare to do anything like this.

Maybe one can start a new web site, allowing citizens to freely post comments for everyone to read, so politicians can find out what their people think about various issues. Initially only the best ones would actually answer questions. If they don't answer questions, they don't get re-elected. At some point politicians will realize that it's a powerful tool that can be used for or against them. Maybe such a tool can create a better government.

Thanks for the idea!

August 8, 2010 at 6:17am

Raj Kumar

Hello Matt,

Got floored by your creativity on visiting your site. I am having a hard time giving substance to just this one idea.

Free Speak is an excellent idea to leverage the power of IT for developing a reliable Feedback system. With reliable Feedback an organization can progress to get what it wants. There will be another benefit: Managers will get an opportunity to explain the thinking behind the not so obvious to carry the personnel along.

Individual atention to each posting may get too demanding for the members of the hierarchy and the CEO. Perhaps the software can be modified to throwup those posts that develop a following or threshold support. Monitoring of the exchange on such collective issues by the HRD arm could identify and quell serious concerns in good time. Of course there is aso the possibility of unearthng great ideas which have already acquired a minimum appeal. In both cases perhaps the software modification can be taken one step further to publicise the identity of the original post with permisson - In fact the person can feed in the identity only if the post serves a purpose and the publicity is welcome.

It would be wonderful if Free Speak takes root in Government. It would be a huge release valve for the public and may even lead to much needed reform.

Regards,

Raj Kumar

June 16, 2010 at 8:47am

Alex Todd

Interesting. I have been thinking along the same lines and have suggested a similarly inspired build for Gary Hamel's hack "Leader Meter (Finding Natural Leaders)". It then occurred to me that it would also be a valuable build for my own hack "The Trust Extender" at http://www.managementexchange.com/node/1968:

"Gary, consider incorporating a social media tool such as the one I have been designing for a similar purpose:

A microblogging widget that captures business intelligence about users' ability to believe information:

Decision Support Widget: A tool that helps users validate information by asking structured questions in the form "Is it true that…?" sent via microblogging, instant messaging, SMS or e-mail to people they trust to validate it. - Hence, the people they choose to follow (namely, prospective leaders).

Business Intelligence: Tracks communications between individuals inside and outside the organization, identifying what employees and business ecosystem participants are having difficulty believing and who they are relying on for validation. - Hence, identify the emerging leaders in various areas.

Performance Optimization: Helps management eliminate trust bottlenecks inside and outside the organization."

BTW, the tool is based on the trust framework I propose in my "The Trust Extender" hack.