Methods of organizational development - aiio and the "wisdom of the many

Gartner already published a few years ago in its research paper "BPA for the Masses: Is It Real?^"1 Gartner recommended that process modeling and analysis should involve many more people who have a less technical view of process descriptions. In their work with this user group, they also state a much higher benefit from tools whose purpose in particular is not the direct execution of processes, but rather the focus on getting to know, understand and analyze the organization.

A similar development is seen in a publication by Forrester2 , which recommends the involvement of the "Citizen Process Expert" in process design and analysis, instead of relying exclusively on the use of process optimization specialists who are not themselves part of the organization concerned and can contribute correspondingly little local knowledge.

Completely independent of tools and technology, authors such as James Surowiecki, Johannes-Paul Fladerer or Ernst Kurzmann deal in various publications with the question of how to tap the "wisdom of the many" - also within companies and other organizations in which it is a matter of working toward a common goal in a division of labor. What preconditions should be fulfilled at best in order to achieve better results on average from many individual contributions than the best members of the group could achieve individually?

aiio is also concerned with drawing organizational knowledge from the minds of all those who are part of the organization on a daily basis and can contribute to its design from different perspectives, and aims to make this knowledge available.

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Approaches: The collective organizational development process

James Surowiecki argues in his book3 that the accumulation of information in groups leads to collective group decisions that are often better than individual participants' approaches to solutions and identifies four conditions that must be met for the "wisdom of crowds" to work:  

• Diversity of opinion: The people who are asked should have their own information on the topic and contribute different perspectives,
• Independence: The people who are asked should be able to answer uninfluenced by other opinions in their circle,
• Decentralization: The people who are asked are able to specialize and draw on locally given knowledge, and  
• Aggregation: some appropriate mechanism is available to aggregate individual judgments into a collective decision.

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These conditions have been incorporated into the genetics of aiio:

• The process manager should not conduct interviews with process participants and cast his understanding of what he hears into a model. With aiio, he can let different process participants, independently of each other and decentralized, describe or comment on the same process themselves from their respective perspective and by contributing their respective local knowledge.
• aiio acts as a neutral aggregator of the information and enables its consolidation in a result model, which is ultimately all the better as a basis for decision-making, the more diverse the existing perspectives are, under which it was considered and described. This model, in turn, should be available as an information hub to as many actors in the company as possible.

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In order to practically succeed in decentralizing the process of information procurement to include as many different perspectives as possible, process management must be "democratized" so to speak. It should succeed in also making use of the otherwise "silent knowledge" of individuals who are close to problems and can probably contribute well to finding solutions - but are otherwise not asked. However, this requires that practically every respondent must be able to use aiio without any training in the software. Therefore, aiio is deliberately kept very simple and focuses on the process of collecting organizational information. aiio deliberately avoids overly technical descriptive languages and complex user interfaces that are hardly usable without thorough familiarization. aiio is both a tool and a method. It allows each individual to increase the total amount of information available in the system with his or her specific and local knowledge and at the same time to bundle this information into a collective whole. This enables beneficial design decisions to be made. Through a lightweight approach, aiio will also change the process of information gathering and updating into a continuous process by regularly asking, asking back and verifying. As a result, the organizational model is constantly updating itself.

With aiio, "BPA for the Masses" becomes more real than ever, and virtually every individual, within the limits of the information and perspectives available to them, becomes a "Citizen Process Expert."

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Sources:
¹ Gartner, BPA for the Masses: Is It Real?, G00201280

² https://www.forrester.com/blogs/is-your-organization-ready-to-democratize-its-automation-strategy-with-citizen-process-expertise/

³ James Surowiecki: The Wisdom of the Many. Why Groups are Smarter than Individuals and How We Can Use Collective Knowledge for Economic, Social and Political Action, Bertelsmann, Munich, 2005, ISBN 3-570-00687-5.