New ideas, and feedback on existing ideas would be a lot more vibrant with support for anonymous publishing. No filtering, no censorship, just trust in your people to contribute honestly
Corporate innovation initiatives, strategic directions and even day to day operating decisions need full commitment to work. From everyone. 50% of a business cannot get behind a vision to make it happen, neither can 50% of the people commit to creating and driving new ideas. 100% commitment is a must.
Innovation initiatives can fail if people are self sensoring ideas before they even get started.
Strategic decisions made without full commitment lead to disillusionment, separation and feelings of not being heard. Hardly a recipe for success
Anonymous contributions would encourage honesty, and a complete discussion of any issue. You'd know a cultural initiative or corporate vision was truly supported if you could trust everyone, under the cloak of anonymity to get behind it. For the innovation space, anonymous entry would enable people to try out even the craziest sounding ideas without fear of reprimand. They could even take the credit later if they felt like it.
Mechanisms could include digital communication via anonymous users, nominated speakers to voice anonymously contributed comments, post what you like whiteboards in communal areas or permission to write on the walls of your lifts.
A business that was able to successfully open the doors of truly open communication across all staff could be assured of having a good guage of unity in it's decisions. Would you want to work in such a place?
Innovation portals, idea logs and other forums for gathering ideas should allow for anonymnous feedback, and anonymous publication. As ideas develop, anonymous generators could remove their cloak of anonymity if they wished.
Opening up strategic directions would take longer, and might be opened up one piece at a time. I haven;t thought this aspect through so much, so ideas are welcome here.
A culture of open communication, trust and respect would have to be established. Manage this like any other cultural change program (easier said than done).
Anonymity is can be like a double edged sword. While on one side it does promote openness, on the other it promotes irresponsibility. There is probably an optimal equilibrium between the two for every given situation. This does not in any way detract from the idea that anonymity should be an option.
The Trust Extender hack I propose is designed to help people rely on information originating from any source, including anonymous ones. You might find it to be a helpful build for your hack.
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