You know the deal: You suggest something and someone else fights it. Then other folks notice “oh, if I support this idea, I might receive my share of the fighting”.
Is there another way?
What if, before entering the conversation, everyone “in the room” would have agreed to specific “rules of engagement”?
To benefit from all the potentially useful, but still unexpressed “pieces of the puzzle”, I want to make the environment friendly to expressing thoughts. The basic pattern I use for supporting “swarm intelligence” is to:
- Allow all ideas to be expressed
- Then, invite support and contribution to any idea the patricipants want to support
This way, ideas without support will wither away of their own accord, and ideas with support will evolve.
So what would an opt-in agreement look like in practice?
One opt-in agreement I’ve used when posing questions on Facebook has been:
- No commenting on other people’s answers
- Clarifying questions are ok
- Instead of commenting, bring your own answer to the question.
- When you see something you want to support, use the like-button