The Wisdom of the Crowd: Prologue

A few months back, I hired on at BlobCo. I knew immediately that I was in for a wild ride, because so many people expressed so much delight that I had signed on. (This would relate to biting off more than you can chew.) If you're a technical writer and everybody's glad to see you before they even know about your chocolate chip cookies, it's a bad sign. But now I've been there long enough that people know about the cookies. Long enough to have delivered my first big project, too; and now, long enough that people are starting to ask about other things they imagine I might do.

A couple weeks ago, the VP of Mumble came to me with a new request: BlobCo has a great team of technical people working with our customers, keeping the customers' websites and software working right. But it takes months to learn the ins and outs of figuring out what's going on when a customer's site starts misbehaving, and there's been enough turnover that the VP was very concerned about the loss of brainpower. He asked me to start a project to capture all that valuable information before it walked out the door. I told him he'd have to negotiate with my VP, but I'd say yes if my boss said yes.

The boss was sitting a couple cubicles over, so I hollered his name. "Yes?" he answered. Talk about your comedy set-up - I couldn't ask for better. "Well, there you go. That sounded like Yes to me."

I did actually give the boss a run-down on the situation. He was concerned about how much of my time it would take, so I told him how I planned to work it in:
I'm not going to do the writing.
The people who know the material will do the writing.
I'll manage the project, help them as needed, and let them know what fabulous people they are. I'll figure out how to stitch it all together and make it easy to find and to use.
But I'm not going to write the darn thing.

The boss said yes for real, once he understood the problem and the approach I planned to take in solving it. I went back to the VP of Mumble to talk through the strategy and agree on a list of the people who should be involved.

I'm not going to write this, I told him. I'll need your help no matter how we do this project, and here's what I think will allow me to keep it manageable:

• Let's have the experts each write the bits they know best.
• Each participant should nominate three things to include in the project.
• Everyone's very busy, so let's not ask them to do a lot in any given week.
• Let's not tackle everything people know how to troubleshoot - just the really hot items.
• Let's not ask anyone to write more than three short pieces.
• Let's hold the project to two months.

The VP of Mumble seemed very happy with all this. We called a meeting to kick off the project.

I know that asking technical staff to write stuff is like pulling teeth, so I used the same trick that the dentist used when I was a little kid: Toys. At the kick-off meeting, I slammed through my talking points, asked for questions (there weren't any), and then emptied a shopping bag full of toys on the conference table. Everybody had been silent through the meeting, but the toys broke the ice. People started asking good questions, cautiously voicing approval for the idea of the project and exploring the "how".

Rubber duckies, Gumby figurines, prismatic "robot glasses", wind-up toys...these got the conversation started. I'm going to need to do more than just hand out toys, though, because I have no formal authority. These people are my peers. I can't compel their participation. I must earn that, along with their respect. One of my top priorities will be to make sure that all the project participants get full credit for their expertise - because that's what keeps BlobCo successful.

Over the years, I have learned that when I don't have prior experience to guide me, the best thing I can do is tell the truth about that. So I've let everyone know that I haven't done a project like this before. (Now I can go ahead and freak out - people will understand.) But I have a plan; so we're further along on this than BlobCo has ever gotten before.

We're only a few days into the project, so I don't yet know how it's going to turn out. Stay tuned!