‘Democracy’ is listed at number ten in the AFR Boss list of 41 Big Ideas.
This is democracy in the sense of participation and shared contribution toward the development of products, services and ideas. This really is an idea to watch as we see it already in play through more and more form of open source development on the web. By open source, I don’t just mean application development, but whole bodies of knowledge (wikipedia), shared creative sources (creative commons). Even marketing is becoming democratic with the resurgence of ‘choose your own adventure’ style campaigns relying on consumers electing content and designing campaigns via SMS and web interaction. This was well covered in a Time magazine article earlier this year.
Back to the workplace, the relevance of this for communicators is that participation requires engagement and access to information. Giving employees the resources and opportunity to participate requires the commitment to see the process through. Treat employee contributions superficially is a fast path to destroying trust and leadership credibility.
In the previous post, we see where communication came in on the list!
