You’ve heard the term and if you think it sounds a little touchy-feely, consider the following story:
March 2003. A day out of home port, the captain of freighter en route from South China to the Philippines radios his shipping office to say 6 of the 13 man crew are sick with fevers and severe coughing.
The context of that month, that year, is important. Between the previous November and June of 2003, 744 people – from a total of over 8200 known cases – died of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). The world watched what was feared to be a global pandemic originating from Guangdong Province. Guangdong was the last port of call for the freighter.
Urgent calls from the shipping company headquarters in Manila connected with an impressive range of experts: Atlanta’s Center for Disease Control, the US Department of Homeland Security, the US State Department, and London’s Tropical Disease Infirmary.
Meanwhile, the ship’s First Mate condition had worsened and the captain was certain he was about to die.
CDC, Epidemiologists at the Infirmary, the US State Department, and the Government of the Philippines agreed – the ship was to stopped, and adjacent shipping lanes were to be quarantined until someone could figure out what was happening.
And then something quite remarkable happened. Almost as an afterthought, the ship’s builders in Northern Ireland had been contacted and in the middle of the Belfast night a junior manager at the shipyard sent out the word “get me anyone, now, at 3 in the morning – employees, friends, neighbors, anyone who worked the docks, who knows anyone who might know _something_ about this 60 year old ship and have them come to our company hall. Now!”
Within an hour there was a conference telephone call between experts from 3 continents – and what must have sounded like a rabble-y crowd at a shipyard in Northern Ireland.
At one point, someone in the Irish crowd made an offhand mention of how hard is was to keep the officer’s quarters clean because the ductwork always got in the way of your mops.
“Ductwork?” repeated the CDC.
The short of it was — in the late 80s, new HVAC regulations came into effect and it was tough to retro-fit the oldest vessels with the new ductwork. At least, hard to do ‘according to plans.’
That hint, made from some anonymous person who remembered some odd little fact from a generation before, was all that was needed. CDC and the London Tropical Disease center made a hypothesis that non-code ductwork was an ideal place to grow deadly spores.
Within two hours, a British Royal Navy Jump-Jet was lowering Haz-Mat equipped sailors down to the deck of the freighter.
No one died.
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So?
The point is – a critical problem was attacked by using the smarts of a community that would otherwise never be tapped. In addition to the experts one imagines would be called in, there were friends, and friend of friends, and people with no other qualification for being in the Belfast meeting hall that night other than they knew *something* about the ship.
It was the smart thing for that unheralded junior manager to do. It was a good idea then, and it’s a good idea today.
Using the terms of today, it was a dramatic example of crowdsourcing, a demonstration of how a collection of people can assemble themselves to come up with insight that might not otherwise see the light of day.
In 2003, they used the telephone as the supporting technology platform.
Six years later, we have other tools — but the importance is being able to tap the collective smarts of a lot of people.
We can help your organization learn how.
