In much of our digital lives we are only too aware of information overload, as the fire hydrant of content gushing forth over the Internet competes for our ever stretched attention.

When it comes to crowdsourcing however, there is a tendency to think that more is always better.  More participants, more ideas, more solutions.  The more you can cram in, the better the outcomes.  After all, it’s called crowdsourcing for a reason, right?

The perils of too much participation

Whilst the point of crowdsourcing is to solicit a wide range of opinions, just as our attention is finite when it comes to digital content, so too is the resources available within an organization to filter and digest the ideas that come in.

A recent paper highlights the diluting affect large levels of participation has on the mental and financial resources of the sponsoring organization.  This can contribute to poorer outcomes as better ideas are missed amongst the general noise generated by the process.

The researchers tracked challenges run by over 900 organizations, which collectively saw over 100,000 ideas generated from participants.  The authors then analyzed each suggestion to try and understand how unique and useful they were.

It emerged that there was an inverse relationship between the popularity of each challenge, and the eventual direction taken by the sponsoring organization.  The more participants there were, the less likely the organization was to take a novel and unique course of action.

When good ideas are crowded out

It’s a phenomenon the authors call ‘crowding’, whereby the challenges of filtering out ideas obstructs the ability for the organization to chart a course of action.

They remind us that crowdsourcing should not be designed as an idea generation process but as a means to change.  Actions are the most important output from the process, with the crowd deployed to help overcome any blindspots that exist within the organization.

When crowding occurs however, it instead acts almost as a set of blinkers as it obstructs the process of locating outlying information and instead encourages organizations down more familiar paths.

A consequence of information overload

It’s something that we’re all familiar with, whether we’ve dealt with crowdsourcing or not.  The authors draw the analogy with our post-holiday inboxes that are so often overflowing with emails.

To deal with the deluge we often pick off the easiest tasks first to begin shrinking the ‘to do’ list.  This pushes more challenging tasks down the list to a time when hopefully we have more mental resources to tackle them with.

The problem when this occurs in crowdsourcing is that there is a pressure to act upon at least some of the suggestions in order to justify the process.  This can then encourage organizations to implement ideas that may be easy to action but not really what the process was designed for.

How to overcome crowding

So how can this problem be overcome?  The authors suggest that the key is to shift emphasis away from attracting a high volume of participants towards attracting high value participation.

So rather than looking for thousands of ideas, it might be better to aim for a hundred or so suggestions from a wide and diverse range of participants.  Achieving this may require a slightly different approach to that traditionally adopted in crowdsourcing challenges as you look to target your efforts more than is the case in an open call.

It’s also important to alert any staff working on the challenges of the crowding phenomenon and how damaging it can be.  This can help keep operational staff focused on the key outcomes of the challenge, and managers aware of the dangers of setting seemingly arbitrary targets or quotas on the process.

Crowdsourcing still has tremendous potential, but the study reminds us of the risks involved if the process is not managed correctly.