Wise Crowds is a method for gathering diverse stakeholder perspectives to analyze strategic questions, revealing convergence, divergence, and blind spots for informed decision-making.
4-5 diverse perspectives, each building on what came before.
The crowd’s value isn’t in consensus — it’s in the spread. Where they converge reveals what’s real. Where they diverge reveals what’s interesting. What nobody mentions reveals the blind spot.
- Each perspective sees all previous contributions before adding their own
- Diverse stakeholder viewpoints surface different priorities and concerns
- The synthesis maps convergence, divergence, and blind spots
When to Use
When you need diverse perspectives on a strategic question. Especially valuable for decisions that affect multiple stakeholders, where each group brings different expertise, concerns, and priorities. Works best when you want the full picture, not just one expert opinion.
How It Works
4-5 diverse stakeholder perspectives examine your topic in sequence:
- Each perspective represents a different stakeholder viewpoint (e.g., customer, engineer, business leader, end user, operations)
- Each sees all previous contributions before adding their own
- The perspectives are chosen to be complementary — not redundant
- A Facilitator synthesizes everything, mapping where perspectives converge (strong signals), where they diverge (things worth exploring), and what nobody mentioned (blind spots)
What You Get
A multi-stakeholder analysis with clear convergence and divergence mapping. You’ll see which concerns are universal (take these seriously), which are unique to specific perspectives (explore these), and which areas went unexamined (investigate these). The synthesis includes concrete recommendations grounded in the full picture.
Related Methods
- Troika Consulting — when you want deeper consulting from fewer perspectives
- Six Thinking Hats — when you want thinking-mode separation rather than stakeholder separation
- Adversarial Debate — when you want focused tension between two positions
/libertee:wise-crowds "your strategic question"