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The whole user contribution paradigm poses a challenge to long unquestioned beliefs about the role of management, the value of experts, the need for control over the customer experience, and the importance of quality assurance. User contribution seems messy and scary; giving customers a public podium to comment freely about your products and company seems to violate the management canon “Don’t hold me accountable for what I don’t control.”  At first, Intuit underestimated just how countercultural the UCS paradigm would be.

Naturally, adopting these methods is easier when competitors have beaten you to the punch and shown you where user contribution works in your industry. But what if you want to lead your rivals? Here’s advice for senior home care managers trying to create contribution systems in their companies.

Use personal experience to move mind-set

Often heads and hearts don’t change until people participate in contribution systems themselves. To overcome wariness in inexperienced executives, consider the following:

• Ask enthusiasts to share stories of their personal experience with user contribution systems.
• Ask people to count the user contribution systems found on an Amazon page and classify them by type. (If you look hard, you’ll find 23 separate systems on a single Amazon product page.)
• Ask inexperienced executives to find and use contribution systems of personal interest to them – that helps develop a visceral feeling for how they work  (The UCS taxonomy chart provides many examples if you aren't sure where to start looking.)
• Get sub-teams of leaders to brainstorm about contribution systems that might solve customer or employee problems and then ask them to sketch out prototypes they can present to a larger group.

Nurture small experiments

Encourage unofficial and “guerrilla” experiments. Challenge employees to create contribution systems that they are passionate about, without requiring them to get clearance from management. Experiment with small batches of employees or customers. (Intuit tried one experiment on the TurboTax version that has the smallest sales volume, accounting for less than 1% of customers for that product.) Most of the experiments will fail; tell the organization in advance that this is OK. Communicate the value of the lessons learned from those failed experiments so that other teams benefit.

Let enthusiasts and young employees provide ideas and leadership

Expect ideas for contribution systems to emerge from those who use them the most. Often, these will be your youngest employees. Seek them out. Make them your mentors. Ask them to take the lead in creating ways for your company and customers to benefit from user contributions. Have them develop prototypes and show them directly to you; then help them act on some of the ideas that emerge.

Set boundaries but guarantee freedom within them

Experiment at the edges of your business. Give experimenters a defined sandbox – spacious, perhaps, but defined – rather than an endless expanse of beach. Within those limits, though, make sure they aren’t distracted by experts and that their experiments aren’t smothered by larger initiatives with broader mandates.

Protect experiments from your company’s natural control instincts

Ceding some control of business processes to outsiders, even in a sandbox, will be scary for your organization. Leaders in certain functional areas – marketers and lawyers, for example – will feel especially anxious.  To counter the instinct to preserve control and the status quo, name a godfather or godmother with big-time clout to protect experiments and break through barriers when initiatives meet organizational resistance.

• At Intuit three people, two division general managers and the founder, played this godfather role in early experiments. Don't be surprised if you swallow hard a few times over things you are about to try.

Use your customer base to jump-start projects

Some new contribution systems face a chicken-or-egg problem – that is, they’re empty and useless until folks begin contributing to them, but few visitors will be attracted to something that is empty and useless. Your company probably has advantages that start-ups can only dream of: existing customers, traffic to your website, accumulated behavioral data, and, sometimes, media that will find your experiments newsworthy.  Do not underestimate the power of leveraging this implicit contribution - see Tim O'Reilly's emphasis on the value of the data you already have. 

Let users “vote,” early and often

Customers are better than executives at picking winners in this arena, so get experiments into the hands of real customers as quickly as possible. Minimize or eliminate time lost to market research, lengthy analysis, PowerPoint presentations, or frequent reviews by management. (Intuit borrowed an idea from Google by creating a public site – intuitlabs.com – that displays current experiments and gives experimenters a fast, direct path to customers, bypassing normal product-launch procedures.)

Seek organizational buy-in only after you’ve had some success

The guerrilla experiments are designed to get around organizational resistance. Ultimately, you want innovation in user contribution to become embedded in the organization’s normal processes, but you’ll most likely struggle to shift mindset until you can point to a successful experiment or two.

The meeting earlier this year of Intuit’s top executives to spur action on user contribution systems would have been a wasted effort two years ago. Then, experiments were just beginning. But with several successful initiatives now in operation, Intuit’s newly promoted CEO, Brad Smith, and others felt the time was right to move the idea into the mainstream and talk about why user contribution is a focus of our evolving company strategy. But not everyone at that meeting bought into the concept. Some undoubtedly saw it as a distraction from their day jobs.

Still, there was real energy in the room that day. In the middle of the meeting, we stopped to ask whether folks had questions. Questions were written on the board, and the entire group - instead of one person - tackled them. People provided answers, better than the ones any single person would have given. (In fact, some of them became content for this article.) The executives in the room had just experienced user contribution in action.

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