in a recent task at work, we were trying to decide upon a song to use in the company reel, and the result left me wondering if we had really built a consensus at all.
essentially, each person involved submitted a set of songs to the group and then each member of the group voted on their top picks. our first mistake was not specifying how many picks to choose and whether to indicate order of preference. What ended up happening was that some people submitted a top three, some a top six (as that was the number of people involved) and while some indicated the order of preference, some did not. the ultimate choice was based upon the song which received the most number 1 votes.
the issue i had with this result was that the song which received the most #1 votes did not appear at all on two voters lists. it left me wondering whether there would have been more overall satisfaction if a song had been given more weight for appearing on everyone’s lists, albeit in a lower position. i also wondered how the ability for people to apply a negative vote (ie. a vote for a song they absolutely did not want) would have affected the results.
what i’m thinking of is some kind of consensus building tool which is not so simplistic as a simple ‘vote for your favorite’, which i see as prone to create more polarized situations in which some people wind up extremely happy while others end up completely dissatisfied (see: our process of electing government officials). there’s surely got to be an easy to understand way to make the whole process more sophisticated.
