Anonymous Communication

Disclaimer: This post is not related to football.

This past week, my command attended a town hall event hosted by the Commanding General.  The purpose of the event was for the general to address comments he read in a recent command climate survey which was completed by active duty and civilian personnel assigned to the unit.  The typical format for these town hall events is that the speaker speaks for however long they choose and then they field questions.  Of course, because attending these events is mandatory for unfirmed personnel, we normally just sit there until we are released and go back to work.  As such, the speaker is usually met by a long awkward pause when they ask “does anybody have any questions”?  The Marines usually leave thinking that the event was a waste of time and they think nothing of it again. 

This time the general wanted to avoid the awkward silence and actually have a dialog with the audience.  For this event, he and his staff used a new app for the first time that allowed the audience members to ask questions anonymously.  The audience simply had to use their smartphones to visit a website and then type in an event specific code that gave access to the questions that were posted.  The audience could then read other people’s questions and vote for them.  Upon completion of the speaking portion, the general addressed the questions that had the most votes.

When the instructions were given prior to the beginning of the speaking portion, I thought that it would be a dud and that the result would be the same, nobody would enter any questions.  To my surprise, a lot of people were entering their questions.  Of course, I thought that any excuse to look at the phone instead of the speaker would be taken advantage of.  In this instance I was wrong.  The audience, primarily the civilian employees, asked a lot of difficult and important questions.

What I learned from this experience is that communication can be effectively done without an orator knowing which exact individual asked a question.  Although asked by an individual, the answers were for the collective.  Lastly, I thought it was a good bit of leadership for an old general to try new technology for the sake of improved communication.