Most decisions in organizations are made by escalating them up the management hierarchy — and it’s usually the highest paid person in the room’s opinion (“HIPPO”) that prevails. The HIPPO model of decision-making will likely always be with us. But with the rise of digital technology, and with it the ability to get immediate feedback from customers and communities, crowdsourcing has become a powerful alternative for driving important decisions. The challenge is finding the right ways to introduce crowdsourcing into your management processes so that it opens up and democratizes decisions, harvesting the accumulated thoughts and perspectives from your customers and across your organization — but without bogging things down.