Survey says... maybe we can do surveys better

Which Pokémon are you? People enjoy filling out silly quizzes like this. Why? Because they’re mildly entertaining while giving us a chance to see ourselves through a new lens. First, they ask us about our preferences and desires, then they reflect back an image that—like a fun house mirror—is strange yet often just recognizable enough to allow us to either reject it as “not me” or identify with it: “Yes, I’m a Squirtle!”

Organizations are made up of PEOPLE. Yet stakeholder surveys conducted as part of strategic planning projects, evaluations, or what have you usually treat people as mere data points. The questions are about what individuals think and experience, but the results are reported back only to a small group of organizational leaders to inform whatever process they’ve contracted for. The survey participants can only hope to maybe read a report of some aggregate results—and that this time the organization does something with the data to actually change and improve.

But what if these surveys were designed not only with the organization, but its people, in mind? For a start, what if every participant got the simple validation of receiving a copy of their own responses? Then, what if there were questions on every survey giving respondents some new insight or lens into themselves—surely not what Muppet they would be or what Hollywood celebrity is their ideal mate, but what they uniquely bring to the kind of challenge or opportunity facing their organization? (They’ll be part of the solution, after all.). And what IF it could even be just a little bit fun and engaging?

Unfortunately, entertaining quizzes are just that: suitable for entertainment only. And the science-based personality (e.g., MBTI, enneagram) and strength-finding assessments take tons of questions to get to a result that often seems just as reductive.

I’m going to come clean right now and admit that I don’t have an answer to how to make surveys better serve the people who take them, but here are two ideas to knock around. Perhaps it’s possible to create a miserably short-cut route to align respondents with one of twelve Jungian archetypes and reflect back, in the most basic of terms, how the characteristics of each could contribute to organizational change. Or maybe one has to give up on the quiz format and offer a set of open-ended prompts for a personal SWOT analysis that invites participants to reflect on the limiting or liberating aspects of their role in the organization’s unfolding story—and, in so doing, begin to sketch the outlines of their own super-powered character.