by Jocasta Williams
Jeremy Foster has spent years in the trenches of strategy development. He’s sat through the long meetings, the convoluted discussions, the moments where ideas swirl but never seem to land. He’s seen businesses struggle to make decisions, weighed down by complexity and competing interests. And he’s seen how, too often, the loudest voices in the room drown out the most valuable insights.
So, he decided to change that.
Foster founded Peakbalance, a company dedicated to helping organisations find clarity in their decision-making processes. The name itself is a philosophy: “Peak impact while balancing trade-offs.” It’s rooted in the concept of the inverted U curve, which suggests that too little effort yields no results, but too much effort creates destruction and carnage. The key, he argues, is balance. And for him, that balance is achieved through Group Wisdom.
“The idea of Peakbalance is to reveal what’s really important for a business in any particular situation,” he explains. “It’s about understanding our ambitions and making decisions that actually move us forward.”
Foster’s approach hinges on a simple but powerful premise: the best decisions aren’t dictated from the top down, but rather emerge from the collective intelligence of a group. The challenge, of course, is how to tap into that intelligence efficiently, transparently, and meaningfully.
That’s where polling comes in.
“What I realised,” Foster says, “is that everyone has ‘wisdom’. But if you can reveal insight from the group you create wisdom collectively. This takes what could be done, and turns it into what should be done. Strategy is often slow, cumbersome, and disconnected. But by using interactive polling, you can surface real priorities instantly and adapt accordingly.”
Polling, he argues, levels the playing field. It separates the ‘discussion voice’ from the ‘deciding voice’, allowing every participant to contribute equally, without fear of judgment or pressure to conform. It ensures that decisions are not just made, but owned – by everyone in the room.
Foster first saw the power of this approach in action in a high-pressure negotiation between a government entity and telecom operators in the Middle East. The two sides had historically been at odds, and tensions were high. Traditional discussions risked descending into posturing and deadlock.
Instead, Foster handed each participant a polling device and asked a simple question: ‘Of these five possible actions, what do we think is going to happen?’
The results were striking. Without open debate, without back-and-forth argument, a clear consensus emerged – one that had never been explicitly voiced before. “What I realised in that moment,” Foster recalls, “was that I had given them all a voice by denying them the opportunity to speak.”
Through anonymous polling, participants could express their true opinions without fear of consequences. The group’s ‘group wisdom’ surfaced organically, revealing a common ground that had previously been hidden beneath layers of institutional inertia and interpersonal politics.
For Foster, polling isn’t just about decision-making – it’s about creating commitment. He describes it as ‘emotional thumbprint scanning’. “If I ask for advice and then follow that advice, we’ve created a moral obligation to each other. We want to see a given path succeed,” he says. “By using polling to shape strategy, you get real buy-in. When people wake up in the morning, they’re thinking about how to make the plan work because they helped create it.”
This, he believes, is the missing link in many corporate strategies. Too often, decisions are handed down from leadership without real input from the people who will execute them. Polling reframes that dynamic – ensuring that every decision is not just understood, but ‘owned’.
In his work, Foster often returns to a story from The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki. In one experiment, students were asked to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar. Left to their own instincts, their guesses formed a predictable distribution, clustering around a surprisingly accurate average. But when a second group was subtly nudged to consider external factors – such as air pockets in the jar – their wisdom collapsed. The curve flattened, and their collective answer became less accurate.
For Foster, this phenomenon is a perfect metaphor for organisational decision-making. “If you introduce bias into the system, you destroy the wisdom of the group, everyone falls back to their own domain” he says. “Polling helps protect that wisdom. It lets you see the truth without distortion.”
Today, Peakbalance is helping organisations across industries use polling to make faster, smarter, and more transparent decisions. From corporate strategy to stakeholder engagement, the ability to harness real-time group wisdom is proving to be a game-changer.
And the best part? It’s not just about making better choices—it’s about making choices together.
“In the end,” Foster says, “joint ownership is the most powerful thing we can create. When people know their voice has been heard, they don’t just follow a plan – they commit to it. And that’s when real change happens.”
