It was based on the concept "to help participants at business meetings arrive at a consensus and thus save time that otherwise might be spent on unnecessary discussion...
Participants seated around a conference table are equipped with a personal terminal, about the size of a hand calculator, which can be held comfortably in the lap away from the view of others..."[10] One of the industry's very earliest systems of Audience response was the Consensor, developed by Simmons in the early 1970s.
[3] Gordon had conceived and partially developed[3] what would today be called an audience response system, and Simmons immediately saw practical applications for it in large corporate meetings, to allow people to air their true opinions in anonymous fashion, so that each individual's Likert scale answer value for a question would remain secret, but the group's average, weighted with weighting factors, would be instantly displayed.
Thus (something approximating) the group's true consensus would be known, even though individual middle managers or aspiring junior executives would not have to jeopardize their conformity to effect this result.
Although business was strong for this fledgling company,[16] the command-and-control management style of the day proved a formidable opponent to this new tool, which promoted consensus building.
[17] In his memoir Simmons describes how junior-executive sales prospects tended to like the idea, imagining themselves heroically speaking truth to power (but not paying any price for being a maverick), while their senior-executive bosses tended to see the Consensor as "a blatant attempt to impose democratic procedures into a corporate hierarchy that is anything but democratic.
Tom Campione joined the firm in 1992 and oversaw the transition from wired to wireless hardware and from DOS to Windows application software.