All Of Us

"None of us is as smart as all of us."

This is a quote that is on the bulletin board in the kitchen at Unit 10 at my company. Apparently this saying is based on a Japanese proverb. It's intended to emphasize that teamwork and co-operation can accomplish a lot of things that we cannot do individually.

Sure, I'll go along with this principle. Two heads are better than one. I often use other people as sounding boards to test my ideas. I make an intentional effort to assume that my decisions and designs may be flawed and I specifically get advice from others. Compromise happens to be a word that I love in this regard.

That being said, I briefly had my own response on this same bulletin board:

"None of us is as smart as all of us."

"Unless 'all of us' is a committee."

It's a long-standing precept in the software development industry that "design by committee" is a bad thing. Yes, two heads are better than one but many heads are not better than two heads. At some point, committees become either a tool of the most powerful person in the room or they introduce a series of endless compromises.

The best ideas - the most risky ideas, the most challenging ideas, the most creative ideas - are filtered out. Only the mediocre and generally palatable ideas are accepted. Instead of implementing a unique and powerful vision, that one voice of the future becomes a gaggle of people talking. At the end, no one can take credit or responsibility for a singular idea and the original passion of the work is lost.

I'm not against committees per se. I happen to be involved in several different weekly meetings at work and they function very well. For certain tasks, though, committees suck...the life out of the project.

I have an idea that you should let geniuses do what they do best. A genius will still get input and ask advice from everyone because they're smart enough to know that they don't live in a bubble and they do not hold the keys to all information. However, their efforts are not diluted, either.

It's often like trying to do a painting. If a bunch of people jump in together, the final image is either a gloppy mess or it's so highly regimented that it may as well have been paint-by-numbers. That being said, comics are often done by a person that does the initial art in pencil, followed by a second person that does inking and finally the colourist does their overlay. Sometimes, the sum result is worse than the individual efforts but when you get a great team, each level only improves and accentuates the last.