… is to make consensus your goal.
An individual person has amazing ideas. But people only know how to dilute ideas.
A person is bold and adventurous. People are just scared and boring.
A person can easily follow his gut. People depend on a vote.
A person can get something done by tomorrow. People can’t even finalize the members of the committee by tomorrow.
A person can be clear. People confuse and are confused.
A person can lead. People stall.
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Maybe the question you should be asking is not “Do we have the right people in place here?,” but rather “Do we have the right person in place?” Whatever that “place” is, it will be because of the leadership of a person
Feedback and advice and councils have their place. We just happen to always put them in the wrong place. This is why politics is so frustrating. Someone starts with a great, albeit polarizing, idea, and then it gets processed and homogenized via consensus until it (supposedly) pleases everyone and accomplishes nothing.
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You are exactly right. I think there is a role for “people” in the creative process. It’s at the beginning. During the brainstorming phase. A group of people, when skillfully led, can come up with all kinds of crazy, uninhibited ideas and feed off each other’s ideas.
But that’s where the group’s role should end. After that, it should be a “person” to take the best of the ideas and incorporate them as she sees fit into her original vision, and run with it. If that person goes back to the group looking for consensus or approval, then the vision gets clouded and the uniqueness evaoporates.
By the way, I think this is the very reason focus groups can be so dangerous. Marketers often look to them to ratify their vision, but I think often the vision gets killed.
Thought provoking analysis, Brett. Interesting with your analysis of person vs. people. As in, a person can start a movement with an idea but it takes people to viral the idea? A democratic society is by nature, fuel by the people’s beliefs, desires, motives, and so forth. And people will do what people will do. We can’t always control that part of it
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Janette Stoll
Janette – I guess you could look at it that way. I’ll be honest, this was pretty much sparked by sitting in 3 days worth of “advisory” meetings where a good idea would be tossed up and then, in the spirit of gaining consensus, it would get whittled down into nothing much. Even large groups of people are often following a single person (or at least the ideals sparked by a single person).
bd
Nice points, Chris. I would argue that there are times when the group at the idea stage can actually backfire. In other words, a person can have a great idea, but it may not make it through all the filters that people put in place. Interesting how sometimes the group approach works and sometimes it doesn’t.
I think what you’re saying pretty much captures the entrepreneurial spirit. This is the story of startups: an individual with a great idea and no bureaucracy to keep him from it. That also explains why startups are sole proprietorships and not corporations. You lose creative control once you have a board of directors. I can’t imagine where Microsoft would be if Bill Gates tried to get a vote on whether to buy DOS.
If there’s a good idea, then there needs to be a person who’s willing and able to protect it. Let the creative have control over the concept, the committee the delivery.
Feedback and advice councils probably serve better in the execution phase than the idea phase. A person can think outside the box, but a committee *is* the box. If you put the committee in the execution phase, they’re creating a box for the idea. A committee in the ideation phase creates ideas for the box. The democracy should decide whether it lives or dies, not what it’s going to be.
[...] yet, we celebrate consensus and compromise and synergy and brainstorming and all that crap. It’s not bad crap, in all [...]