A sort of "duh" moment.
In a blog entry entitled The
Power of the Collective Brain, one blogger tells us that: Every
now and then someone makes a call for collective brain power; it may be someone
in a blog posting or a CEO addressing his staff. The odd thing, at least to me,
about such requests is that they frequently occur after some suboptimal individual
attempt at solving the original problem. This seems inefficient; why wait as a
last resort to call on the power of a collective conscious?
Apparently,
the solution to this problem is an "agile environment", which seems
to mean something along the lines of open-ended teamwork within a networked setting.
In other words, why wait until someone in an organization who has been delegated
to solve a problem fails to find a solution before asking help from others. Why
not make the problem public to input from other members of the organization before
someone fails.
What can I say! I couldn't agree more, though I find myself
wondering about the organization of which this particular blogger is a member.
Surely somebody could have told him that there's nothing new or novel about this
idea. But organizational thinking seems to run deep. How else can we explain that
our blogger adds an additional comment:
This isn’t necessarily a fully baked idea, but something I’ve observed with more than one agile team. It is not often there is the explicit call for ideas, yet is seems like many decisions have the benefit of input from multiple people. Besides being egalitarian and empowering it generally leads to good outcomes.
Just what isn't "fully baked" about the idea of encouraging the input of others is beyond me.
Go to: What's so mysterious about it?, or
Go
to: Are crowds really that smart?