Team Smarts

Kathy Sierra writes one of my very favourite blogs, called Creating Passionate Users. It's one of my favourites because she writes about topics in a way that always makes me think. It's like having your own devils advocate writing to you every day or so.

I was particularly struck by her recent post "One of us is smarter than all". I happen to think that teams often snatch at consensus because it makes the majority feel good rather than listening to the lone voice with a different point of view who makes everyone feel uncomfortable.

Slightly re-writing a quote that Kathy used (which I think comes from the book The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki)... the power of a team comes NOT from consensus decision making, but from the aggregation of the ideas and thoughts of each member of the team.

That just makes a huge amount of sense to me.