Agile Ramblings

The Power of the Collective Brain

November 16th, 2005

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?

The simple answer is one of resource allocation and opportunity cost; it is inefficient to always point some collective at every issue when a subset can solve the problem. However, agile environments offer an alternative. The high visibility and communication of requirements, risks and decisions provides the opportunity for an opt-in application of collective brain power. Team members can choose to give background thinking to a topic, while not consuming everyone with it.

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.

Entry Filed under: Software Development