Consensus makes no one happy.

There’s this saying, “a camel is a horse designed by committee,” that I particularly like, and while it might seem to be overly critical of committees, it does have a very valid point.

Far too often projects suffer from what I’ll call staff-bloat; where more and more people are added to the job.

Then what happens is we start to try and incorporate everybody’s ideas into the project. Next thing you know, you’ve got some frankensteinian creation filled with logical inconsistencies and which is indecipherably complex.

With so many cooks messing around with the broth, we often lose sight of what the whole purpose of the project was in the first place. We lose direction.

And the inevitable result is a mess that nobody likes in its entirety. No doubt everybody likes their “contribution”, but nobody – absolutely nobody – will ever like the whole thing.

That’s why you need a strong, focused leader and a tight dedicated team. Call the Steve Jobs‘ and Richard Bransons of this world arrogant assholes all you like, but there’s no denying their achievements. What are the chances they would have succeeded if they incorporated every half-baked idea from every meaningless brainstorm they probably never, ever sat in?

A lot of the unnecessarily complex commercials we see on TV today are borne of exactly such consensus-building group-think, and they are rubbish. They take a simple, clear idea and like a dodgy bartender watering down your whiskey, they dilute it until you can barely taste anything.

Committees simply don’t add value to the creative process.

Consider this from David Ogilvy: “Search all the parks in all your cities. You’ll find no statues of committees.”

Indeed.