Creativity and idea development has trouble in crowds.

• How many authors per book?
• How many authors/producers per song?
• How many screenwriters/producers/directors per movie?
• How many choreographers per dance show?
• How many authors for early stage software?
  • Rust
  • Redis
  • Scala
  • Python
  • Elm
  • Keras

Despite this, most software development companies still swear by a divide and conquer strategy using many low-impact software developers rather than focusing on producing the high-impact individuals who seem to actually move things along when venturing into uncharted territory. It seems backwards to me that so many companies talk so much about innovation and then turn around and hire hordes of people to execute it.

The truth is probably that many of those companies talking about innovation aren’t really trying to innovate. The combination of large crowds and a semi democratic process is very good a keeping the status quo, exactly because it takes a long time for many people to agree on even simple things. Try agreeing on a date with 10 or more people...

How big are your teams? An innocuous question with with a lot of power.