[njr123]

> People unlikely to be able to contribute won't have a strong opinion

Oh man, you are so so wrong. Sure the people who know nothing won't contribute, but there will be a large number of people who know 'just enough to be dangerous' with very strong opinions that are not only wrong, but so completely obviously wrong you will not even know how to respond. And (in this hypothetical exersize), you will have to spend the next 2 months explaining to all of them why their ideas won't be used, at the same time without offending anyone.

[Terretta]

The people whose opinions are both fervent and wrong will tend to be either outliers, or mostly wrong the same (junior) way, and easily filtered out assuming you have any amount of expertise yourself. The opinions you aren't sure about are exactly the opinions your team should have a look at.

What you're looking for are insights about business requirements or outside the box solutions you yourself missed or didn't stumble on. You're cynically mining the group as a business knowledge and solution brainstorming source, with an open mind to any wisdom it offers but with a healthy grain of salt.

And no, you don't have to explain why each individual idea won't be used, if up front you say, "Our time and resources are limited, so unfortunately we just won't be able to do everything everyone suggests."

If whether you offend is important to you and large numbers of people are likely to take offense because they're too clueless that not every single idea can be reconciled at the same time, your company may not be suited to this exercise.

If whether you offend is important to you and only small numbers of people will take offense, wrap up after the feedback with "Wow, everyone, fantastic input. While not every idea will make it into the product, every single idea helped inform our approach. Thanks to each and every one of you!" In other words, respond in the aggregate, not individually.

Finally, if you're talking about large numbers of people and you don't have the authority to, or you don't know how to, respond to people in aggregate, then this approach isn't for you.

[grey-area]

I'm curious - have you tried this in real life? The mediocrity of consensus has doomed any such attempt I've seen in a real company.

If so, could you share the details as it sounds interesting, if unorthodox and counterintuitive.

If not, what makes you so confident it would work?

[Terretta]

Yes, I've tried it and I've had useful or surprising input come from unexpected quarters. Not always, but enough to make asking routine. Sometimes we'll even get a new team member, someone who'd been thinking about this longer but their group didn't need it, for example.

Sorry if I sounded as though I was advocating consensus about a systems architecture across the whole company. I am not. I'm talking about gathering data, and that's the expectation that should be set.

Collecting input informs the decision making role, but that role shouldn't be abdicated.

[grey-area]

Thanks for the clarification, I agree gathering data from everyone is useful, as long as decisions are then taken by someone competent in the field (be it branding or systems architecture).

I'm not sure about this new Yahoo logo - there are some nice points (the bigger O at the end to imply an exclamation, the simplicity), but the tilted !, kerning and new font are pretty awful and it does look like the CEO had a hand in designing it on a weekend. I just visited the yahoo home page to see it - the exclamation animating in for no reason is particularly grating, and the positioning of the logo is also amateur (it should hang on the left over the nav below for balance), so I can't really see the process employed as Yahoo as anything but a failure here.

It's a shame this article focussed so much on the process rather than the end result, but I think he just assumed the end result was clearly, objectively bad.