My name is PLleoughwhiesc. 

How? Take a group of reasonably intelligent adults and tell them to spell my name in English. My name is Lewis, by the way.

There are some groups who will spell my name LWS. Some will spell it longer, and some, because humans love to please absolutely everybody, will create a compromise here, and a committee decision there. Eventually you get bloat. There’s a saying that an elephant is a horse designed by committee.

And so, my name is PLleoughwhiesc.

English spelling is less a system than a series of historical accidents that were never properly cleared up. The “ough” in “though” sounds nothing like the “ough” in “through,” which sounds nothing like the “ough” in “tough.” All correct. None consistent. Once you treat this as permission rather than a warning, things escalate quickly.

It’s all wrong, yet here we are!

Every letter in PLleoughwhiesc is wrong, and yet, defensible. The “PL” has precedent. The silent “e,” the “ough” standing in for a long “u,” the “wh” cluster, the softened “sc.” Each contributor arrived with a straight face and a citation. Nobody was wrong.

The output was gibberish.

Nobody would have reached PLleoughwhiesc alone. More importantly, nobody would have defended it alone. It required a group, a process, and the slow accumulation of individually reasonable decisions to produce something collectively unusable.

This is, with minor adjustments, a description of how a surprising number of organisational decisions get made.The original question gradually disappears under the weight of everyone being technically correct. The output satisfies every contributor and serves nobody.

The problem is not collaboration. The problem is collaboration without a constraint and without someone who owns the whole word, not just their letters.

Why are we doing this?

In the spelling exercise, as with all things, the constraint is simple: can the user actually read it it – is it understandable?. Applied early, and often, that question kills PLleoughwhiesc in the first round. Applied late, it just produces embarrassment and a rewrite.

In organisations, the equivalent question is equally simple: does this still solve the original problem? Not does it reflect the brand guidelines. Not does it incorporate the feedback from Tuesday. Does it solve the problem?

And without collaboration, ideas and products fail. They are the product of a process that isn’t designed for the customer or user.

Designing a horse by committee is not a failure of intent. It is a failure of architecture. Every hoof has a precedent. Nobody was asked to make it run.

Businesses need collaborative cultures. They also need people who are are clear about who owns the outcome, what the constraint is, and when the contributions stop.

PLleoughwhiesc is technically Lewis. But I hate, hate, hate it.