A camel is a horse designed by a committee, so the saying goes.

It's not fair on camels, which are remarkable animals, but the idea that meeting everyone's requirements leads to a weaker product without a strong vision has a lot of truth to it.

Like a remote control with 50 buttons or a policy so watered-down by different requirements that it has no effect, design by committee can be the death of an initiative. Part of strong product leadership and creating designs that wow is having an opinion, saying no, and not trying to please everybody. Much easier said than done.

To bring it home, the movie Pentagon Wars has an entertaining satirical scene about the evolution of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle (11 mins). The clip shows how the plan for an infantry transport vehicle became "a troop transport that can't carry troops, a reconnaissance vehicle that's too conspicuous to do reconnaissance. And a quasi-tank that has less armor than a snow-blower but has enough ammo to take out half of D.C." Perhaps most informative is the effect on the motivation and morale of the designers—"Can you make it amphibious?"

Also see: groupthink, the tyranny of small decisions, the Abilene paradox, the bandwagon effect.

Or Jeff Bezos' guidance: Be stubborn on vision. Be flexible on details.

Design by committee

Chihuahua syndrome refers to messy data from variations in spelling or input—Chihuahua is easy to misspell. The quality of your data matters—errors can creep in anywhere, particularly when people enter data. Garbage in, garbage out.

Here's Chris Groskopf quoted in Seeing with Fresh Eyes—Meaning, Space, Data, Truth by Edward Tufte:

"There is no worse way to screw up data than to let a single human type it in, without validation. I acquired a complete dog licensing database. Instead of requiring people registering their dog to choose a breed from a list, the system gave dog owners a text field to type into, so this database had 250 spellings of Chihuahua. Even the best tools can't save messy data. Beware of human-entered data."

Capitals, spaces, misspellings, hyphens, numbers stored as text, numbers entered as letters (I, O), accents, straight/curly apostrophes, dates out of order, languages, dialects, abbreviations, and more are all routes for misleading your analysis.

The name The chihuahua syndrome is from Edward Tufte.

Chihuahua syndrome

The Droste effect is an endless picture-in-picture—a part of the picture contains the whole picture, which contains the picture, which contains the picture, and on.

Most of us are likely familiar with it from the fun visual effect you often see when sharing your screen on a video call, which contains the video call where you're sharing your screen, on which is the video call where... Always entertaining. Google calls it an infinity mirror.

The name derives from a Dutch brand of cocoa powder, Droste, where the classic advert was a picture of a nurse carrying a tray with a box of the cocoa powder, with the picture of the woman on it carrying the tray with a box of the cocoa...

Articles about the Droste effect often mention the amazing M.C. Escher's Print gallery, a picture without beginning or end.

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The Droste effect