Hazelnuts of Wisdom

In the last post I refered to misaligned design in the classic quote:

a camel is a horse designed by committee.”

In an idle moment [or are you and I just procrastinating - escaping some other activity or chore?!] I’d like to briefly explore this quote because I used to use it a lot in work contexts.

First let’s explore its possible origin, the quote is attributed to:

• Unknown.
• Ancient proverb.
• 1958, Sir Alec Issigonis [designer of the classic Mini car] in Vogue magazine.
• University of Wisconsin philosophy professor Lester Hunt.
• 1952, Proceedings Regular Meeting, Ohio Valley Transportation Advisory Board, Pacific Northwest Advisory Board, pg. 24:

  A camel is a horse designed by a committee, so we hope that this committee will—and I think it will—function appropriately.

• 1975, The Professional Geographer: The Journal of the Association of American Geographers, v.27 1975, pg. 132:

  If a camel is a horse designed by a committee, what is a materials policy statement prepared by seven study teams?

ASIDE:  Interesting how many assign the quote to Sir Alec, even though there are earlier examples of its use.  This is a minor indication of the power of belief over evidence [the 1952 citation above precedes Sir Alec by 6 years].  Most seem to suggest it is more of an ‘ancient proverb’.  Perhaps this is just a hint of the desire for attribution to an individual, rather than acceptance a old community maxim.

What about the meaning?

In wiktionary.org the entry says:

An expression critical of committees—or by analogy, group decision-making—by emphasizing the ineffectiveness of incorporating too many conflicting opinions into a single project. In this figure of speech, the distinguishing features of a camel, such as its humps and poor temperament, are taken to be the deformities that resulted from its poor design.

Alternately is wikipedia’s entry on design by committee:

Design by committee is a term referring to a style of design and its resultant output when a group of entities comes together to produce something (often the design of technological systems or standards), particularly in the presence of poor and incompetent leadership. The defining characteristics of “design by committee” are needless complexity, internal inconsistency, logical flaws, banality, and the lack of a unifying vision.

The term is especially common in technical parlance, and legitimates the need and general acceptance of a unique systems architect. Often, when software is designed by a committee, the original motivation, specifications and technical criteria take a backseat and poor choices may be made merely to appease the egos of several individual committee members. Such products and standards end up doing too many things or having parts that fit together poorly (because the entities who produced those parts were unaware of each other’s requirements for a good fit).

The term is also common in automotive parlance for poorly designed or unpopular cars.

A more succinct comment is from Andre Rabold at Liquid Media:

The camel/horse quote (no disparagement to camels meant, of course) perfectly captures the problem when too many people have input into a product.

Sadly these are all making presumptions.  They assume one or more of the following in the quote:

A camel is a horse designed by a committee.”

• …the committee has a brief – otherwise where did the horse issue come from.
• …that the brief is to design a horse.
• …that committees are always leaderless – otherwise this generalisation is flawed.
• …that a committee can never have shared vision.
• …that the brief was not about a specification to resolve a problem.
• …that a committee is always dysfunctional.
• …that the committee went against the brief owing to its dysfunction, or…
• …that the committee decided the brief was incomplete or poor.

Okay I hope you get the idea. There are lots of assumptions to get to the meanings defined in wikipedia and other such places – including the common current use of the proverb.

The source is unclear for this quote.  It also lacks context within the quote itself.  So you have no solid basis for interpretation within the quote itself.  People have attributed their own meaning based on their own context or on the context which has become associated with the quote over time.  Such user defined context has reinforced a perception of the quote which is not truly there in the quote itself.

Let me make this a bit clearer.  I’ll take a totally different perspective, derived from some of the assumptions noted above.  Hopefully you’ll feel you can step into this perspective too and see the quote through different eyes.

Let’s consider what the quote means when a group of merchants who’d travelled from Europe/Asia, or even better for you to imagine, the Mongol hordes as the reached the extent of their empire on the boundary of ancient Arabia.

On reaching the edge of Arabia the Mongols faced a problem.  Their familiarity with horses was great in terrain where horses thrived, where there was a ready supply of, in particular, water.  In the desert sands their horses would have suffered from dehydration and would not have performed as they desired in battle.

So [for the sake of this story] imagine Genghis Khan gathering a group of warriors and elders and saying:

For us to progress further we need something like a horse but better equipped for this environment.

Okay, I’m paraphrasing and zipping through a great story to illustrate a point in interpretation.  This ‘committee’ following extensive research, a few slugs of airag [fermented mare's milk drunk by the Mongols even today] and sleep, they realise that the camel is the equivalent.  It does the job, is much better suited to the environment [perhaps a bit more moody as a result], and solves their needs.

ie: A camel is a horse ‘designed’ by a committee who have been breifed to find the equivalent of a horse for desert conditions.

In this interpretation the role of the committee is shown in a good light.

ASIDE: I did find one interpretation that haphazardly touched on this – really through saying the ‘customer’ brief might not be good and the committee might come up with better [by accident or intent].

Now you might say my logic is flawed because that’s not what the saying means.  I’ll just refer you back to the proliferation of sites who say Sir Alec Issigonis was the source in 1958.  He wasn’t according to the cited evidence.  The evidence is that the quote existed prior to that.  Because you believe your interpretation doesn’t make it a good interpretation, just that your interpretation means something to you.

Ask yourself the question: how do you design a camel – an animal really well adapted to its environment without having a start point of something you know?

You’ll find that those who face a problem rarely describe the solution with a name, because if they had the solution there wouldn’t be a problem.  They usually say:

I want something like that [X], but not that [X]“.

They identify something similar to what they feel is the solution, though isn’t enough of a solution.

In my illustration work I regularly meet clients who can show me some stuff or describe something they’re looking for roughly.  They can’t produce it.  Then I produce my first estimate and they either say ‘Yes!’ or ‘Yes, but could you change the…a bit?’

If you’ve ever done any interior decorating or watched the endless home improvement shows on TV, people are often asked to create an ideas board of cuttings with photos, colours, fabrics etc that evoke the sort of decor they feel they want.  They rarely come up with the exact solution.

Mmm.

Okay, you may be harking back to the committee bit – stating that that is the focus.  Well, yes it could be.  Yet how the quote look if it were anything else?

A camel is a horse designed by…

• …a designer.
• …someone.
• …God(s).
• …a person.
• …Uncle Ahmed.
• …Martha Stewart.
• …a group brainstorming and inductive reasoning experience.
• …a meeting of elders.

The first few are not as catchy or meaningful [except perhaps the God(s) one for those of a religious leaning].  The proverb would probably not have occured and certainly not lasted.  Try it out on someone – use one of the first few here and there’ll probably ask you what on earth you mean.

Now, if the saying is an ancient proverb, the last statement is quite likely.  It is likely that people would pass their problems to a group of senior or acknowledged wise people.  It is easy to move to a proverb or saying: “to get around the dry desert environment a camel is a horse designed by a meeting of wise people.”

This makes much more positive sense, because it is evidenceable in terms of logical evolution.  Otherwise, if you wish to knock committees why isn’t the quote: “a fish is a horse designed by a committee.”  ie: exaggerate the daftness and pain of committees, since that’s the most commonly cited interpretation.  Or use a better saying that is explicit in meaning such as:

Too many cooks spoil the broth.”

The current common interpretation of our camel proverb is really saying: “a group of nominated people make a right bodge of any task you give them.”  Or perhaps: “a group of nominated people come up with stuff that isn’t expected…or desired.”

In each case the proverb is so much weaker than the ‘cooks/broth’ metaphor.

Why could this interpretation of committees being pretty useless exist in your minds?

Well, how many of you live in wonderful functional communities with a clear and respected group of elders or wise people who guide your community in the agreed direction and pass on their learning in an orderly way to those chosen to succeed them?

Good, right…in the modern, techno-industrial commercialised, internet world practically none.

What is critical here is your frame of reference for interpretation.  Let’s make this clear: if all you’ve ever experienced is bureaucracy, corruption, dysfunction of course a committee to you means failed outcomes, wasted time and money [in the UK unelected quangos - jobs for the boys], and  stupid systems and laws that don’t resolve the problem even though, on their own, they might have some internal logic.

ie: your interpretation of the quote is severely influenced by your existing experience of the world.  The meaning has been lost over time, and interpretation of a non-explicit saying has been translated over the years to better suit peoples’ experiences of the world.

As to the saying in its current interpretation, such use presents some subtle challenges or problems, it:

• Subtly disparages the camel [in the case of the definitions cited above there's nothing subtle about the disparagement]…
• …and thus places an interpretation on those who value the camel in their lives.
• Predisposes you to have a negative perception on all group decisions, unless, one might suggest, they agree with you.
• Predisposes you against authorities [absolutely valid when it's dysfunctional though not necessarily helpful to a solution or to those that are helpful].
• Doesn’t make the most of the disaffection for, or dysfunction of, committees – if that was important you’d use the cook/broth or pick an object far removed from a horse, or expand the saying to provide more salient context that highlights the problem as being fairly and squarely the committee.
• Doesn’t focus on the leadership and vision issues at all.  These are merely peoples’ interpretations.  A committee can have avery clear shared vision and leadership.  So this is a poor way to illustrate such problems.

There is also a certain irony, in that you are complicit in the problem by allowing yourself to be governed by committee after committee, and some of you even to be members of them whether at work, school or as parents or community members.  Why are you involved if ‘committees’ are implicitly bad?  Better you than someone else?  Or just a way to socialise or occupy life until death?

[Pause for thought].

Much better would be an interpretation of committees [when aligned, focused and well-structured] of being able to resolve social and organisational problems – then it reinforces te value of collaborative working – which is proven to add greater value.

Mmm, wow!

…and there goes another chunk of your life and mine…hopefully enlightened and resolved.

All the best, I’m off to trace down some airag and a group of wise people and making sure we have a patent agent to hand!

Finn

PS:  My take on it, even after years of use in the negative interpretation:  I sense that the saying is one that is positive, and that over time in an increasingly complex and dysfunctional society the interpretation has been twisted from the original because the original context is scarce, unrecognised or unexperienced.

Tags: Communication, Culture, Decision-making, Decisions, Design, Responsibility

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 14th, 2009 at 5:36 pm and is filed under Culture, Group behaviour. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.