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How Do Committees Invent?

Melvin Conway · c. 1968

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Melvin Conway did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

  1. Therefore, there is no such thing as a design group which is both organized and unbiased.
  2. It is an article of faith among experienced, system designers that given any system design, someone someday will find a better one to do the same job.
  3. To the extent that an organization is not completely flexible in its communication structure, that organization will stamp out an image of itself in every design it produces.
  4. The larger an organization is, the less flexibility it has and the more pronounced is the phenomenon.
  5. From experience we know that the two men, if they are well chosen and survive the experience, will give us a better system. Assumptions which may be adequate for peeling potatoes and erecting brick walls fail for designing systems.
  6. As long as the manager's prestige and power are tied to the size of his budget, he will be motivated to expand his organization.
  7. Probably the greatest single common factor behind many poorly designed systems now in existence has been the availability of a design organization in need of work.
  8. This is one reason why military-style organizations design systems which look like their organization charts.
  9. The basic thesis of this article is that organizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.
  10. Primarily, we have found a criterion for the structuring of design organizations: a design effort should be organized according to the need for communication.
  11. Because the design which occurs first is almost never the best possible, the prevailing system concept may need to change. Therefore, flexibility of organization is important to effective design.
  12. There is need for a philosophy of system design management which is not based on the assumption that adding manpower simply adds to productivity.

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