Chapter 8
Grassroots, Not Top-Down
Experts, no matter how smart, only have limited amounts of information. They also, like all of us, have biases. It’s very rare that one person can know more than a large group of people, and almost never does that same person know more about a whole series of questions. The other problem in finding an expert is that it’s actually hard to identify true experts. In fact, if a group is smart enough to find a real expert, it’s more than smart enough not to need one.
—James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds
When I started my career as an instructional designer, I worked for a company that created high-quality training. Its dedicated graphic designers and artists developed slick participant guides, polished illustrations and animations, and PowerPoint slides that all coordinated perfectly. We spent a great deal of time tying pretty little ribbons around our training products. I personally wrote a 100-plus-page style guide to govern the look, feel, and every last detail for a large-scale eLearning program for the Navy. I was proud of it then—and still am!
When I started at Google, I spent some time adjusting to its culture of launch and iterate, which meant getting stuff out there and not worrying whether it was perfect. There, engineers flat-out distrusted pretty, polished things; perfection implied that someone had spent far too much time on it. So it was with this mind-set that I began to work with a team to develop a leadership program for early-career ...
