Breaking a consensus?
Balancing divergent interests is one of the key things to do in a project: between business people defending the functional requirements and technologists pushing for non-functional, between the project manager guarding his time and budget constrains and the project member wanting to figure out the details of a problem, etc…
Lacking a brilliant visionary that can nail the silver bullet (the number of Steve Jobs in this world equals “limited - 1” these days), most project teams settle around a consensus. This decision approach does not always lead to an optimal solution (referring to the Belgian situation would be too easy), but allows building a shared discourse that is broadly supported and accepted (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_decision-making).
Once such a consensus is found, introducing a divergent idea (e.g. to accommodate new insights or other requirements) is hard. Lacking the in depth elaboration, the required maturity and the broad understanding of the consensus idea, it is rather easy to shatter it to pieces and dispose of it - no matter if it may have a potential or not. Furthermore, most projects do not have the luxury to return on decisions taken or bet on several horses. Unfortunately, it may take a long time to validate the assumptions behind any large decision and assess the impact (market fit, technical feasibility, …), so doing an a posteriori evaluation of the original decisions is an exercise rarely doable.
My suggestion: make sure that you are part of the initial consensus building team. Breaking a consensus later on may seem a worthy cause, but chances for success are small & will in any case require lots of effort. And for the shortcomings of the/any consensus… I guess creativity will bring the right answers :)
Feel free to share your own experiences!
