CONCEPT
Committee Function vs. Process
The function (perspective diversity, challenge generation, accountability) remains essential; the process (meetings, reports, hierarchical review) is obsolete.
Committees serve a dual nature: the process (how they operate) and the function (what they achieve). The process—twelve-person meetings with two-hour slots, shared documents, hierarchical reviews—was never optimal for architectural decision-making but was the mechanism organizational structure made available. The function—generating perspective-diverse challenges to architectural assumptions, creating social accountability that makes self-examination obligatory, providing redundant error detection through multiple pairs of expert eyes—is irreplaceable. When three engineers from different specializations review a design, they see different things: attack surfaces, performance bottlenecks, user confusion. No single person sees all three because expertise is trained attention, attending to some things at the expense of others. The committee compensates by assembling different trained attentions.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The Challenger disaster illustrates both what committees provide and how they fail. Morton Thiokol engineers warned about O-ring performance in cold temperatures. The warning traveled through organizational channels, was received, discussed, and ultimately overridden by managers facing schedule pressure. Standard narrative: the committee failed, organizational structure corrupted the safety signal. But the narrative is incomplete—committees don't