I don’t think “stacking” is a good analogy. I see this process as searching through some space of the possible solutions and non-solutions to the problem. Having one vision is like quickly searching from one starting point and one direction. This does not guarantee that the solution will be found more quickly as we can’t be sure progress won’t be stuck in some local optimum that does not solve the problem, no matter how many people work on that. It may go to a dead end with no sensible outcome.
For a such complex problem, this seems pretty probable as the space of problem solutions is likely also complex and it is unlikely that any given person or group has a good guess on how to find the solution.
On the other hand, starting from many points and directions will make each team/person progress slower but more of the volume of the problem space will be probed initially. Possibly some teams will sooner reach the conclusion that their vision won’t work or is too slow to progress and move to join more promising visions.
I think this is more likely to converge on something promising in a situation when it is hard to agree on which vision is the most sensible to investigate.
I don’t think “stacking” is a good analogy. I see this process as searching through some space of the possible solutions and non-solutions to the problem. Having one vision is like quickly searching from one starting point and one direction. This does not guarantee that the solution will be found more quickly as we can’t be sure progress won’t be stuck in some local optimum that does not solve the problem, no matter how many people work on that. It may go to a dead end with no sensible outcome.
For a such complex problem, this seems pretty probable as the space of problem solutions is likely also complex and it is unlikely that any given person or group has a good guess on how to find the solution.
On the other hand, starting from many points and directions will make each team/person progress slower but more of the volume of the problem space will be probed initially. Possibly some teams will sooner reach the conclusion that their vision won’t work or is too slow to progress and move to join more promising visions.
I think this is more likely to converge on something promising in a situation when it is hard to agree on which vision is the most sensible to investigate.