A mobile phone project was six weeks away from completion. Then suddenly there was a new requirment – for another language option to be added to the menu. The language requested was Hebrew, the department doing the requesting, Marketing, who else? 

Of course, the project manager wanted nothing to do with it. After all, with the launch date so close, such a change could only delay the project. But, Marketing had a cast iron case. The leading network operator in Israel had promised to make the product a standard, but obviously only under condition that the menus includ their own language. 

The potential gains were huge. At this point, one development engineer was of the opinion that other languages such as Arabic should be includd, since both Hebrew and Arabic share a common characteristic, which is that they read from right to left instead of from left to right. 

A linguistics expert took this a step further: a surprising number of the world’s languages also go from right to left; why stop at Hebrew and Arabic? To be short: suddenly, no two people in the team shared the same opinion. Yesterday, they had been a team sharing the same views on the project priorities. Today, there was no longer a team. Because of the change proposal, consensus had exploded. 

A workshop was convened. At the end of the workshop, the team was back in shape, the priorities concurred. The phone would be launched on time, and the menu would includ Hebrew. However, several low priorities, like the play station, had been dropped from the bottom of the menu, to be includd probably in the next version of the mobile phone.