The unique feature of the OM competition is its emphasis on letting kids solve the chosen problem completely on their own. A coach is not allowed to make any decisions for the team, nor is he allowed to offer preferences or direct solutions to the problem. This makes coaching extremely frustrating at times (Three points in space defines a plane, so if introduce a fourth point that makes the system unstable. Can't you see it?). On the positive side, I looked at the whole process as a lab experiment about how humans (well ok a bunch of sixth graders - pretty close) collaborate to solve an open ended problem subject to time, resource, and monetary constraints.
As expected I observed plenty of things that could have been improved upon, but I also saw a few "best practices" that can be followed when grown ups like me and you are collaborating within a social network. I am posting some of my observations as a question to the readers. Unfortunately you don't win million dollars if you have all the right answers. On the bright side, if you fail you get to post a comment on this blog that says "My name is [insert your name here] and I am not smarter than a sixth grader!
Are you employing the right information aggregation mechanisms?
My team had to select five members out a total of seven to compete in the "sponteneous" section of the competition. I am not sure about the rationale behind forcing the team to select a sub-group in this manner but I am guessing they do it to test the collaboration spirit. For us it proved to be a daunting task given different combinations of personal preferences, desires, gender conflicts, etc. Ultimately the team decided on a voting model that involved each kid writing in five names for three possible variations of the sponteneous problem. After everyone cast their ballots, we simply selected the top five vote getters in each of the three possible variations of the problem. Amazingly, the team collectively seemed to have made a better choice than most of the team selections proposed by each team member individually.
Selecting the right aggregation model is crucial to the success of collaboration communities. In general the end goal of these models is creating a ranking of competing entities such as people, ideas, outcomes, best practices, etc. Spigit offers a number of aggregation mechanisms including:
- Polls - very simple mechanism for analyzing crowd preferences
- Prediction Markets - determine likelihood of future outcomes
- Idea Markets - Allows users to invest virtual money on ideas and in the process ranks ideas according to their potential
- Automated Graduations - Engages the crowd in idea filtering by aggregating information about buzz, voting, reviews, team memberships, etc.
Is your community composed of a diverse, independent-minded individuals?
Our OM team required different kinds of talents to be successful. Some team members were good at column designs, some were good at building, and some were good at writing and acting. It also turned out that the roles and contributions changed as we went along. Initially boys on the team were keen on building and the girls were engaged in writing/acting aspect of the problem. These roles and interests changed over a period of time as the kids discovered some hidden talents that they didn't know they had.
The evolution of the OM team is fairly representative of what we see in the 400+ communities that are supported on the Spigit platform. When you expose the ideation process to a large number of participants with diverse skill sets and experiences, it greatly speeds up the innovation process. If implemented correctly, individual biases tend to cancel out. Community members are quick to point out flaws based on their experience and jump in to greatly enhance the idea's potential. In some cases, we have seen bad ideas turned into very good possibilities when users suggest a different use case for the same basic concept. Great ideas are often suggested by users that happen to be interested in areas out of their "designated" expertise or users who are close to the customer.
Are you encouraging an open ended exploration of the solution/idea space?
When our team started tackeling the column design problem, I explained the physics behind column building process. I talked about truss designs, different types of forces, failure modes, etc. The kids did take some hints from that explanation, but very quickly started experimenting with different design possibilities. It wasn't quite the linear process one adopts in solving text book problems. They created 50+ column models that included different cross-sections, truss patterns, laminations, etc. The team then tested more promising ones and ultimately selected a design that was best in terms of the supported weight and stability.
This exploration strategy reminded me very much of the way bees decide on the best source of nector as described in James Surawieki's "The Wisdom of Crowds" book. The most exciting thing about social innovation is how the crowd can collectively break the mold and come up with ground breaking ideas and solutions via taking random walks through the solution space. Traditional R&D centric approach tends to perform poorly in this area. Tools like spigit offer communication efficiencies that scale very well and enable this approach. In conjuction it is important to encourage open ended thinking. Radical ideas may be adversely reviewed by the peer network, but sponsors should be careful not shutting down those ideas before the owner has a chance to prove the critiques wrong.
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