Here is a quick time-series video I put together following the CNGL Fall Scientific Meeting last week. Please excuse my flair for the dramatic and poor production value; I cobbled it together quickly over the weekend.

The overall idea was to shrink the psychological distance between upper management and our PhDs & Post-docs working on the ground; all while coming up with a few great ideas to make CNGL a better place to work. To do this we setup four large posters with the following topics which were primed with a few seed ideas.

• We Need…
• We Want…
• We Think…
• Any Other Thoughts…

At the beginning of the first day the Director of CNGL explained the importance of what we were doing and asked everyone to share ideas over the next two days, even if they were small and trivial.  What emerged were organisational themes around infrastructure, community and collaboration but more importantly an esprit de corps that spanned our four academic universities and nine industrial partners. The posters became a focal point for discussions and new interactions, even if it was just over the silliest of ideas: “We want fish & chips for lunch!”

Emergence, especially in organisations, can be a scary thing because normally you never know what the outcome will look like. The typical solution calls for over-engineering the experience so that responses are funneled into nice convenient bins, everything outside of which is ignored.  Unfortunately this strategy completely wastes the power of social emergence.  The best solutions are designed to be simple (grab a post-it & write), collaborative, and quick (<10 seconds), which I think is what we were able to achieve.

The skeptics will say that this was just a silly exercise that will amount to nothing…but multiple bits of practical feedback during, shortly thereafter and several days out thoroughly refute that notion. The only regret is that we are only able to do this type of activity in a campaign-like manner once or twice per year when all 100+ members of the research group come together for annual meetings.

We are working on a few ideas that extend the campaign-based model of idea generation and are looking forward to using CNGL as a testbed to gauge their effectiveness.  If anyone else out there is interested in/using/knows of tools for managing organisational emergence give me a shout (stevegotz at gmail.com) I would love to have a chat.