The (Idea) Room Where it Happens
It’s easy to make decisions when everyone is present. But if somebody is missing from a conversation, it’s hard to come to the best conclusion.
Everyone knows that Aaron Burr killed Alexander Hamilton because he wasn’t in the “room where it happened, the room where it happened, the room where it happened.” (I apologize if you don’t understand sarcasm and Hamilton: An American Musical references.)
It’s relatively easy to brainstorm, communicate, compromise, and solve problems when all parties are physically together. Technology has made this all easier, with Skype, Facetime, and conference calls all readily available. That being said, if even one person in a given scenario is missing from the room, the conference call, or even the Slack message, their ideas and input vanish. Furthermore, upon returning to the conversation, someone who’s been gone is usually completely lost. They are either given an overload of information (notes, a slack conversation, etc) or not enough (the final decision or outcome). Still, waiting for everyone to get into the room- whether that room is at work, between friends, or even more importantly, within a huge organization or constituency- is massively inefficient. When people get together, ideas abound, and solutions are possible. But not everyone can be there, and we shouldn’t keep ignoring those who can’t show up.
Our team realized this nuance at Hubweek, during the Health and Wellness Design Challenge. Agora’s online idea rooms weren’t used much during the day, because the challenge consisted of small teams who spent the day physically in the same room. But at the end of the day, when we submitted the ideas generated throughout the day into the app, we were able to get a picture of what happened that day. Members of our team who weren’t involved in the challenge could see the most important aspects of the day. At the end of the week, we could see all of the ideas from the week, and the directors of the event- who weren’t physically there the entire time- were delighted to see the best ideas quickly and efficiently.
Given the societal focus on brainstorming and including people in conversations, it’s strange that innovators haven’t come up with a way to include remote participants who aren’t there in real time. Anyone who wants to contribute to a decision or conversation should be able to. Aaron Burr would have been less bitter if he’d at least seen the compromise over the capital of the United States taking place (at least Lin Manuel Miranda has led us to believe so).
If you want to make an idea room of your own, go to ideas.theagora.co.
Don’t throw away your shot (ok I’m done I promise).
