Kicking off Tech & Innovation in Gov — Spring 2020
Last week was the first class of my Harvard field course, Tech & Innovation in Government — it was awesome to welcome the students and government partners to the class!
With just the students at present first, we spent time getting to know each other, during a simple ice-breaker (finding two non-school things in common):
I introduced the class and spent some time providing some context to the students about the challenging and fun semester ahead. See the week 1 slide presentation.
One of the readings I assign to the class is a New York Times Magazine article about how to “build the perfect team.” It’s a story of Google’s Project Aristotle, an internal study about team effectiveness and productivity. The Google researchers working on this project pored over external academic studies and crunched internal data from teams working across the company.
What the Google team learned — perhaps unsurprising to experts that study team dynamics — is that the emotional side of teams matter.
Check out my blog post on teamwork last year:
After a quick break, the government clients — from the U.S. Air Force, VA, Health and Human Services, Social Security Administration, and the City of Boston — joined us and gave short introductory presentations.
The students and client teams then did a design exercise called the Marshmallow Challenge — learning the value of iteration the hard way!
Finally, and importantly, the student teams spent time with their clients:
Looking forward to the next class!
