If you retrieve elements by the name only, and the name is unique, do not use Array. Use Object instead. See:
http://www.quirksmode.org/js/associative.html

You may find my user forums useful where I review all lectures from new Teaching Company courses:

http://teachingcompany.12.forumer.com

Feel free to read,reply, or post your thoughts,

enjoy,

Doug van Orsow
forum administrator

Some great pics!

If you have a spare 5 minutes, I’d appreciate it if you could add one the images to my new blog - http://www.viewfromoffice.com

Thanks,

Chris

I don’t disagree with what you’re saying. I see this process more as a way of:

a) fostering a creative, if not innovative environment
b) providing an outlet for employees to explore different roles, and acquire more confidence
c) identifying the leaders and visionaries among us

I think what you’re perceiving as failure is that the process has been unintentionally cut off at its knees, and therefore, hasn’t really fulfilled any of the above promises.

I completely agree with you about the need for strong visionaries, and coherent visions. I think this process could have, and should have, produced those visions, and identified at least a couple of visionaries in our team. In some ways, I think it’s because it came at a bad time, and it tried to do too much in too short of a time. For example, I know you have some outstanding visions, but with everything else going on and all of your other responsibilities, you didn’t have enough time and energy to contribute to the process. Others were in the same boat. I think that’s being corrected, although maybe too much has been cut in the process.

In the generic case, what kind of team structure do you think is best at both producing innovations and meeting/exceeding business requirements? It needs to be a team that is good at retaining intelligent, creative people–so it has to involve them in an authentic way, or they’ll go somewhere else. It also needs to be a team that gets its foundation shaken every now and then, so new ideas must have a way of getting not only heard, but demonstrated. And it needs to be a team that works well together, so competition between coworkers can’t be the overriding force.

In the end I feel the experiment failed because it was difficult to confront the reality of working in a business where there are scarce time and people resources. I think there was a passionate team, but I don’t think it was nearly large enough to get done what was asked of it and the time frame was way to short.

I believe that in situations like this you see teams with strong visionary leaders rise to the top. With this setup, it’s easier to maintain a cohesive vision and decisions can be made much more quickly. These people are often glorified in both the business and military worlds. The difficult question is what to do when you don’t have someone that fills that role. In the military, the position is assigned to someone and they’re asked to step up, this can often be a painful jump. Maybe that’s the right thing to do, maybe not.

I definitely agree that getting everyone’s buyin and listening to everyone’s opinion is important. A diverse set of ideas is a very good thing to have, even if they’re not realistic ideas. This can work very similarly to mutation, most the time they’re a waste but every so often they’ll give you a leap forward. This is not mutually exclusive with having a strong leader. I just feel that intentially not having a leader is dangerous, which is what the experiment seemed designed to do. I know I feel very passionately about certain ideas that are in direct conflict with ideas that others feel very passionately about, we have to have a way to resolve this or we just flounder.

There is another possible explanation why the post-experiment list was 99% the same as the pre-experiment list: upper management wasn’t really as receptive to the anarchy as they thought, and therefore, did not design a process that could produce effective results.

In our particular case, consider what we were asked to provide for each proposal at the beginning of the experiment: specific feature proposals, competitive analysis, estimates of resources required, educated estimates of impact, measures of success, prototypes if possible, and so on. All the things that you need to make an informed decision, and foster an innovative environment. (All the things we learned in our product development training.)

By the end of the process, those requirements were all widdled away to (basically) a one-line summary, and rather than having a meeting where everybody (or every group leader) could ask questions, make trade-offs, send a proposal back to the team for further refinement/consideration in the face of alternate proposals, and so on, we got a meeting where team leaders read their one-line summaries. No questions. No hard discussion. No follow-ups with the teams.

Under these circumstances, how can we blame our leadership team for not giving thorough consideration to new, bold ideas? If I’d been given that list, I probably would have selected the items I’d already thought about too. (Even the good ideas from other teams didn’t impress me during the initial proposal presentations, because they were not well developed.)

In subsequent experiments of this nature, we need to ensure that product/tech teams are given the responsibility for producing real proposals, and the ability to engage the leadership team in assessing tradeoffs.

In spite of this, I think this experiment was mostly a success. Did it produce the overarching results we’d hoped for? No, but it was an excellent start. It’s only a failure if we give up now, or do the same thing again with no tweaks to the process.