Question: What is the best way to find ten large red balloons deployed at secret locations throughout the United States?
“This is not an easy question,” Daniel Coyle writes in The Culture Code.
“It was dreamed up by scientists from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a division of the U.S. Department of Defense tasked with helping America’s military prepare for future technological challenges.”
DARPA announced the Red Balloon Challenge on October 29th, 2009. It was designed to resemble real-life predicaments like terrorism and disease control. They announced a $40,000 prize to the first group to accurately find all ten balloons.
“The immensity of the task—ten balloons in 3.1 million square miles—led some to wonder if DARPA had gone too far,” Daniel notes. “A senior analyst for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency declared it ‘impossible.'”
Hundreds of groups signed up, including some of America’s smartest people, including social media entrepreneurs, tech companies, research universities, and teams of hackers.
“The vast majority took a logical approach to the problem,” Daniel writes. “They built tools to attack it. They constructed search engines to analyze satellite photography technology, tapped into existing social and business networks, launched publicity campaigns, built open-source intelligence software, and nurtured communities of searchers on social media.”
Riley Crane heard about the challenge four days before launch. He and his colleagues at the MIT Media Lab didn’t have time to assemble a large team or create technology.
Instead, they put up a web page.
“When you sign up to join the MIT Red Balloon Challenge Team, you’ll be provided with a personalized invitation link, like http://balloon.mit.edu/yournamehere.
Have all your friends sign up using your personalized invitation. If anyone you invite, or anyone they invite, or anyone they invite (…and so on) wins money, so will you!
“We’re giving $2000 per balloon to the first person to send us the correct coordinates, but that’s not all–we’re also giving $1000 to the person who invites them. Then we’re giving $500 [to] whoever invited the inviter, and $250 to whoever invited then, and so on… (see how it works).”
That was it.
“Compared to the sophisticated tools and technology deployed by other groups, the MIT team’s approach was laughably primitive,” Daniel notes. “They had no organizational structure or strategy or software, not even a map of the United States to help locate the balloons.”
The site went live on the morning of December 3rd. Two days before the balloon launch.
For a few hours, nothing.
“Then, at 3:42 P.M. on December 3rd, people began to join,” Daniel notes. “Connections first bloomed out of Boston, then exploded, radiating to Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Denver, Texas, and far beyond, including Europe.
“Viewed in time lapse, the spread of connections resembled the spontaneous assembly of a gigantic nervous system, with hundreds of new people joining the effort with each passing hour.”
DARPA launched the balloons on December 5th at 10:00 A.M. ET from ten secret locations across the U.S.
“The organizers settled in for a long wait,” Daniel states. “They estimated it would take up to a week for a team to accurately locate all ten balloons.”
Less than nine hours later, it was all over.
“The MIT team had found all ten balloons and had done so with the help of 4,665 people,” Daniel writes. “Their primitive, last-minute, message -in-a-bottle method had defeated better-equipped attempts.”
2: What was it about the MIT team’s approach that created this wave of motivation, teamwork, and cooperation?
Daniel believes it was the MIT team’s willingness to show “its own vulnerability.”
They did not claim to have created the perfect plan or solution. They did not pretend to have all the answers.
They simply “provided people with the opportunity to create networks of vulnerability by reaching out to their friends, then asking them to reach out to their friends,” he notes.
The Red Balloon Challenge wasn’t “a technology contest,” he writes. “It was, like all endeavors that seek cooperation, a vulnerability-sharing contest.”
Instinctually, we believe vulnerability is a condition to be hidden.
“But science shows that when it comes to creating cooperation, vulnerability is not a risk but a psychological requirement”, Daniel notes.
“What are groups really for?” Harvard researcher Dr. Jeff Polzer asks. “The idea is that we can combine our strengths and use our skills in a complementary way. Being vulnerable gets the static out of the way and lets us do the job together, without worrying or hesitation. It lets us work as one unit.”
3: Daniel spent four years studying the world’s most successful groups.
“After talking to Dr. Polzer and other scientists who study trust, I began to see vulnerability loops in other places I visited.
“Sometimes, they were small, quick exchanges. A pro baseball coach began a season-opening speech to his players by saying, ‘I was so nervous about talking to you today,’ and the players responded by smiling sympathetically—they were nervous too.
“Sometimes these loops took the form of physical objects, like the Failure Wall that Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corporation built, a whiteboard where people could share moments where they’d fallen short.
“Sometimes they were habits of seemingly invulnerable leaders, such as Apple founder Steve Jobs’s penchant for beginning conversations with the phrase, ‘Here’s a dopey idea.’ (‘And sometimes they were,’ recalls Jonathan Ive, Apple’s senior vice president of design, in his memorial to Jobs. ‘Really dopey. Sometimes they were truly dreadful.'”).
One of Daniel’s big takeaways from all his research is that there is a pattern or similarity to all of these different circumstances.
Which is “an acknowledgment of limits, a keen awareness of the group nature of the endeavor,” he notes. “The signal being sent was the same: You have a role here. I need you.”
“That’s why good teams tend to do a lot of extreme stuff together,” says Professor DeSteno. “A constant stream of vulnerability gives them a much richer, more reliable estimate on what their trustworthiness is, and brings them closer, so they can take still more risks. It builds on itself.”
Being vulnerable, something we often take great pains to avoid, is “the pathway through which trusting cooperation is built,” Daniel writes.
Vulnerability is how great teams are built.
Cooperation does not magically appear. “It is a group muscle that is built according to a specific pattern of repeated interaction, and that pattern is always the same,” Daniel observes: “A circle of people engaged in the risky, occasionally painful, ultimately rewarding process of being vulnerable together.”
More tomorrow.
___________________
Reflection: Think about a high-trust relationship in my life. Am I willing to be vulnerable, to be my authentic self, with that person?
Action: Run a small experiment. Lead with vulnerability. Note what happens.
What did you think of this post?
