Pixar and Zootopia: Teamwork and Group Development

Last week we talked about Colvin's "What Really Makes a Team Work". I particularly enjoyed the example about Steve Job and how he designed the Pixar headquarters around a central atrium in order to optimize teamwork. The design forced employees to always pass each other when heading to different offices, and it encouraged interaction outside of the office. A large part of what makes a team work is how effectively that team communicates both in and out of the office. Here is an image of what the Pixar headquarters look like:

Click here for an additional article that expands more on how the central atrium encourages unplanned collaboration. My favorite story of unplanned collaboration is when the Andrew Stanton, John Lasseter, Pete Docter and joe Ranft met up at Hidden City Cafe and came up with the ideas that later became A Bug's Life, Monster's Inc., Finding Nemo and Wall-E. If they had not met, then we wouldn't have the movies we all know and love today!

Hidden City Café

We also talked about Tuckman's "5 Stages of Group Development" and looked at the Prezi that used Remember the Titans to illustrate those stages. I liked this project so much, that I decided to do my own illustration of the 5 stages of Group Development using one of my favorite movies, Zootopia (Warning: Spoilers ahead!).

Zootopia is about a bunny named Judy who dreams of becoming a cop in the big city named Zootopia, and she teams up with a fox named Nick in order to solve a case. Animals in the movie are separated between predators and prey, which is the underlying theme of the movie. Nick is a predator, and Judy is prey.

**Note: If video doesn't play, click on link that says "Watch this video on youtube".

Step 1: Forming

Forming is the stage where team members first come together to accomplish a still undetermined goal. The first instance of Judy and Nick working as a team is when she recruits his help for solving a missing mammals case. Judy blackmails Nick into helping her, and so he begrudgingly agrees to help her find clues for the case.

Step 2: Storming

This is usually the stage where conflict occurs because roles are still being established. Nick makes a couple of attempts to sabotage Judy's investigation because he does not want to be working as a cop. He does a number of things such as taking her to a Naturalist club and to the DMV, which takes up a lot of time (Judy must solve the case in 48 hours).

Step 3: Norming

This stage is when the roles are established and a common goal is achieved; team members start to contribute to meet that end game. The first instance of Nick starting to help Judy out with her investigation is after she is almost fired from the ZPD. He saves her job and then comes up with an idea that gets them closer to solving the case.

Step 4: Performing

The performing stage involves the team working effectively. All group members want to achieve their goal, they take care of each other and they solve disagreements in a positive way. Judy and Nick work as an effective team when they find the missing mammals, and also when they solve the bigger mystery close to the end.

Step 5: Adjourning

The adjourning stage involves the team members accomplishing their goals and moving on to other tasks. This stage is important for recognizing success and leaving the door open for future collaboration. The movie ends with Nick officially joining the ZPD and becoming Judy's work partner.

Well, that concludes my blog for this week, I hope you all enjoyed!

Jude Paw

Collaboration, Improvisation and Collective Intelligence

We hit the ground running in this class and have learned a lot so far! We started out with three images and what each one represents. 

This is an image that represents social networking. The red dot represents an individual, and the rest of the dots represent all the people who are connected to that individual, and people those people are connected to as well.

This image represents the Democratic and Republican tweets about Ferguson. For the most part, each party remained in their own domain, but occasionally there were crossed paths where tweeters went back and forth on this political issue.

This final image represents online communities. Many communities tend to overlap with each other.

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After the first day, we had our three readings, the first of which was titled "What is Collaboration Anyway?" (which was written by a lot of people). One of the more interesting aspects about this reading was differentiating between the different types of collaboration that exist (weak, strong and intense). 

Weak collaboration is when people do their own thing, and somehow all their works end up being put together into one larger project/picture. For example, if you type in the phrase "Corgi Puppies for sale" into a google search engine, you get something back that looks like this:

Each link leads to a potential breeder or adoption agency who have nothing to do with each other, and yet they are all put together into one convenient location!

Then we have strong collaboration, which is open peer to peer sharing, like movies, games and music. Click here for an example of what strong collaboration looks like! The great thing about this type of collaboration is that the public joins forces to provide easily accessible media on a single platform.

Lastly, there is intense collaboration (when people intentionally get together to create something). The most popular example of intense collaboration is Wikipedia. Anyone can contribute their knowledge to this site, and experts working for Wikipedia are hanging around to fact check all the new material. 

Hopefully now we have more of an idea of what collaboration really is...!

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Our second reading this past week was Tina Fey's "Rules of Improvisation", which was hilarious (I mean, who doesn't love Tina Fey?) She talked about the rules of improvisation, which essentially boil down to making agreements, contributions, statements and opportunities. It is important to agree with your team on a project before moving forward with something they have no idea about, and it is also crucial for each member to contribute to said project. Contributions should not just be questions, but also statements that keep the conversation rolling. And of course, it should be understood that incidents should not be viewed as mistakes, but as opportunities to learn lessons. Now, here is an image of the police hamster Tina Fey mentioned in her article.

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The last thing I would like to talk about is our third reading from this week, "Collective Intelligence" by Pierre Lévy. More specifically, I wanted to focus on one specific quote that I liked very much, which was "I believe that imagination, and especially collective imagination, produces reality". I love this quote because it is absolutely true; nothing in this world would exist if someone hadn't thought of it first. Where would we be today if Netflix had never been invented?? Probably out on the streets doing activities, and who wants to do that? But did you ever stop and think, Netflix just started out as an idea, a figment of someones imagination. Well it did! One day Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph were sitting around and Hastings said, "Hey Marc, imagine if there was a website that allowed people to rent or watch movies and tv shows right from their PC's!" and Randolph answered, "Yeah man, that sounds great!" And thus Netflix was born**. It started in their imagination, but it blossomed into something we all know and love today.

**Disclaimer: This story is not an accurate representation of what really happened.

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So, to end this weeks blog I would just like to invite you all to collaborate *wink* and share what you think about these topics! Thanks for tuning in, and enjoy this cute picture!