Alison Wong's Amazing Graphic Novel on Group Dynamics

Alison Wong was one of the fantastic students in a d.school class that Diego Rodriguez and I taught earlier in the year on Creating Infectious Action.  One of the things that Alison's group did in the class (the group also included Josh Snyder, Brook Blumenstein, and Tim Wright) was to design and inspired website for spreading Firefox among Christian users called Faith browser, which wowed the folks from Mozilla who were involved in the class (they did this in two weeks!).  It  was also one of the student sites featured in an Information Week article on The Sacred and Profane Sides of Firefox. Alison has an undergraduate engineering degree from MIT and a masters in Product Design from Stanford. And she now works at IDEO.

I was thinking of Alison because all d.school classes are taught by teams of two or more instructors from different background (the class I am co-teaching this term has a teaching team of at least six people, a mix of product designers, people experienced as senior executives, and organizational theorists -- and several people  like  Liz Gerber who fit into multiple categories) and we construct teams by mixing master's students from around the campus, including people from product design, management science, computer science, and the business school. We assign them tough problems with short deadlines, while they struggle to coordinate their schedules, do part-time jobs, take other classes, interview for jobs, and have a social and/or family life.  Both teaching teams and students struggle with the challenges of group work.  And one of our main goals at the d.school is to produce people who are creative collaborators. Yet little prepares the students at places like Stanford and MIT to work in groups, even though they will likely need to do so for the rest of their lives.  Plus creative work in companies happens primarily in teams.  Unfortunately, the students who get into fancy schools like MIT and Stanford and are evaluated both before and after they arrive largely on their individual performance: BUT then life plays a cruel trick on them, forcing them to work in groups, to deal with the messiness and sometimes craziness of human groups -- and their individual brilliance is no longer enough and they have all those damn people, with different needs, opinions, priorities, and skills, and different schedules too, to deal with.

When Alison was a senior at MIT, she decided to do a graphic novel that showed one group's struggle -- and ultimate -- success dealing with group dynamics through the product design process. As she wrote me:

"It stemmed from my senior year at MIT where I realized that people didn’t know how to work in groups.  There were many books and “textbook” ways on the design process but nowhere did we have a resource that helped students realize that the people were just as important as the process.  I’ve always had an interest in organizational behavior and thought the comic medium was one of the better mediums to convey it in!"

I recommend this novel to any student that is working on a team project or student group -- or in fact any person or group in any organization -- as it shows the struggles that just about every human group faces --- plus the group's ultimate success also shows some of the ways that groups can overcome such obstacles.   I also Alison's the novel because it reminds me that, even in the most successful groups, group life is challenging and often upsetting -- it is never (at least in any group I have ever known or been part of) this beautiful thing that unfolds in a seamless and relentlessly happy way -- there are always hassles in the best of groups.

Alison has posted The Product Design Process on a website, where you can go and read it or download it.  I also think that this graphic novel is something that ought to sold as a real bound book ins tores and on Amazon and all that -- and I am checking around to see if I can convince someone in the publishing business that this is the case.

 

Comments

[James Drogan]

My four sections of grad courses and a fifth course in which I assist all feature team projects. I think Alison's material is going to help us get across some aspects of teamwork that we've been struggling with.

Thanks.

Jim

[Alison Wong]

Thank you Lilly, I will do that!
And please, I welcome any feedback on the book. If you use it in an educational setting, I'd love to know how helpful it is to students. (Or if you have any suggestions for further distribution)

[Lilly Evans]

I am delighted to see Alison's 'graphic novel' on group dynamics. Do tell her to speak to Pegasus Communications, http://www.pegasuscom.com/ (created by a former MIT student) who have experience in both publishing and distributing 'cartoon books' for business community.

Incidentally, while at BP, I created "The Tale of Windfall Abbey", a graphic novel as you call it, to introduce busy executives to principles of systems thinking (similarly thin. It became classroom material at London Business School on Systems Dynamics course (among others).