John Seely Brown: Accelerating the Pace of Collaborative Learning

So there’s an interesting kind of question on the table, especially aimed at the C-suite: how am I to reaccelerate collaboration and learning, especially collaborative learning, in the workplace?

And the curious thing is that I get asked this as much in Asia, where I spend a good share of my life, as I do in the United States. I usually tell them a story that they find incredible because it appears to have nothing to do with a C-suite, and yet it has everything to do with the C-suite.

Maui has never had in its history any junior or world-class champion surfers. The world-class surfers that come from Hawaii always come from the North Shore in Oahu, never Maui. And then, an amazing singularity occurred. There were five kids, age 16 at the time, that now, one by one, all five—basically one year apart—from Maui became all world champions.

I asked myself how could this have happened. Never before in the history of Maui had this occurred, and then out of the blue, this happened. It’s a beautiful story.

The beautiful story started with Dusty when he was 16, and his dad said, “Dusty, what do you want to become?” Dusty looked at his dad incredulously and said, “What do you mean, Dad? I’m going to become a professional surfer.” His dad, being responsible, replied, “Dusty, that’s not a career; that’s a hobby.”

Dusty said, “No, it’s not; it’s going to be my career. I’m going to pull my four best buddies in, and the five of us are going to become this amazing learning community.” You may even call it a community of practice; that’s the term that Dusty would have used, but I used it.

What these kids did is they first said, “You know, we’re going to go out and we’re going to get these beautiful videos of all the past world-class surfers, and we’re going to study these videos step-by-step, frame by frame. And then what we’re going to do is, every time we see a new move, we’re going to dash down the hill and try it out.”

Now here’s where things started to get interesting. They were always, by the way, competing with each other and fiercely collaborating with each other. They’d run down the hill with their own video cameras and video each other trying out a particular move on a specific wave. And then they would dash back up the hill to the living room and start to pore over the videos they took of each other, collaboratively deconstructing each move that each of them had made.

Then they dashed down the hill again and tried it out again. They used some very interesting video tools to be able to reflect as a group on each other because often they would see each other do things that the individual couldn’t see in himself. That started getting them going to become really, really good.

They began going to the hot spots around the world because they were good enough to compete and have these rich conversations about looking at each other, working as a collaborative group, but also analyzing the moves that their competitors were making. Again, they were collaboratively constructing a story for what their competition was doing, even though they were competing with each other.

They said, “You know, we’ve got to have new ideas. Let’s look at adjacencies.” Now this is an a-ha for the corporate world. They said, “Let’s look at how people are doing other things closely aligned to us that we may be able to learn from,” such as windsurfing, snowboarding, skiing, mountain biking, and they would even look in extreme cases, motocrossing.

In fact, the last time I checked in with Dusty, he had just gotten another world championship from an idea called The Superman Move on a motorcycle, which is totally unbelievable unless you follow motocrossing. But it’s where you actually let the bike get out ahead of you, you hold on to the back, and you fly behind the back of the bike. This is not something for amateurs to try.

He repurposed this move, which is already pathological in the motorcycle realm, into the surfboard realm and basically won the event with the next move.