Build something cool in 24 hours

Kathy Sierra writes:

"The notion is this: stick people in a house for 48 hours, with a goal to have something created at the end. Depending on the nature of the goal, participants may be collaborating (like building a game together) or working alone (musicians composing, writers writing, etc.). The key is the process--a process that forces you to supress the 'inner judges' that stifle creativity, and gives you not just permission but an order to create as much as possible, as fast as possible... even if what you end up with is 97% crap.

The point is to learn something valuable from the experience... something you'd likely never get to in your day job, even when--as it is for Squirrel and his game developer cohorts -- what you do in the jam is what you do in your day job. In other words, by working under the ad-hoc/jam constraints, you're able to 'improve your craft' and discover things about yourself and the work that you might never find in your traditional work environment. It takes the idea of rapid iterations to a completely different (dramatically compressed) time scale. What could take weeks, months, or years to evolve suddenly happens in hours. And the work never leaves your personal brain RAM! No more cost of switching contexts as you go from personal life to meetings to actual work to commuting to whatever... this is 100% being in the zone, where each hour spent in one of these jams is worth perhaps 10 or more hours at work in your usual environment.

The idea can be mapped to virtually anything for which you want to encourage maximum creativity, innovation, and most importantly... getting something done. While it may be a Big Deal to start your own Foo/Bar-style self-organizing conference, the total immersion 'ad-lib jam' model is something we can all start in our home town, wherever that may be. All you need is a handful of participants (maybe 4-8), some delivery/take-out menus for chinese food and pizza (revise to reflect what goes for 'fast delivered food' in your culture), maybe a few pillows and blankets, a whiteboard and some markers, and whatever other tools of the trade your participants need to make things.

(Sidebar: out of the 15 or so people at Squirrel's informal session, the most engaged participant was Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.)"

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I think I need more than "a whiteboard", but that's just me. YMMV. . .

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