Collaboration Values

I’m going to start by stating that while there are exceptions, by and large, academia is a fairly broken place where people learn that failure is not an option, and being anything other than the very best is failure. (Where “best” means a PhD and tenure at a top research university). Many of us were indoctrinated from an early age: You have to get top grades in high school to get into a top college, where now you have to get the top grades and be a top (student) researcher) to get into a top graduate school, where again you have to be the best so you can get a post doc… so…

This indoctrination is flawed in so many different ways, all of which have been enumerated in lots of different blogs, and I’m not going to add a new “think piece” on these issues to the internet.

What I’d like to do is instead offer a different set of values.

At CosmoQuest, our founding principal is simple: It takes a village to raise a child, and it takes a global community to raise our understanding of the universe. At CosmoQuest, we are citizen scientists, professional scientists, educators, and programmers. We each provide different skills & resources to this community. Together, we strive to explore our Universe and contribute to science.

Put another way, we recognize that everyone in our team has unique skills and each person has value. By working together, we can (and do) accomplish great things.

This isn’t manned space flight. Failure is an option. We dare mighty things, and we will sometimes fail, but we will learn and grow.

And all are welcome. Come as you are (but, please don’t lick the science).

In order to leverage the skills we have, we need a set of working values. Here, we embrace the Agile Community’s Scrum Values (source: 1. additional reading: 1, 2) This is a learning process, and we don’t yet live entirely by these values (especially that first one: we often are doing too many things at once), but this is the path.

•  Focus: Because we focus on only a few things at a time, we work well together and produce excellent work. We deliver valuable items sooner.
•  Courage: Because we work as a team, we feel supported and have more resources at our disposal. This gives us the courage to undertake greater challenges.
• Openness: As we work together, we express how we’re doing, what’s in our way, and our concerns so they can be addressed.
• Commitment: Because we have great control over our own destiny, we are more committed to success.
• Respect: As we work together, sharing successes and failures, we come to respect each other and to help each other become worthy of respect.

Because science is broken, these values need augmented with some life lessons that may have been forgotten (or never learned).

Things I learned from horsebackriding

• Have a plan and remember to steer.
• Sometimes butterflies are mistaken for monsters.
• If you’re not afraid, you aren’t pushing yourself (or you’re being stupid).
• Brains sometimes fall out. That doesn’t make you a bad person (or the horse a bad horse).

Things we should have learned in Kindergarten (adapted from source)

• Play Fair
• Share everything
• Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody
• When you go out into the world, take a friend and stick together

And finally, some lessons come from stick figures

 

Let’s work on living by these values (knowing we’ll misstep sometimes). Let’s go out and dare mighty things (knowing we’ll fail sometimes). Most of all, let’s be courageous and work on discovering our Universe.