All of the Next Agenda public challenges have some key elements that always work together and are reflected in the design of the website. It doesn’t matter what big problem we are trying to solve. Every challenge will need a network of smart, knowledgeable, innovative people dedicated to solving it, i.e., “Our Network.” Every Challenge will have Gatherings, and Videos, and online collaboration with Waves. So below we walk through the six common elements, and in doing so we essentially walk you through the core areas of the website.

 

 

All challenges start by posing a simple but critical question that is very ambitious, yet ultimately doable, and definitely worth figuring out how to answer as quickly as possible. 

 

Take our first one: How can America get all its electricity from clean energy as fast as possible? And by fast, we mean more like 10 years. This is a challenge of great importance to the country and world, with big implications on how successful we will be in the even bigger challenge of solving climate change. The Clean Energy Challenge is theoretically doable, but there are few ideas about how, and certainly no consensus. 

 

Framing involves getting everyone on the same page as to what the problem actually is that we are solving. This is not as easy as one would think. The problem itself often is not clearly understood and people have very different  analyses of what needs to change to make the situation better. Some people might feel the problem is actually unsolvable – or it is too late to solve.

 

And then everyone has to get general alignment around the vision of what the solution would generally look like. Again, figuring out the general goal is not always so easy either. With both the notion of the actual problem and ultimate vision gelling, then attention can turn to the solutions, the many different ways to reach the goal. 

 

 

Great tools, processes, platforms don’t solve big problems – people do. Getting the right mix of people together is crucial to solving any complex challenge. The usual suspects will not do. Often the established players are part of the problem, or at least have a hard time thinking creatively enough to break through to new solutions. We think you need three kinds of people: 

 

Experts: You do need people with expertise relevant to the challenge, but the notion of “relevant” should be very elastic. Often solutions come from cross-fertilizing expertise from different fields. 

 

Innovators: Some people, like entrepreneurs, are just better at innovating than others. The experts need to be complemented by people who can see the facts for the first time and see possibilities that no one else sees. 

 

Remarkables:  Then there is the more rarified category of the remarkable person who defies categorization but seems to always think creatively and out-of-the-box. It’s always good to have a nice mix of these people to stir the intellectual pot.

 

 

Nothing beats catalyzing a network more than physically gathering them in one place. A gathering allows people to emotionally connect as well as practically get on the same page. Some very complicated or difficult work is best done in a concentrated fashion and so works best face-to-face. However, gathering large numbers of people is expensive and time consuming. There’s always a lot of logistics involved. So we keep our gatherings to a minimum, only when we really need them:

 

Beginning:  We physically bring the network together to kick off the challenge and help initially define the problem and the ultimate vision of where we want to end up. We design a process that treats everyone as a participant – no division between speaker and passive audience. Everyone is pushed to contribute whether in plenary discussions, breakouts for working groups, or in side interviews. 

 

Middle: A full challenge should have several gatherings interspersed with serious work online. After the kickoff and online brainstorming, a second gathering should focus on integration. Here a smaller group could immerse for several days and connect the dots between what’s been done and identify the gaps. 

 

End: After more online work, towards the end the challenge, a third physical meeting is needed to make some hard choices about the best ideas to have emerged that could actually solve the problem. An endgame like this can get contentious, and will require compromise if not consensus. To do that, people need to look each other in the eyes. 

 

 

Everything that happens at the physical gatherings is captured on video – or as much of it as is reasonably possible. We use as many as half a dozen versatile video journalists to cover everything that happens on the main stage as well as much of what happens in side breakouts or within working groups. These savvy journalists can shoot, edit and tell great stories – ranging from short sizzle pieces resembling movie trailers, to 10-minute narrative overviews, to well-edited hits of everything presented on the stage.

 

The brainpower assembled goes well beyond those asked to give short presentations to simulate the group. So we move as many people as possible into side rooms to conduct more in-depth interviews with two cameras for quick, easy editing. Again, the shooters are journalists and are always looking to hone in on the best stuff for quick turnaround. Everyone at the gathering has some knowledge or insight to share so we also have roving camera people on the floor asking common questions to diverse participants in order to aggregate the answers and glean the best ones. 

 

In the end, almost everyone at a gathering gets captured on video where their contributions can live online. We find well-edited, high-quality video gets almost everyone over the hump and onto the web environment. Everyone loves to see themselves say smart things on the web. Once there, the offline community from the gathering can begin the online work.

 

 

Any collaborative work done offline in a physical gathering is done intuitively. People don’t need to be taught how to watch a presentation, discuss the ideas in a group, turn to their neighbor for a private conversation, sketch on a common whiteboard, or raise their hands to vote. They just do it and it works. 

 

“Waves” are the closest online equivalent of just showing up in a room and collaborating with other people. You can watch a video presentation together, discuss the ideas as a group in real time, carry out a private conversation on the side with one person, sketch out ideas with others in common documents, or even essentially raise your hand in a public vote. 

 

Waves encompass all those previously distinct operations that had been carried out online by different tools like web video, wikis, and instant messaging. They integrate the tools together and design an online experience that allows the users to focus on the work that needs to be done – not the tools themselves.

 

Google Wave, the foundation for our waves, is a brand new platform so it’s not fully developed and as seamless an experience as one would like. But it’s the best thing on the Internet to date – and a great leap over what people used to do.

 

Next Agenda uses waves as the central organizing unit of all our online collaborative work. Every video of an expert’s idea shot at a gathering could also anchor a wave and allow people to vote on its relevance, discuss and challenge it, or build on the idea with others to make it better. Or every major idea or conversation can be a wave that could conceivably roll through the entire Challenge time period, pulling in people and ideas all along the way.  (Still not clear about Waves? Check out our separate page on “What Are Waves?.” [link])

 

Not all our work is on waves. We still have a blog, and the basics of a Web 2.0 website. We also have a nifty little tool that we specifically developed for Next Agenda: our Q & A tool.

 

This tool allows anyone to ask questions and give answers. Figuring out a complex challenge requires asking a lot of questions – particularly at the beginning. And many of those questions have ready answers out there that we just need someone to point out and link up. Some questions, however, are more open-ended and don’t have ready answers. Those kinds of fundamental questions may elicit many different answers that our community can rank so the best ones rise to the top. 

 

All our tools are used to continue what could be metaphorically considered “waves of collaborative work” within our network as we head into the endgame.

 

 

The whole idea of a Next Agenda Challenge is to focus on coming up with a set of solutions that are up to the scale of the problem, which by definition, is big. Throughout the process we keep people focused on finding practical solutions that will work - not too much dwelling on the problem, or envisioning lofty goals that are too far from reach.

 

Solutions can mean many things, and to solve a challenge as complex as our initial Clean Energy Challenge, many different solutions will be needed. Getting all America’s electricity onto clean energy can’t be done by government fiat and a few policies. It can’t be done by the private sector alone, or by changing public behavior. It will take all of that  and more. 

 

Next Agenda can’t fully solve a public challenge that big. We can help catalyze efforts towards it, focus the attention of key stakeholders and the public, enable a process to develop a range of ideas that could solve it, and identify the very best initiatives in the end.

 

We think of the end product as “initiatives.” Each of them are ideas that have been worked through and vetted and seem capable of making significant progress towards solving the challenge. Taken together, this set of a half dozen to a dozen initiatives could arguably solve the challenge if fully carried out. 

 

Next Agenda brings these initiatives to the point of activation. We are not designed  for making them actually happen over the long haul. Other organizations and entities are much better suited for that line of work. We expect others will pick up where we leave off and make these potent projects and policies and other major initiatives come alive. 

 

Next Agenda can stick to what it does best, and turn to take on the early thinking of solving another big challenge, and get that to the point of activation too.