No "I" in team, but there is a Me

Pick a problem--any problem, from your roommate's dirty laundry to world hunger--and put together your dream team of experts to work on solving the problem.

This is the challenge I gave my composition students during this morning's class. They've been reading articles about groups of experts trying to tackle some of life's persistent problems--protecting endangered whales, balancing the need for development with the need for conservation, and preventing paper jams--and they'd also viewed the film The Martian, where a whole host of people with different types of expertise have to work together to get Matt Damon home from Mars. The final exam will ask them to write an essay related to problem-solving, so I thought we would spend a little time talking about how to put together a problem-solving team.

But I gave them very strict rules: Choose a problem and then put together a team consisting of one character from The Martian, two experts from our recent readings, and two Marietta College employees, and be prepared to defend your choices.

All my groups chose complex problems--hunger, littering, protecting endangered species--and they made some fairly predictable choices of experts from the film and their readings, but their choices of campus experts were especially interesting. The group tackling the problem of how to feed starving people thought they ought to have a cafeteria employee on the team because they know something about the logistics of feeding people, and another group mixed biologists with engineers to make sure to prioritize design thinking. 

And one group chose to put me on their team of experts. Why me? I'm not a scientist and I don't know anything about how to solve these big complex problems, but here's what they said: "We need someone to persuade people to care about the problem. That's your job." 

Well sure, let me just clear my committee schedule and I'll get right on it....

They made me proud, these students, because they finally realize that the big complex problems that face our society require the efforts of all kinds of people, from biologists to economists to cafeteria workers and even students, and an important part of the work is simply telling the story so that people will care. If they've learned nothing else this semester, I'm glad they learned that communication is an essential part of solving any complex problem.

Now I can't wait to see how they put this principle to work on their final projects. I'm still on their team, even when I'm wielding the gradebook.