dhruvmethi

Crossposted from here. I attended a collegiate Bollywood-Fusion dance competition a couple of weekends ago. This setting was nothing new to me; I competed at many competitions back when I was in college, and after graduating college, I spent a couple of years volunteering with a group that organized a large competition and assisted other competition-organizing groups with their logistics and planning. Basically, through my experiences, I had a high degree of familiarity with how these events typically run. In my experience, the challenges associated with organizing these collegiate dance competitions are what I would call solved problems: problems for which already existing solutions have been adequately demonstrated. Each competition's core outcomes and processes are largely the same, and the organizing group’s responsibilities and tasks are generally static year after year. Even though Bollywood-Fusion dance is relatively new in the United States, there have probably been over 500 of these competitions run across the country over the last 10-15 years. You’d expect each of these competitions to run like well-oiled machines by now, but I was really surprised to see that many of the things I viewed as solved problems…weren’t. The emceeing and awards presentation was awkward. Teams were taking flagrantly unnecessary amounts of time setting up for their performances. Transitions between sets weren’t seamless. All this contributed to an experience that at times felt disjointed and clunky for the audience. And the worst part? The solutions to these problems weren’t secrets! They were widely known and well-documented. I had no idea why this was happening, but it drove me insane enough that I decided I never wanted to run into this issue again. So I built myself a framework — a playbook — designed to prevent myself (or any team I'm part of) from falling into the same trap. step 1: throw away roles, responsibilities, and titl