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Hello, my name is Hannah Rudin and this is Teambuilding America, a Declaration of Interdependence.
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Why teambuilding + America? Last February I was listening a podcast about partisan polarization causing
congressional committees to fall into dysfunction and a wild thought popped into my head: what if walked
into the Capitol and made the Senate do bipartisan trust falls?
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You see, to me, trust falls mean something very specific: I’ve been working in outdoor education for about
the past nine years, and spent about half that time specifically working to develop teams and leaders to better
achieve their goals.
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I realized that if America has the same goals and needs of a team...
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... then we can address our most pressing problems by scaling up teambuilding practices and using design to
figure out where and how to intervene.
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To help me unpack this challenge from a variety of angles...
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... I spoke with over fifty subject-matter experts in fields of design, politics, and team & leadership develop-
ment.
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They also helped me break down the space into the key driving forces. Through this research, it quickly be-
came clear that you can’t talk about political polarization without also talking about social polarization, and
the media is this huge storm force in the middle.
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Media is so important here because media is communication, and effective communication is imperative for
successful teams.
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My interviewee Chris Renner highlights how the incentives on social media are different than most other
ways we communicate. Instead of engaging or persuading each other on social media, we are rewarded for
getting reactions. I wondered what might happen with an intervention around this.
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You you type your post into the app, which then calls out inflammatory language, based on patterns from
across social and news media platforms. You are then invited to revise your post through the app.
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Unpost exists as a plug-in for Facebook, Twitter, and even Google Chrome, so it’s there when you post. This
may become the default if you have been repeatedly blocked or reported online.
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I also wanted to address some of the polarizing forces within even trusted, mainstream media sources.
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So I created the toss-a-mic, which creates a new spectacle for televised political media.
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Aiming to change from what you see on the left, to more like what you see on the right. By tossing the mic
back and forth, toss-a-mic replaces interruption with hand-eye coordination. If a pundit holds the mic for
too long, it become a voice-changer. Which is never not entertaining.
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Media is a place for my thesis to sit, but not stay. So I learned about the political side of polarization and as
you might expect, it is full of messy, institutionalized problems.
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Fortunately, Rule of Nobody author Philip K. Howard actually lays out a number of logical solutions to
some of these problems, but they need to happen through some huge policy changes. And as he says, this
requires massive, collective movement from the public.
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So, the place I actually need to start with all of this is the social side. Here I’ve laid out the biggest forces
keeping us socially divided and increasingly polarized in this country.
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But Lilliana Mason illustrates this best in her book Uncivil Agreement by highlighting that while money,
politics, and religion used to be taboo topics in social settings, they are ironically now some of the best din-
ner party topics because you are most likely only having dinner with people like you. This separation is in a
positive feedback with polarization, and it’s only getting worse.
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However, I’m excited. Through my research and interviews, I developed three strategies to counter social and
political polarization:
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First, we need to bring people who would not otherwise meet each other to come to the same table. Or as
my interviewee Randy Plemel of IDEO put it, we may need to bring the table to them.
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Second, with need to give them something to accomplish together. It can be small, or arbitrary, but they
need to successfully do it together.
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Third, we need to empower them to develop an inclusive vision of the future, recognizing that America is an
enormous nation with a lot of visions for the future.
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However, I presented this to my interviewee Mallory Combemale who designs team-building experiences
through Deloitte Greenhouse, and she told me that inclusive wasn’t good enough. In order to be effective,
and for the team to be successful, the vision needs to be shared.
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And I realized that she was right. I don’t know whether or not a shared vision is possible, but in order to
team-build America, I need to believe that it is.
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So far this semester, I’ve been able to start designing around these strategies.
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With Stumble, which matches you with people you are most similar to but least likely to meet, or least simi-
lar to but most likely to meet.
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Once you are matched, you and your new stumble buddy will figure out a common passion you share, and
then set goals and track progress around that. Like me and Jonah, who challenged each other to a combined
number of tutoring hours.
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Stumble exists in other places where barriers are lower to meeting with strangers. Like in a bar.
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Next I wanted to give people something to accomplish together, or rather, celebrate a small achievement.
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Clink celebrates the ways we connect with each other over a pint by linking our glasses together and creates
a new social behavior through physical links with friends and strangers.
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I received some fascinating responses with really interesting alignment, particularly around who and what
people want America to be. However, this workshop needs to be done many more times with more socially
and politically diverse populations. It needs to be scaled to see how it shakes out across the country
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Now you’ve seen what my thesis is, but I want to be explicit about what my thesis isn’t.
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My thesis is not about getting everyone to like each other. That would be great, but it’s not necessary.
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It’s not about fixing democracy or civic engagement because that doesn’t address polarization right now.
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And it’s not about creating dialogue or even empathy. My team-building approach encourages collective
action, not conversation, and does not require much getting to know each other.
