I met with Allison McKeever over lunch to hear how her agency group, Lattice, fared after their first day-long brainstorming session last Friday. I also wanted to talk with her about a post she'd written suggesting future years of COLABORATORY re-think the structure of our group competition.

Well, it turns out next year isn't soon enough.

Moving entirely on their own, the interns came to a consensus that it would be better to pool their resources while researching Sameunderneath, than to spend time and energy in redundant competition. Not only had they agreed to do it, they'd developed guidelines for managing the tasks and information sharing and scheduled a group meeting for Wednesday night.

These people just met a week ago.

I find this fascinating, inspirational and totally in the spirit of COLABORATORY. It speaks to the program's flexibility even more than the agency-naming episode from orientation day.

We made an assumption in COLABORATORY's planning phase that the competition of two teams would be engaging and push our interns to do great things. What we sacrificed for that approach was a sense of unity among the 10 interns. Now that I've met all the intelligent individuals who have gathered under the COLABORATORY banner, it seems unfair to have denied them that opportunity and I'm glad they've reclaimed it.

I'm proud Ascentium has helped shape a program that can change so rapidly to better serve its purpose, rather than adhere to procedure. If the COLABORATORY committee members were people frightened by experimentation and possible failure, this idea could have been quashed simply because we didn't plan for it. Instead, it's already taken on its own life.

Anyone else curious to see how the COLABORATORY interns surprise us next?