When I joined my first project at Omdena I got shocked. No clear goal, no hierarchy, and a sense of urgency to show how good each of us was at drawing charts and feed machine learning models.

I just said:

Oh My God what are you doing here!

I got a flashback to the time where I used to teach evolution and I got the image of the ocean’s surface full of small and simple cells competing for the sunlight, this was about 3.5 billion years ago. The fierce competition brought up new life strategies. Better and more efficient ways to use light, but also new organisms that didn’t care about light and started eating the ones using light as a primary energy source. Of course, many died in the journey but the ones that remained were the most efficient ones. They are our ancestors.

The first two weeks of an Omdena project make you feel like if you were floating in this “primordial soup”. Competition is not only good for innovation, without competition nothing moves on. But when players in a competing environment reach optimal points, the system dynamics slow down unless something unexpected comes into play.

#collaboration #competition #teamwork #soft-skills #ai