To Command is to Serve
My Experiences as iGEM 2019 Shanghai United Team Leader
It’s been a year since our last team meeting for the iGEM competition. Throughout the preparation and final competition, I focused on developing leadership, problem-solving skills, management strategies, communication skills, marketing strategies, and entrepreneurship. The design skills I acquired while drafting our technical poster also assist me later in the UI design of my app Finia. Eventually, I managed to pull together the merits of my teammates from different areas to win a Silver Award in the final round held in Boston.
After leading the team for more than half a year, I have created an autonomous and collaborative culture that is unique among a lot of other high school teams. This team culture helped us to navigate through a lot of the interdisciplinary tasks effectively.
Before our meeting in the summer, I received training in marketing and management science through lectures on MIT OpenCourseWare as well as the learning opportunities provided by our team’s Primary Investigator. Throughout this journey, I also realized that Synthetic Biology is very similar to Software Engineering. In both fields, research is essential to increase the knowledge base. However, these two fields also require management strategies, entrepreneurship, and marketing skills in addition to knowledge in science and engineering.
Being the leader of the whole team, I have to supervise the research progress and marketing research, set the agenda, and inspire the whole team. I am also responsible for drafting our Technical Poster for the presentation in the final round held in Boston later in the fall. Besides that, I am involved in the writing of our final report and wiki.
Rotation Team
Background
A team for iGEM is usually split up into the laboratory team and the human practice team. Oftentimes, there will be miscommunication or even conflicts between the two teams, which often resembles a typical issue in a corporate environment in tech when a developer has to communicate with a UI designer or product manager, and the latter may not have adequate knowledge to understand the work of a developer. After a few days, I discovered that a few of our teammates are egocentric as they are the elite students from the best schools in Shanghai and are rarely challenged when they are in their school. The result is that the human practice team and the laboratory team often refuse to cooperate as they believe the work of the other team is not important and can be accomplished very easily. For two days, our human practice team hasn’t received the progress updates from the laboratory team because the lab team is trying to take over the work of writing the wiki and communicating with experts and advisors.
Structure
To improve communication and operational efficiency, I added a team of 4 people as the Rotation Team consisting of 2 students from the laboratory team and 2 students from the human practice team. During each stage of the research, the 2 students selected will be sent to the other sub-team to participate in the activities, oversee the progress, and report to the other team about the progress. The rotating members of the laboratory team will report the progress of the experiment and deliver the data and lab results to the human practice team for making the website and drafting the summaries and reports. The rotating members from the human practice team will deliver the data from their survey, suggestions from instructors, advisors, and government officials to the laboratory team for the laboratory team to make new changes. Every evening, I organized an event in which each rotation team member has to present their work to the other team to all team members and highlight what they have learned from their work there. After some time, the two teams successfully established a bond that lasted till the end of this competition. With enough knowledge of the work in another sub-team, all the team members can work together more efficiently.
Inspiration
The idea of the rotation team was inspired by Job Rotation which I learned in my training in Management Science. In this case, rotation team members from different disciplines help them to get to know each other’s work and have respect for each other. With the expertise from different fields, the progress from the laboratory can be integrated seamlessly into the marketing efforts and report drafting tasks of the human practice team.
Leadership and Management Strategies
As the primary team leader, I also organized weekly meetings with the leaders of the human practice team and laboratory team, our Primary Investigator, sponsors, and potential investors. In this meeting, we evaluate the work of last week, set the agenda for next week, and report the progress to our sponsor. I used several management strategies and tools from my training in management science including the OKR framework for goal-setting at the team level, the OGSM model for strategic planning in sub-teams, the PDCA cycle for organizing and supervising specific processes, and Kanban for operations management. Some of these strategies are more useful in our Laboratory team (research operations) while others are more effective in the Human Practice team (business and marketing).
OKR framework
OKR framework is a very powerful strategy to set goals at an organizational level (for us it’s team level). First, we will have a group meeting every week discussing the key objectives for the week such as market our potential products to the public for the Human Practice team or complete the Plasmid construction stage for the Laboratory team. These are usually tasks highly relevant for the success of the whole team. For example, the Plasmid construction stage would later appear in our pitch to the potential investors and the results from marketing will determine the pace for lab activities. Then we will identify the key results that should be derived from our activities.
One of my small innovations in the OKR framework is to define key results on the scope of a team. Therefore, I often advise the management of our team to focus on measuring the results on the scope of the team. When it gets to the team level, a lot of the measurements will be relevant for both teams. In this way, the management process for the OKR framework becomes more efficient because I am measuring less comparing to measure each sub-team directly. For example, a result for the team could be to increase the engagement of investors by from 10 people to 20. This will require both sub-team to work together to achieve this goal. The Human Practice will have to come up with a more engaging and time-efficient pitching while the Laboratory team will have to increase the efficiency of the experiment to achieve more metrics to be presented to investors. Then, during the concluding meeting, this result will be used in the PDCA cycle for measuring.
OGSM model
After the goals have been set, planning becomes the most challenging activity in our interdisciplinary team as the Human Practice team and the Laboratory team have very different priorities. To facilitate strategic planning, I adopted a powerful tool from my training in management science — the OGSM model (Objective-Goals-Strategies-Measures). Note that the objectives and goals are very different from those in the OKR framework. Every evening in our status reports, we will define a smaller objective for the next day as part of our bigger objective for the week, like transform the target gene into pLEX. Then we would identify the goals such as complete co-transformation process and complete fusion protein process. Afterward, we would develop very specific strategies and plans to carry out the procedure. At the same time, a standard is drafted for the Measures in OGSM to ensure that every step is carried out correctly.
PDCA Cycle
To better manage our progress, I adopted the PDCA Cycle in Management Science, and it is beneficial for managing our research project. At each stage of the cycle, I will host a report session where each team member will reflect on their effort according to the PDCA cycle. The report session will make each member adopt the PDCA cycle in their own tasks.
Kanban Boards
Kanban is widely used in lean manufacturing and just-in-time manufacturing. In our laboratory team, I designed a Kanban board to manage our scheduling in the research. I divide each stage in the research into steps, which become the columns on the board. Each member of the laboratory team will be assigned a task by the head of the laboratory team, and their progress will be reflected on the board. At the end of each stage, we will do a review to analyze the metrics and efficiency.
Human Resource Allocation
When managing an interdisciplinary team, Human Resource Allocation is crucial to keep the team running even when problems occur. To wisely allocate human resources in our team, Adam Smith’s Division of Labor is widely applied together with the PDCA cycle. By breaking the work down into small units and letting each member use the PDCA cycle, we can identify potential problems more quickly. When a problem is discovered, the corresponding team member will focus on correcting the mistake, and the other team members will still be able to focus on their work to ensure progress.
Outcome or Output
Other than leadership and management skills, I also developed my entrepreneurship throughout the preparation of the iGEM competition. As an industry with extensive application in our lives, synthetic biology, like software engineering or computer science, requires a high level of entrepreneurship. In iGEM, team leaders are encouraged to think about the practical application of research and how to transform the discoveries into products that are affordable, reliable, and sustainable.
A very important aspect of entrepreneurship is Product Thinking, which focuses on the outcome a team delivers other than the output. The product thinking in software engineering is also apparent in Synthetic Biology. I have developed my own product thinking framework called IMI (Idea development, Market research, Impact) which is first practiced in iGEM Shanghai United Team’s research.
Idea Development Stage
The first step in product thinking is to develop an idea based on the research or existing technologies. One of the effective techniques in idea development is Brainstorming. Before the fundraising event, I organized a brainstorming secession for the whole team to think about the potential applications to our research (the early diagnosis of people with a high risk of HPV) and how that would be helpful to the general public. After a day of brainstorming, I manage to formulate an idea for our future product (the idea cannot be discussed in detail here due to confidentiality). At the fundraising event, my job is to pitch the idea of this product to our potential investors. At the presentation, I described the potential applications of our research in diagnosis in hospitals and how it is different from the traditional diagnosis of HPV in that it is more effective and efficient.
Market Research Stage
The next step of product thinking is to identify potential customers in the market. Our Human Practice team managed to gather data from some local communities and learn about the current precautions people take to prevent Cervical cancer. I coordinated a relevance analysis based on the data we gathered and successfully identified our potential customers of the future product our research led to. After these activities, I started to realize how important marketing strategies are in fields like synthetic biology and software engineering. These fields require entrepreneurs to target the group that most needs their products to create an impact in the market to grow their business as well as help those in need.
Impact Stage
The last step of product thinking I want to discuss here is the effort to make an impact. After the Idea Development and Marketing Research stage, the Impact stage ensures the product is delivered to the target customer. In this stage, one must be creative to make an impact in the market. After we identified our potential customers, we organized an event in Xuhui Central Hospital to publicize our idea of the product to the general public and has been highly praised by the people passing by. To attract target customers, we creatively drafted some comics to illustrate our future product to help them better understand our research and future product. Based on the feedback from the audience, we also created a future development plan for our product.
In our presentation in the final round, we presented our research discoveries, the idea of the product, survey results, and future development plans to the committee and received good feedback from the judges.
Like Software Engineering, Synthetic Biology also has a complex development cycle, and the technical aspect is only part of the development process. A lot of the efforts are devoted to maintaining and renovating the product to meet the needs of the customers. Experiences of presenting to both technical and non-technical audiences furthered my understanding of the interdisciplinary nature of both fields. The three stages in product thinking gave me a taste of entrepreneurship through the process of developing a product from discoveries. I gained significant business skills by engaging in marketing activities. Our survey, relevance analysis, and product proposal also helps me gain some insights into the social, legal, and commercial implications of technology.
With my leadership, our team has become one of the most autonomous high school teams according to our advisors who also advised several other local high school teams. It is my wish that this team culture and management methodologies will inspire more high school leaders to manage their teams more effectively in interdisciplinary competitions. I will continue to use these leadership skills to manage any teamwork in the future.
