Brainstorming the Future

Now Chow is surveying the project's detritus. Yes the team had concluded with formal presentations --Ryan on the digital desk, Jessica on speech recognition, Kris on new patterns of communications. But these polished finales weren't really the point; Chow doubts Xerox will ever build a product based on what happened here. "But we weren't focused on creating a result," he says. "We were focused on creating an environment that would actually encourage creativity. It's the antithesis of how business tries to structure itself. If you're providing products or services on demand, you'd like things to be as predictable as possible. What we wanted to do here was capture, in the purest state that we could, what these young people thought, how they behaved, how they reacted."

In that sense the kids left a powerful imprint on their adult colleagues. "These kids aren't kids, they're students," Chow wrote in an email journal he kept during the project. "But they aren't students, they're research assistants. But they aren't assistants, they're the actual researchers. We aren't leaders, we're guides. But we're not useful as guides in the future, we're hindrances. The adult leaders of the 20th century have to become the supporters of the students, who will lead us into the 21st century."