X汽车大奖（Automotive X Prize）的挑战看起来无法完成：造一辆可以合法上路，价格也不太离谱的车，不过油耗要低于100英里/加仑，还要尽快造出来。乔• 贾斯蒂斯不信这个邪，当然，1000万美元的奖金也令人难以拒绝。

    一开始，贾斯蒂斯单打独斗，不过情况很快就改观了。他开始写博客，在社交媒体上分享他的成功、挫败和教训，很快就吸引了来自四个国家的44名热情的志愿者。就这样，WIKISPEED团队诞生了。

    队如其名，WIKISPEED团队的主旨就是加速，而且不局限于他们建造的汽车。成员们可以加速学习过程，借用来自敏捷软件开发的原理来思考和解决复杂问题。而他们的成果见证了他们的学习能力：就在组队3个月之后，WIKISPEED团队的工程原型车就获得了X汽车大奖主流级别比赛的并列第10名，一举超越了全球100多辆参赛车。更重要的是，赛事之后团队势头正旺，继续追寻以合理价格建造超级高效汽车的梦想。

    WIKISPEED团队的成功不仅在于它本身令人印象深刻，还在于这一成功对各种规模的组织的广泛启示。在本文作者合著的《拉动力》（The Power of Pull）一书中，我们解释了深化的全球化和技术的迅速进步如何带来一个变化愈演愈烈的新的竞争格局。

    为了竞争，公司必须将重心从简单的规模扩展转变到员工知识的扩展上来。然而许多公司对“人才培养”口惠而实不至，难以真正地帮助员工跟上市场变化的步伐。这不仅仅是挽留人才或者员工满意度的问题了：学习快的员工提高得也快，而提高快的员工能为整个公司带来业绩提升。

    为实现这一点，公司需要考虑WIKISPEED团队的成功四原则：

    主动联系积极分子

    你的公司里有聪明人，但公司之外的聪明人更是数不胜数。成功愈加地依赖于和外部人员联系并利用他们所带来的知识。

    凭借社交软件、云计算、移动性和大数据这样的新技术所提供的强大工具，各个社会生态系统达到了前所未有的广度和深度，可以帮我们联系到世界各地的积极分子。通过社交平台，乔• 贾斯蒂斯迅速集结了充满激情和动力的一伙人，这在以前是无法做到的。公司有更多的机会使用这些技术来延伸和深化他们与外界个体和组织的联系。

    为何强调积极分子？积极分子渴望挑战并为之激动。这些挑战被视作快速学习的机会，他们也更可能去发现和联系具有相关经验的人，帮助他们更快地找到创造性的解决方案。积极分子聚集得越多，背景越多样化，就越有可能得到相关的经验加以利用，而参与者也越有机会互相学习。就像贾斯蒂斯所说的：“士气是速度的倍乘器。”当面对像X汽车大奖那样极其复杂的问题时，任何个人已经知道答案的可能性微乎其微（否则那人已经可以拿下1000万美元的大奖了），所以联系和集结积极分子会有显著的益处。

    Joe Justice was inspired to enter the Automotive X Prize contest in 2008 after hearing about the seemingly impossible challenge: create a road-legal, reasonably priced car that gets 100 miles-per-gallon, and build it fast. The $10 million purse didn't hurt, either.

    Justice may have entered the contest alone, but it didn't stay that way for long; he began blogging and using social media to share his successes, setbacks, and lessons, and soon attracted a team of 44 passionate members from four countries excited to volunteer their time. Just like that, Team WIKISPEED was born.

    As the name suggests, Team WIKISPEED is all about acceleration, and not just in the cars they build. The group of volunteers can speed up how they learn by using principles from agile software development to think through and solve complex problems. Indeed, the proof is in the results: just three months after forming, Team WIKISPEED had a working prototype that tied for 10th place in the X Prize contest's mainstream class, outlasting over a hundred other entries from all over the globe. More importantly, the competition built momentum for the team and its dream of putting ultra-efficient cars on the road at a reasonable price.

    The success of Team WIKISPEED is not just impressive in its own right; it has broad implications for organizations of all sizes. In our book, The Power of Pull, we explain how increased globalization and rapid advances in technology have brought about a new competitive landscape of increasingly volatile change.

    To compete, firms will have to shift their focus from simply increasing in size to increasing employee knowledge. Yet despite all the lip service paid to "talent development," many firms today struggle to meaningfully engage their employees in a way that will help them keep pace with the changing marketplace. This issue is not simply one of retention or employee satisfaction: employees who learn faster improve faster, and those who improve faster can deliver improved performance for the entire company.

    To pull this off, firms should consider four principles that helped Team WIKISPEED:

    Reach out to passionate people

    No matter how many smart people you have at your firm, there are a lot more on the outside. Increasingly, competitive success hinges upon the ability to connect with others and take advantage of the knowledge that they can bring to the table.

    New technologies like social software, cloud computing, mobility and big data provide powerful tools to increase the reach and richness of different ecosystems, helping to connect passionate people wherever they may be. Through social software platforms, Joe Justice was quickly able to assemble an army of passionate and driven individuals, which would have been very difficult otherwise. Companies have even more significant opportunities to use these technologies to extend and deepen their relationships with outside individuals and organizations.

    Why the emphasis on passionate people? Passionate individuals seek out and are excited by challenges. They see these challenges as an opportunity to learn faster. They are also much more likely to identify and reach out to others who might have relevant experience, thereby helping them to reach a creative solution faster. By bringing together a larger and more diverse set of passionate people, there are more relevant experiences to draw from, and more opportunities for participants to learn from one another. As Justice puts it, "Morale is a multiplier for velocity." When tackling incredibly complex problems like building a 100 mpg vehicle, it is highly unlikely that any one person already has the answer (otherwise they might already be $10 million richer!), so the benefits of connecting with and bringing together passionate people can be significant.

    缩短项目时间表

    传统的公司项目要求制作两到三年的战略计划和详细的蓝图。然而这个方法限制了灵活应变和及时满足市场需求的能力。也无法暂退一步，去反思从试错中可以学到什么。而WIKISPEED团队与此完全相反，按7天的周期来运作：他们经常反思各种结果，考虑在下个周期可以改进的地方。虽然这样的方式不适合大多数的公司项目，但还是应该尝试采用尽可能短的工作周期。至少，公司应该考虑确定明确的目标，每6个月作检验，提供一个评估进展的机会。这样的审查能创造重新评价和改进计划的机会，避免浪费时间和精力。

    将项目模块化

    如果产品和流程处于僵硬的管理之下，就很难鼓励创新和快速试验，而那正是WIKISPEED团队成功的秘诀。确实，打破流程并允许个人对较小部分的工作进行实验是有价值的。通过给予参加者对某个部分修修补补和即兴发挥的自由，就有更大的机会取得突破，而对于整个计划来说，引起无法预期的连锁反应的风险也不大。

    WIKISPEED团队将传统的、紧密整合的汽车设计模块化。这种方式允许多个个人和团体分别承担独立部件任务，给他们更大的自由度去摸索新的选项。在快速测试周期的帮助下，仍然能确保模块成为初具雏形的整体设计的一部分，而模块之间的问题也能够快速确认并解决。

    创造实地学习的机会

    你当然可以通过阅读课本学习知识，但获得“隐性知识”是一种来自第一手经验的教育，强大而有效得多。今天公司里的人才培养模式通常就是陈旧的训练课程和演示，并不注重隐性知识的开发。而在WIKISPEED，团队几乎完全通过实地体验来学习。志愿者以新手和熟练工搭配的方式工作，共同研究小项目。这不仅仅有助于新人更快学习，也免除了纪录每个流程所需的时间和费用，因为知识是在同伴之间交流，而不是集中到正式的培训项目。

    Keep timelines short

    Traditional corporate projects require the creation of two- to three-year strategic plans and detailed blueprints. This approach, however, limits the ability to act nimbly and address market needs as they arise. It also reduces opportunities to step back and reflect on what can be learned from trial and error. On the other end of the spectrum, Team WIKISPEED works in 7-day cycles -- they're constantly reflecting on different results and what they can do better in the next cycle. While this may not be feasible for most corporate initiatives, firms should try to go with the shortest possible work cycles. At a minimum, they might want to consider defining explicit goals that can be measured every six months and provide an opportunity for progress assessment. These reviews will create more opportunities to reassess and refine approaches and waste less time and effort.

    Make the project modular

    As long as products and processes remain tightly regulated, it is very challenging to encourage the kind of innovation and rapid testing that made Team WIKISPEED such a success. Instead, there is value in breaking up the process and allowing individuals to experiment with smaller pieces of work. By allowing participants the freedom to tinker and improvise on small bits, there is a greater chance of making a breakthrough, and less risk of unexpected ripple effects throughout the entire initiative.

    Team WIKISPEED took traditional, tightly integrated car designs and made them more modular. This approach allowed many individuals and groups to take on discrete pieces, giving them greater latitude to explore new options. Rapid testing cycles helped ensure that modules could still work as part of the emerging overall design and issues between modules were quickly identified and addressed.

    Create opportunities for hands-on learning

    You can certainly gain knowledge by reading a textbook, but acquiring "tacit knowledge," education that comes from first-hand experience, is a much more powerful and effective way to learn. Talent development in firms today typically comes in the form of stale training courses and presentations rather than a focus on tacit knowledge development. At WIKISPEED, however, the team learns almost entirely through hands-on experience. Volunteers work in pairings of inexperienced and experienced individuals who take on small projects. Not only does this help novice volunteers learn faster, it also reduces the time and cost of documenting every process because knowledge is exchanged between peers rather than consolidated in formal training programs.

    这种教育甚至可以应用到虚拟环境中。应用合作软件，每个人都可以分享实时的修改和建议，使得志愿者更容易真正参与进来。依靠免费的合作软件，WIKISPEED连接起了遍布全球的成员。

    尽管WIKISPEED诞生于一个一次性的挑战活动，但在X汽车大奖之后，它已发展成为一个志愿者社区。团队现在拥有超过150名志愿者，他们通过各种短期项目为实现改善环境的最终愿景而努力。WIKISPEED作为一个团队已经取得了多项重大成功：目前，他们的原型车在高速公路上的油耗已达到每加仑114英里的水平，在全球最大车展做专题展出，并以2.5万美元价格出售。

    但其成员的热情和团队技能发展的速度让人相信他们在未来将更有作为。“如果我们只有短期视野，”贾斯蒂斯说，“X汽车大奖之后团队就会解散了。”相反的，WIKISPEED已经更上一层楼，除了自身项目的工作，他们还和SolutionsIQ合作，将某些流程应用于其它组织。实际上，所有公司不管规模大小，都能从他们的成功中学到点什么。

    This type of education can even be used in virtual environments. Using collaboration software allows individuals to share real-time edits and suggestions and makes it easy for volunteers to become meaningfully involved. WIKISPEED relies on free collaboration software tools to connect individuals all over the globe.

    Though WIKISPEED was born from a one-off challenge, it has developed into a community of volunteers since the X-Prize. The team now includes over 150 volunteers working towards an ultimate vision of improving the environment through short-term projects. WIKISPEED has achieved several great successes as a group -- their current prototype, which gets 114 mpg on the highway, was prominently featured at the world's largest auto show and is available for sale for $25,000.

    But the passion of its members and the team's rate of skill development leave no doubt that the group will take on even more going forward. "If we only had a short-term vision," Justice says, "the team would have dissolved after the X-Prize." Instead, WIKISPEED has taken the mission further, teaming up with SolutionsIQ to apply some of these processes to other organizations even as they work on their own projects. Indeed, companies of all sizes can learn from what they managed to pull off.