It’s 7:35 PM at a downtown Washington, D.C. restaurant. A plate of half eaten dumplings and soft drinks drank to the dregs litter the table. Every few minutes, an idea floats out from one of the half-dozen interns. It’ll land however it does—either challenged, or celebrated—before they move on to the next.
10:30 AM the next morning, and the scene isn’t much different. Laptops running shell scripts and regression analyses replace the dumplings, and expo markers scatter the tables of a conference room. But the opinions keep flying. The problems they’re solving are big ones, as the intern challenges at Booz Allen range from ending human trafficking, to engineering a polygraph machine for Twitter, to installing cameras into quad-copters to find victims in the wake of a disaster.
Collaborative challenges consume the intern from early morning to late evening. They have a perspective, and they’re not shy about sharing it. That’s by design. In diverse teams, it’s the ability to debate and examine their thinking that leads to greater clarity.