A soccer tournament, a gigantic radio tower and collective brain power...
I'm not kidding, the tower was incredible!
This past weekend, our daughter Penny’s soccer team played in a soccer tournament in the Des Moines, Iowa suburb of Altoona. If you are a parent and your children have played soccer, you’ll know the gig. More or less you watch a little bit of soccer and spend a lot of time with the other parents. It can be a pretty pleasant weekend when the company is good and the conversations interesting.
I’ve always been one for solving an interesting problem, or puzzle and as we watched our girls warm up for game 2 of 4, I was looking across the fields at a gigantic radio tower. I asked my fellow soccer parents: “if that thing fell, would it hit us?” Instantly the replies came back:
“No way!”
“I think it might.”
“How tall do you think it is?”
The topic rippled up and down the lounging line of soccer parents, embedded in a wide array of camping chairs. Some immediately started to line the tower up with trees, estimating possible height, breaking it into sections, counting the sections and solving math problems. Trigonometry was brought up. Others went to Google figuring the answer to this, like everything else on Earth, had to be readily available. Surprisingly, Google didn’t immediately yield the answer.
I’ve often talked and written about the advantage of a team in which everyone is allowed to contribute to a potential solution in a non-hierarchical manner. Collective brain power, rather than one single “big brain”, doing all the thinking and decision making. I’ve long used the animations below to describe these two types of teams.
After roughly 24 hours of on and off problem solving and discussion, the collective brain of the CC United U-13 states team parents concluded the tower was about 1000 feet tall. Before calling it, myself and another dad decided we needed more conclusive info. So, we hiked through a low growth corn field, to the base of the tower, where a placard listed the radio station who owned the tower. The radio station’s Wikipedia page listed the technical specs of the station, including a tower height above average terrain (HAAT) of 982 feet. Collective brain power at its best…or something like that…if you’re a soccer parent, you know what I mean.
