Recently I wrote about what I love about OM and what it was like to coach a team for a decade. But it needs some help. For an organization so focused on creativity, the program itself lacks innovation.
It didn’t use to be this way. Dr Sam traveled overseas and struck deep friendships with partners in Asia and Europe, laying the groundwork for decades of international students traveling to American to compete.
They used to do some wild things at the World Finals:
Later that day, the Golden Knights, a U.S. Army Parachute Team, greeted OMers with a grand entrance at the picnic. These aerial artists performed one of their most famous maneuvers, the baton pass. This involved passing a 14-inch wooden baton while the jumpers were in “freefall”. Once on the ground, the baton was presented to Dr. Micklus. Each parachutist also carried the flag of a country. There were 9 different flags, each representing one of the countries competing in OM’s World Finals.
Look at this excerpt from the first ever Creativity Festival from World Finals in 1987:
Southwest Ontario’s booth had a mannequin, which when kissed, gave a printout of the person’s kissing power. Rodent Roulette had a mouse running on a roulette wheel. When it stopped, the winner was indicated by the hole with food the mouse chose.
Ok maybe we shouldn’t have live animals at the Creativity Festival but I can tell you these two ideas blow away anything I’ve seen there the last four years.
Somehow Dr Sam even got Northwest airlines to make the flights non-smoking in the 80s for kids leaving World Finals.
Here are 13 things I’d improve about Odyssey of the Mind:
- Eliminate Problem 4: Building a small structure out of balsa wood and seeing how much weight it can hold has a known best process for hardening the wood. Good teams have long converged on this solution and do it every year. The material for the structure never varies. If a new coach / team chooses this problem, they can’t be successful solving it in a creative way. The experienced programs dominate every year.
No hate to the teams who love this problem and I enjoy watching problem 4 solutions. It’s just time to recognize that this problem has been solved and they should eliminate it or radically re-conceive it with different materials. - Verbal and hands-on spontaneous at every tournament: Why did my team practice moving ping pong balls, stacking cups, making catapults, and flipping boxes all year to simply get asked, “What’s behind this door?”
Kids should do a hands-on spontaneous immediately followed by a verbal. This would help balance scoring variance as well, since typically verbal has a low variance (ie. top team isn’t too far from the bottom team) whereas hands-on has a high variance. Verbal-hands-on should be eliminated completely as it’s the laziest of all spontaneous problems. - Or even more radical… Eliminate spontaneous as it exists today and reimagine it to test creativity. Spontaneous is certainly fun, but does it really test your creativity to see how high of a structure you can make out of plates and straws? I’d rather see something more like a micro version of the long term problems. “Here are 10 minutes, come up with a 30 second commercial for this product” or “Create a one minute video, enticing people to travel to a country you invented that exports XYZ and must include a song” or “Here are some construction materials. Build a vehicle that carry an egg safely down this course. Name it and give commentary as it proceeds through the course.” Make creativity the focus rather than a carnival game.
- Give teams one minute to setup before time begins. In OM you get 8 minutes, which includes all your setup time. The good teams start their performance immediately while the rest of the team continues to move props. Why on Earth do we do this? It’s hard enough to hear an un-mic’d 4th grader on stage, but it’s impossible while 3 cardboard boxes are being pushed behind them. Give the kids one minute to stage their set.
- Give the kids a 1 minute warning before their time is up. Teams incur significant penalties for going long (1 point for every 2 seconds in some problems). Flash a warning light at one minute and another when 10 seconds are left and include a 5 second grace period. My team got a penalty one year because we were 1 second over time.
- Let parents and coaches move props without direction. Can we end this ruse that I can drive a van of props across the state, but a kid has to tell me to carry a particular box out of the trunk and move it to a section of the school they’ve never been to? Sorry this is the nit-pickiest of items, but tournament directors remind us of this every year and it makes no sense.
- Remove Iowa State as a location for World Finals and add locations in California and New York. Sorry Cyclones, but it is difficult to get there for almost everyone. Do it at Rowan!
- Triple the cost limit and enforce it. The cost limit has only gone up $20 in 10 years and it’s far too low ($145 for Problem 5 this year). The cost limit serves as a good check on teams just purchasing everything they need, but consumables (paint, glue, etc.) and even building materials like wood, fabric, wheels, brackets, will eat up your entire budget. Teams re-ruse materials from previous years and new teams without that reserve can’t catch up or have to use creative accounting methods to come under budget. In 10 years i’ve never had a judge ask about the cost form, which encourages coaches to cheat. Experience about which rules aren’t really enforced shouldn’t be an advantage.
- Get sponsored by Duct Tape and have it be an exempt item on the cost form so kids use more of it. Seems like a win for everyone. See also: Hot glue.
- Standardize membership and tournament registration systems nationally. This seems like an area where world finals and local programs have been sliding backwards. There are hundreds of ways to make this work in 2025 and it can’t be that hard to have a great tournament registration process.
- Recruit and market to more towns. In Collingswood we have 18 teams and if we had enough coaches and practice space we could have 20 or more. We do almost no advertising or promotion. Everyone comes in via word of mouth. In the Startup world they call this product-market-fit but for some reason none of the towns around us have teams. None of the NJ towns 5-10 miles from us have teams. Odyssey of the Mind World Headquarters is in Washington Twp, NJ and they don’t have a team. School teachers traditionally start new OM programs and there are a lot of obstacles for that because of funding and competing priorities. In Collingswood we do it through our recreation program and it has worked well for us. Creative Competitions should encourage other models instead of the ones that worked 30-40 years ago.
- Recruit celebrity judges for World Finals. Imagine a broadway star sitting at the table watching your performance. Imagine riding your vehicle around the gym and Weird Al asks you how you made it. Flo Rida announcing the team from Florida.
- Reject nepotism. Listen, I get it. I grew up in a family business that spanned generations. The best person for the job isn’t always going to be the person with the correct last name. There are brilliant people throughout this program would could take the reigns if you let them. The family can still own it and support it. Please put it in the hands of people who will live what the late Dr Sam preached and innovate for another 45 years.
I wrote this not because I think Odyssey of the Mind is failing or it used to be better. It’s not a personal attack on anyone. It’s because I think the world needs things like OM. More making, less consuming. More freedom, fewer rules. More inspiration, less repetition. I tell parents all the time: There’s nothing like it and it serves a need for the community as a place for kids who don’t fit neatly into the sports/theater/band bucket.
Acknowledgements: Some of these suggestions have come from conversations I’ve had with Kenneth Allendoerfer, Sasha Garvey, Kelly Zenfell, Brett Mandel, Geoff Dimasi and more.
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