“One of our animating goals for the project was, would it be possible for someone to summon an entire organization for something you wanted to do with just a click?” Mr. Bernstein said. In addition to True Story, the two professors enlisted one team that built an app to help emergency medical technicians communicate with hospitals, and another that built a web tool to help a consulting firm run workshops for clients.

The professors recently presented their research at a prestigious computer-science conference.

Three lessons stand out across the flash-type models. First is that the platforms tend to be highly dependent on data and computing power. Roger Dickey, a co-founder of Gigster, says every member of each team assembled by the company reviews every other member, generating 20 to 30 data points per person per project. Artificial intelligence then looks for patterns and helps the company figure out how best to build future teams.

Second is the importance of well-established roles. Sociologists and organizational theorists have marveled for decades at the way disaster response teams or emergency room trauma units pull off complex tasks, even if they have never met before, because the division of labor is understood.

The same goes for flash teams. Dave Summa, who worked on a team that the Business Talent Group assembled to advise a major agribusiness company on which markets to compete in, said it fell to him to define the questions that needed answering and the mode of analysis, while a colleague oversaw teams of workers who produced specific plans.

“He was very detail-oriented and meticulous,” Mr. Summa said. “He let me do what I was good at. I let him do what he was good at.”

Then there is perhaps the least likely of innovations: middle management. The typical freelancer performs worker-bee tasks. Flash-like organizations tend to combine both workers and managers.

True Story, according to Daniel Steinbock, one of the game’s inventors, would have been lost without its managers. When the writers, who composed short poems for each game card, first submitted their work, he and his business partner had one overriding impression: “Most of the content was really bad,” he said.