Last week I had one of the most memorable classes ever! =) In my Management 3120 class we all took part in an activity that my professor named “An eggs-cellent way to plan”. I had no idea what we were about to do. Well, it turns out we (as groups) had to compete against each other to make an egg contraption. One that would protect our egg after we dropped it from 6+ feet. Sound familiar? It might. I remember watching shows about this a while back. We had 25 minutes to plan and design the contraption. Then we had 10 minutes to actually make it. The class turned into chaos because whichever group succeeded would earn 10 bonus points on our first exam. Unfortunately not one group succeeded!! =/
The whole point of this activity was to see how well we worked as a team to plan out what we were going to do to successfully drop our egg without breaking it. While we were in the planning process we did work well together and everybody had a little input but when I think back to the 25 minutes we had we definitely could have planned better. First of all we never picked a team leader. Which I think was ok because we didn’t have a lot of time. We didn’t set objectives like the Planning Process says to do but again we had a limited amount of time and we were trying to figure out how we were going to earn these extra 10 points. One thing that we did do was ask each other about what abilities and knowledge we had. Not a lot of us had enough knowledge of architecture or drawing to know that we would be 100% successful. I ended up sketching the design and we all agreed on a plan and an alternative.
All in all I do think my group could have done much better if we had assigned ourselves specific roles before the 25 minutes were up. I think our main problem was time. We were all just trying to get the contraption done before the 10 minutes were up and if we would have assigned ourselves roles than things would have been done more efficiently. I wish we could’ve had a second chance at this activity with a little more time and maybe one of the groups would have actually succeeded.
I think designating roles to each group member is one effective way to go with this type of activity. I feel like with any group activity there's always that awkward silence and not everyone is willing to participate. But once that barrier is broken I think things will start moving smoothly. I also agree with you, I think if my group had a prominent team leader, there could have been a person making sure that everyone is engaged and involved. Also the leader can also track the progress the group has made and motivate the group members to utilize the time and resources available efficiently.
ReplyDeleteI agree with said above, having a leader changes the process..what made the process of appointment of a leader harder is lack of knowledge of each other's background, absence of experience of doing a similar task and time limit for the planning...it made me question of the following: what are the criteria on the basis of which a leader is chosen?
ReplyDeleteDear Melana,
ReplyDeleteFirst off – thank you for your group effort and support, it was quite challenging working with such a large group, varying both in personality’s (passive, aggressive) and in design-vision!
After reading your blog I agree with you on the fine point that we not efficient at staying on time or at picking specific people to perform certain tasks. Keep in mind that this task may have been easy had only one of us had to perform it i.e. there would not have been a clashing of ideas. On the flip side – we learned to control our outbursts for who’s idea was better and focus on the important points of getting the job done. We can only aim to be better at performing jobs and realizing what dialogue is relevant in design.