Decisions Decisions

After going over the decision making process I was surprised to see how closely the class had unknowingly followed its structure. In our activity the professor had purposely created a decision making conflict, and according to what we learned in class there are a variety of ways in which people behave when dealing with these types of conflicts. I personally believe I followed the compete to win path and tried to get the class to hear my ideas. At first I had tried raising my hand and when I was unable to successfully get the attention of the class I found it necessary to go up to the front to get my point heard. I believe I chose this method because I thought I had an idea which would benefit everyone and wanted the class to hear it. I also guess I wanted to persuade the class to see things my way.  I do not believe I was acting in a selfish manner however I really thought I had a good idea that would help the whole class and one that the class would agree with. Compete to win seemed to be the more popular method within the class. A lot of people were fighting for attention to try and get their views across. A few others followed the route of avoidance, choosing to not partake in the activity because they didn’t see any chance of getting their point across. I do not blame these individuals seeing how the environment made it easy for a person to lose hope. One guys said he had been raising his hand for about 5 minutes before being recognized.  This method is not very productive however. When people decided they were no longer going to take part they basically only agreed to whatever the rest of the class came up with. They felt forced to go along with this choice and didn’t feel like they really got what they wanted. It seemed to have brought a negative vibe to the process. There were also a few people who acted as compromisers, trying to bridge the gap between two extremes to try and satisfy two majority groups at once. I don’t really think too many people followed the accommodation path being that nobody did exceptionally well on the test everyone this decision was one that would affect everyone. Those who let others decide for them I believe would have been practicing avoidance rather then accommodation in this case. Looking back on this activity the method the class should have used, but I did not see too much of, was collaborating. I believe the environment was too disorganized for this to happen and a more authoritative leader would have had to been designated the role. If everyone had stayed calm and spoken one at a time I believe more ideas would have been heard and a greater compromise would have been reached. We could have let everyone that wanted to get an idea across speak and write their idea on the board, and afterwards come up with a way to incorporate the ideas that would help the majority of people. I do not believe it would have ever been possible to get the whole class to be 100% happy with the final decision but at least in this way everybody could feel that there idea was heard and that they played a role in the decision. Overall I was happy with this activity and the results that our class had. I was a little worried at the end when that one girl didn’t raise her hand but it all worked out in the end.

The unbreakable egg

I found this activity to be very entertaining and feel that it helped teach us alot about the planning process. During the experiment it seemed that my group wasnt really as concerned with following the planning process as with getting a good idea together, but looking back I see that we did actually follow a majority of the steps. In regaurd to step one "defining your goal and objectives" our goals and objectives were pretty much laid out by the professor and befor begining the process the goal of the activity was made clear to everyone in the group. As soon as the time began we had a working idea and we continued to work on that idea in order to make the most efficient apparatus possible. We came up with the idea of letting out apparatus hang from the strip of tape pretty early and spent a great deal of time planning out the container part in which the egg would be held. We didnt really state all of our stregnth as stated in group two but they somehow managed to come out. One member began explaining the physics behind the design we should make another more artistic member took the role of drawing out the apparatus, one took the role of engineer, another a leadership role etc. During the planning process step 3 was definately met, having at least 3 alternate models for the egg holding device. We went over each device judging it based on how much impact it would be able to absorb, how well it would hold the egg ect and choose the final design accordingly. We then began considering how we would make this structure keeping in mind that we wanted a majority of the tabe to be left over. This would count as step 4, analyzing the alternatives. Once the planning time was over and it was time to start building we began step 5 and quickly got to work on our plan. The time went by pretty quick but we got everything done on time, or so we thought and we were pretty happy with our design. Then it was time to test it. Our design was one of two that actually ended in a sucess and didnt crack the egg however we had one major flaw... we forgot to write our names on the paper disqualifying us from the competiton and teaching us one valuable lesson, pay attention to detail. We were so caught up in designing the model that we failed to pay attention to the smaller details such as writting our name on the paper. In the future I believe if we have someone specifically there to ensure that we follow all of the steps and stay on track things will go alot smoother. We had good team dynamics and I beleive after learning from this mistake our team will preform much better in the future.