Group desicion making = conflict

Firstly, I want to congratulate all of us that during the decision making activity we were able to make a unanimous vote and get something out of an hour long deliberations. I have to admit that at the beginning of our discussion I wasn’t very convinced that we will be able to get a hundred percent of votes on one idea. Though, the results of our discussion confirmed that the means of dealing with conflict that each of us took were effective in achieving our mutual goal, even if the goal didn’t fully comply with our individual interests.

My behavior in the class decision making process demonstrated accommodation and compromise. I believe that in any relationship, whether personal or business, we have to compromise and quite often this is the only method that successfully ends a conflict. For many people compromise is difficult to accept and it sounds like giving up one’s own view. I totally disagree with that opinion. I think that compromise is very effective if it is used at the right time. A person who compromises to quickly is a loser. On the other hand when it is obvious that no party in the conflict will get exactly what they want, compromising at this point of discussion is the only way to go. In my opinion it is just dull to stubbornly defend one’s point if it has no chance of winning.

As my other approach in the class discussion I used accommodation. My grade for the test was lower than I would like it to be but it was still higher than the average for the class, so I felt like my classmates who got really low grades should have the priority in deciding about what should be done to move the grades up. I kind of knew that any grade improvement options chosen by my classmates will benefit my grade as well, and I will go along with the ideas.

In overall, I think that as a group we did fine job negotiating the terms for our grades improvement. If I was to name our biggest weakness in the decision making process it would be inability to think collectively by some individuals, which lead to wasting way to much time and in effect not having enough time to work on our second part of discussion - the form of the second test.

Planning process vs. outcome.

“When the outcome drives the process we will only go to where we’ve already been. If process drives the outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there."
“Incomplete Manifesto for Growth,” Bruce Mau

In the beginning, I would like to say that the exercise we did during our Monday class was an “eggs-cellent” way for me to get hands-on experience with planning.

I think that my group, more or less, went through all of the planning steps. Our goal, which was clearly defined by the professor, was to construct cushioning for our egg that will protect the egg from breaking when dropped from height of 10 ft. to a bucket. We identified our resources which included 8 straws and 2 foot piece of tape. Our group strength was that we were all active in the planning process and we all contributed ideas to the project. Our weaknesses were quite obvious: time constraint and lack of experience with inventing and building egg-protective devices. We came up with two alternative ideas. After having discussion about possible problems with constructing and not having enough material for our more advanced project, by the majority of votes we settled for the other project that seemed to be easier to build. We found it really difficult to create and imagine how our device would look on the egg without having the actual egg in our hands. Now I feel like we didn’t spend too much time on assigning roles to our group members. When we were provided building materials every person in the group began working on something and helping each other in order to complete our task. Implementation phase was the most difficult and chaotic part of our planning process. We were running out of time and we had to modify our original idea in order to finish before the deadline.

Even though our final protective device wasn’t able to save our egg from breaking, we definitely haven’t fail as a planning team. Of course, it would be nice if we were able to reach our goal and get the extra 5 points, though, I feel like our involvement and the fun that we had during our planning process were more important than the outcome.