“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.
2 comments:
I like your positive outlook on life and I feel like my group was tied up in various constraints as well. You mentioned one of them-time. I have to say that time- or lack of thereof- definately played a major role in the egg's dramatic fall and following its cracking, but i feel that this activity was also a very important example of how all the steps in the planning process are interrelated and consequent for the successful implementation of the whole project. Creativity also turned out to be a forte of few groups.
Looking forward to new challenges.
Take care,
Tatsiana
It seems that you went through a very comprehensive team work process in this exercise. Our group pretty much followed the same pattern, when we started building the materials we all had a different task assigned. I agree that as a team you did not fail, maybe some more expertise in building egg protecting devices, like you said, could have helped.
Post a Comment