decisions decisions decisions!

During our decisions making process, there was a lot of conflict as to which model was the best. Everyone in the group had opinions and it was really difficult to come to a compromise. When one structure was decided on, someone else would reject it and have their own input on how to modify it better. This was followed by back and forth arguments that ultimately lead no where. As for me, i used the collaborating method of decisions making. I chose this method because i believe that the best decisions a GROUP as a whole can make is to have the input of everyone. Everyone thinks differently and by having many creative options, the best way to achieve our goal was to go that route. Other methods i observed from our group members include the "compromise" method and "compete to win" method. Peter in our group was always listening to others opinions and would agree but would also consider other options once in a while. Others in the group constantly believed that their idea was the best and that ultimately lead to a lot of wasted time and effort in argument that could have ultimately have been spent thinking up a better model. A different way I would have thought up to see a more desirable result with less conflict was to be a mediator between all argument and try to piece together little bits of everyone's ideas or even look online and find proven structures of the experiment to guarantee success because as we all know, facts cannot be argued!

An Eggs-cellent Way to Plan

In our group work last thursday, i felt like our group accomplished very little. In evaluating the planning process, i see that we skipped through a couple steps and that is probably what ultimately led us to not succeed in our experiment. We were pretty unorganized and pretty much freelanced the whole experiment. Many of our group members brainstormed idea after idea which no one can agree on. When someone finally got everyone to agree another person would come up with another idea and we were starting back at square one all over again! I can say that we had a hard time making a final decision and the decision we made turned out to be a bad one.

In class, professor kurpis spoke about choosing a leader which we completely bypassed. Not intentionally though, it's pretty difficult to decide who should be the leader of the group when we barely know each others names. It would be unfair for someone to volunteer to be leader unless everyone agreed on it because everyone had their own opinions. I believe however that would have been a critical step in saving us more time to brainstorm more had we had a leader to manage the group. Another step we bypassed was the alternate plan step. Since it was already difficult enough to come up with one plan, coming up with a second or even third design would have been impossible.

Although we came up with a design that in the end, seemingly almost worked, i still believe that we needed to work better as a group taking ideas from every member to implement into the design. Had that taken place, i believe our design would have succeeded and the 10 points would have been all ours for the upcoming test! Oh well, you learn from your mistakes. Congratulations to those groups that succeeded! Clever thinking goes a long way. Happy blogging.