Okay, three lessons I've learned in this challenge process so far...complete with the situation leading up to the lesson, the actual lesson itself, and what I would do differently if presented with a similar situation in the future. I can already tell, that last part is going to be difficult; I think if "how to successfully handle a large group progressing toward a goal while maintaining enthusiasm, participation, creativity, and idea-sharing" was common knowledge, the business world would be very different than it is today. Everyone would have the tools to lead their companies effectively, making the success of the company more dependent on the talents of the individual than how they work cohesively as a team.
Lesson One: It's hard to coordinate a meeting of nineteen people.
When we were first presented with the challenge, the logical thing to do was to get together as a group to talk about it. But that wouldn't be easy, seeing as we can't even find a time to meet officially as a full group. I remember Sarah saying something to the effect of, "After trying to schedule our weekly meetings for this quarter, I can tell you that you'll either have to meet in the middle of the night, or on Sunday. Maybe."
The complexity of logistical issues are often easy to overlook when shadows are cast on them by bigger-picture-type stuff. Again thinking of this in terms of a business setting, I am hard pressed to come up with a scenario in which nineteen members of a project team aren't located in the same office building, or don't even have similar working hours each day.
Lesson Two: Motivation, participation, communication, hallucination.
It's difficult to make sure everyone's motivation is on the same general playing field. Enthusiasm, I think, is different; with individuals having their own interests, odds are that not everyone will love the project. But that doesn't mean that people don't have responsibilities. Relating back to lesson one, the trick is coordinating the team so that each person knows what that responsibility is. A remedy to this is heavily based in communication.
Lesson Three: Ideation and all its glory.
Speaking as a team member - at times, it feels like the team is getting pulled slightly toward instances of groupthink. It would impractical to attempt to meet (again, lesson one) regularly as a full team to solicit input on all relevantly important issues; being still in the formative stage of this project, everything seems relatively important. Then it wouldn't be too much of a stretch of the imagination to question the system a little bit. As things have progressed, our organizational structure appears to have emerged as some sort of a representative government and its citizens. While not making the decisions, the government is creating the decisions for its citizens to make. I simply find this unexpected, as I didn't realize at the time that I essentially "elected" Joe to an oligarchy (of sorts).
My thoughts tend to be rooted in pragmatism; I usually have questions more so than answers. But one thing my parents always taught me - if I didn't have a better option for a restaurant to go to, I wasn't allowed to complain. This was to be especially in effect when I didn't mind the restaurant that everyone else had agreed upon.
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
My chocolate wrapper told me to buy myself flowers.
I see the weekly prompt as more of a set of guidelines to help direct my thought. Blogging is inherently an individual activity; I'm writing about what I think, correct? There's feedback for the program and self-reflection. Answering all the feedback points is important to the growth of the program, but in the case of self-reflection, it's personal. So if I stick too closely to the prompt, am I not stifling my creativity?
I think I said this last week, but in deciding not to spend the gratuitous amount of coming to weighty conclusions about my life and future, I ended up arriving at some weighty conclusions about my life and future. They are summarized as follows:
I have a general idea of where I am currently, and U have a general plan through the next year and a half. Beyond that, I don't know where I want to go with my life (airport metaphor). One of the few things I do know with certainty is that I want to be successful. And at this point in the ever-(d)evolving saga of my life, being successful meanings being able to spend an inordinate amount of time on a beach. Doing a whole lotta nothing.
On to the next one.
I think that Eddie and Sarah included our family/friends in this challenge because they were bored with seeing how the fellows interacted with each other. They wanted to mix it up, get some fresh faces and fresh personalities on the scene. Working with the same people can result in similar dynamics evolving repeatedly; you know (or think you know) how someone will act or react - the situation is lacking in ambiguity.
To fulfill their duty for continued ambiguity, they brought in a guest per person. This actually maximizes ambiguity because there are lines of communication that have already been established. BUT, only the guest's host is familiar with the guest (his or her personality, skillset, etc.); all the rest of the fellows have to annex this relationship into their social outlook.
Several fellows brought parents as their guests; this brings up something interesting. Fellows would be considered "young people" by the parents - meaning "lacking in experience". The parents, on the other hand, have a considerable amount of experience under their belts; things relevant to the challenge would be dealing with people (leading and following), adjusting and adapting to unfamiliar circumstances, cooking, eating, etc. On the other hand, the fellows have been working on their self-awareness; it doesn't make up for experience, but, it is valuable research.
From a personal standpoint, I know I'm not fully there in applying everything I learned from the extensive battery of tests I took. Regardless, the "general public" doesn't always have access to the same tools. I'm not trying to rate the merits years of experience in the real world against self-awareness. I'm trying to imply that experience doesn't lead to self-awareness, or that being a young person means you don't have any experience to draw from.
The overall I'm point trying to make is to point out the two majority groups will likely draw on different sources of information for reference when it comes to teamwork situations. The old folks have been around the block a few times, and their pools of knowledge are quite a bit deeper that ours.
With my mom their, I was on my best behavior; that meant watching my choice of adjectives and keeping the inappropriate stories to myself.
One goal that my team had was to plate all of our food by the time the clock read 00:00. It went pretty well. I definitely got a little nervous at about the four-minute mark though. My mom even mentioned it. It wasn't a bad nervous though; just reading the time off for my team (since we couldn't see the clock) making sure we had all our plates, and just helping out where I could.
I can't find my list of competencies so I'll see how this goes. Obviously communication was important. We had an initial idea session where we brainstormed possible ingredient combinations.My time made several dishes; a couple of these seemed like really solid ideas, so they got started right out of the session. As we started on them, I wrote the dishes down and crossed off required ingredients. After that, the team had a bit of fluidity; dishes came on and off the table until were settled on ones that fit our collective vision.
Although we never explicitly dictated it, our vision was defined by making top-notch dishes that incorporated the required ingredients, instead of combining the required (and other) ingredients into a dish; we were chefs first, challengees second. We looked for originality and innovation in our dishes, using both the required ingredients and some of the more random ingredients available to us. One example I remember specifically was the seviche - into which we were able to incorporate the hearts of palm; the judges observed this, and were "happy to see someone use them".
I really enjoyed this challenge. I think my team being awesome was a large part of that. Another major contributor was my affection toward. I like cooking, though I may not be very good at it; I love eating, and I think that love looks fondly back on the preparation process. The challenge was beneficial for all of the ambiguity stuff I talked about above, and because the environment itself was something new. New is always better.
One key thing though - while I graciously accepted the opportunity to NOT clean up after myself, the clean up crew took our food before we were done eating it! I barely filled my plate the first time around, thinking that I'd have the opportunity to get seconds. And I didn't even get my own bread pudding...I had to try it off of the judges plate.
I think I said this last week, but in deciding not to spend the gratuitous amount of coming to weighty conclusions about my life and future, I ended up arriving at some weighty conclusions about my life and future. They are summarized as follows:
I have a general idea of where I am currently, and U have a general plan through the next year and a half. Beyond that, I don't know where I want to go with my life (airport metaphor). One of the few things I do know with certainty is that I want to be successful. And at this point in the ever-(d)evolving saga of my life, being successful meanings being able to spend an inordinate amount of time on a beach. Doing a whole lotta nothing.
On to the next one.
I think that Eddie and Sarah included our family/friends in this challenge because they were bored with seeing how the fellows interacted with each other. They wanted to mix it up, get some fresh faces and fresh personalities on the scene. Working with the same people can result in similar dynamics evolving repeatedly; you know (or think you know) how someone will act or react - the situation is lacking in ambiguity.
To fulfill their duty for continued ambiguity, they brought in a guest per person. This actually maximizes ambiguity because there are lines of communication that have already been established. BUT, only the guest's host is familiar with the guest (his or her personality, skillset, etc.); all the rest of the fellows have to annex this relationship into their social outlook.
Several fellows brought parents as their guests; this brings up something interesting. Fellows would be considered "young people" by the parents - meaning "lacking in experience". The parents, on the other hand, have a considerable amount of experience under their belts; things relevant to the challenge would be dealing with people (leading and following), adjusting and adapting to unfamiliar circumstances, cooking, eating, etc. On the other hand, the fellows have been working on their self-awareness; it doesn't make up for experience, but, it is valuable research.
From a personal standpoint, I know I'm not fully there in applying everything I learned from the extensive battery of tests I took. Regardless, the "general public" doesn't always have access to the same tools. I'm not trying to rate the merits years of experience in the real world against self-awareness. I'm trying to imply that experience doesn't lead to self-awareness, or that being a young person means you don't have any experience to draw from.
The overall I'm point trying to make is to point out the two majority groups will likely draw on different sources of information for reference when it comes to teamwork situations. The old folks have been around the block a few times, and their pools of knowledge are quite a bit deeper that ours.
With my mom their, I was on my best behavior; that meant watching my choice of adjectives and keeping the inappropriate stories to myself.
One goal that my team had was to plate all of our food by the time the clock read 00:00. It went pretty well. I definitely got a little nervous at about the four-minute mark though. My mom even mentioned it. It wasn't a bad nervous though; just reading the time off for my team (since we couldn't see the clock) making sure we had all our plates, and just helping out where I could.
I can't find my list of competencies so I'll see how this goes. Obviously communication was important. We had an initial idea session where we brainstormed possible ingredient combinations.My time made several dishes; a couple of these seemed like really solid ideas, so they got started right out of the session. As we started on them, I wrote the dishes down and crossed off required ingredients. After that, the team had a bit of fluidity; dishes came on and off the table until were settled on ones that fit our collective vision.
Although we never explicitly dictated it, our vision was defined by making top-notch dishes that incorporated the required ingredients, instead of combining the required (and other) ingredients into a dish; we were chefs first, challengees second. We looked for originality and innovation in our dishes, using both the required ingredients and some of the more random ingredients available to us. One example I remember specifically was the seviche - into which we were able to incorporate the hearts of palm; the judges observed this, and were "happy to see someone use them".
I really enjoyed this challenge. I think my team being awesome was a large part of that. Another major contributor was my affection toward. I like cooking, though I may not be very good at it; I love eating, and I think that love looks fondly back on the preparation process. The challenge was beneficial for all of the ambiguity stuff I talked about above, and because the environment itself was something new. New is always better.
One key thing though - while I graciously accepted the opportunity to NOT clean up after myself, the clean up crew took our food before we were done eating it! I barely filled my plate the first time around, thinking that I'd have the opportunity to get seconds. And I didn't even get my own bread pudding...I had to try it off of the judges plate.
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
It's rush hour.
And Reflection is like that semi that's trying to merge into my lane in front of me, and I really want to let him, because I'm a nice guy and all, but I'm late for my flight and going to go ahead make the justification that keeping this one vehicle out of my path is necessary. Nice guys finish last.
 |
Earlier I said I was late for my flight. I guess that makes the airport the proverbial "end of the day". Where am I headed? Eh. Maybe if I'd taken the extra few minutes to let Reflection in, I might've given my travel plans an adequate amount of thought. Time to throw darts at the departure board.
That reminds me of my man Jimmy Buffett. In "Changes in Latitudes" he says that reading departure signs in some big airport reminds him of the places he's been. I have a couple of exceptions in mind, but I think for me it would be mostly the opposite; that list of departures would remind me of the places I haven't been.
James goes on to talk about how he thinks about Paris when he's high on red wine. That would be somewhere I'd like to go. I watched the movie Midnight In Paris recently. I know I'd be nowhere near as appreciative of all the culture as Owen Wilson's character was, at least not at first - just for lack of knowledge. I might decide to move there, like he does, and meet a nice French girl, and come home from work for a two hour lunch everyday, and find the holy grail, and hate on America even though they saved France on multiple occasions... I want to see if I fit into Paris's legendary romance.
Or French Polynesia. That was my plan in high school. Head out to French Polynesia and become a pearl diver. Their economy basically runs on pearls like ours runs on cheap Chinese-manufactured goods. Actually that's a bad analogy seeing as the key to the cheap costumer goods is that they're made in China - i.e. imported. French Polynesia exports the pearls...I guess I can't make an analogy after all because the United States doesn't export anything anymore.
Better plan - if what I want is a beach, maybe I'll lucky and my plane will crash on a beautiful, mysterious island and I'll just get Lost.
In conclusion I decided to avoid the real meat of this post by going off on a tangent instead. I think in doing so, I actually got some of the potatoes. Where am I headed? To the airport. For what purpose? To catch a flight. Where? I don't know yet. Why? Don't know that either. Maybe I'll do some reflection once I get there.
The airport is both the destination of a journey and the beginning of its own journey; I suppose I could get stuck in the airport like Tom Hanks did in Terminal, in which case I will be a little disappointed.
Thursday, February 2, 2012
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