Decision Making with a large group of people

In class, on 11/14, which was the day our professor gave us our midterm back, you could tell the classroom was unhappy with the results they received on the test. After receiving some feedback from the class, our professor presented us with a challenge. He told us to figure out as a group how we would like him to change the grades to the test. He said he would not consider anything outrageous, but he is open to a curve, extra credit etc., but every single student in the class must come to a general consensus.

When the decision making process began, I was open to compromise. I felt that all the people in the class were equal, and we needed to come to a decision together. I did not realize how hard this was actually going to be. I chose this method because I felt the only way everyone in the class would be happy with the decision if everyone had an equal say in it.

If I could look back on the task at hand now, I would rather have everyone take on the collaborating approach. This approach was suggested by some class members in the beginning of the session, but then disregarded. If everyone broke into smaller groups, and came up with group proposals, and each group presented each proposal to the class, we would have had a better chance at taking full advantage of this opportunity to shape our grades. We could have taken the most popular proposals, and combined the most attractive attributes of each to come up with optimal idea.

Regardless, we did eventually reach a consensus, in the last minute of class, and make out pretty well. Next time, we will make out even better!

Fortifying an Egg

In class, we were given a group task to complete. The task was to take 25 minutes and plan out how we would build some sort of protection mechanism for an egg, with 8 straws and 2 feet of tape, which would prevent the egg from being broken when dropped from 10 feet. After the assignment was assigned to our team, we began planning immediately. Using the steps in the planning process as our judge, we incorporated a part of each step into our planning process, but there is room for improvement. The goals and guidelines were clearly established for us, since this was a short-term in class assignment. We did know about what resources we had available to us, but did identify each team member's strengths and allocate work accordingly. One of our team members immediately came up with a design. After perfecting this design, we did come up with two other plans, but decided on using the original idea because it was by far the best. On actually making a plan to implement is where great improvement could have occurred. We did briefly divide up the labor of constructing our contraption, but we did not do this effectively enough. This is where our main flaw occurred, which hindered us from success. We should have better divided up the work, so each person knew exactly what to do during the 10 minute construction period. We did implement our idea, as everyone else in the class did, but did not take time to reflect and evaluate our results.

Since we did not plan out the actual construction well enough, we found ourselves rushing to complete the construction in the allocated time. Even though our design was excellent, we did not have enough time to secure our egg inside of our contraption well enough, therefore it broke on impact. If we would have better planned out and allocated duties during the construction period I believe our egg would not have broke.