Reflection 4 – Team Work – The Puzzle Picture Lies.

From 11:30 to 3:30 – Finance Group Meeting | 3:30-6:00 Linguistics Elective Group Meeting | 6:00-9:00 Business Writing Group Project Work.

And it’s only Monday. Unfortunately.

The life of a typical Sauder student is not much different; on average every course requires at least one group project, and if you’re unlucky enough (like myself) they will all have presentations and papers due in the last weeks of the semester. Currently I am involved with 4 teams for each of my courses, and I am also on an executive team for a club. The last 2.5 years have certainly taught me a lot about teamwork. And though most of the lessons are constant reminders, I keep learning new things.

Personally, I have been very lucky in my teams. When I hear the horror stories my friends tell me, I consider myself to have had great team members. In my first year, my Organizational Behavior team became such good friends that we still try to meet up every now and then for some bowling. Our consultant group was called Omni, and we continue to talk about Omni Hangouts. However, I have realized that we did not perform as well as we could have, teams made up of friends often struggle to get efficient and productive work done.

In the D.Studio, I have been working with 4 other people, great people, but it took us a while to get into the rhythm of things. We all get along great, but I have found there to be numerous clashing personalities. We have a couple of very independent, strong people on our team, and occasionally things get a little disorganized. Our first meetings were far from productive, mainly because we suffered from severe communication-dysfunctionalism. Each of us really wants to be heard, because each of us is deeply certain that we are right. Of course, this caused quite some conflict, and even mutual disappointment. Eventually we sat down and literally talked about talking. Things improved from that point onwards.

I don't agree with this photo. The puzzles pieces are never the same size; sometime the team must support one person who has constructed the entire puzzle by themselves. This is teamwork in a utopia; it is highly unrealistic.

Now, how does Design Thinking affect teamwork? I think the creative process adds an entirely different dynamic to teamwork. For some reason, in all my three years at Sauder, this was the first team to be quite dysfunctional. Perhaps this is because the members were all very similar in their work ethic, but perhaps it is because creativity requires an increase amount of idea generation and sharing. I think that the creative requirements of the ClimateSmart project really forced us to not only discover our creativity, but also to communicate it in a manner that was organized.

My team has been working alongside ClimateSmart to prepare an interactive workshop for this Friday. Determining what our actual topic would be was the greatest challenge. Each team member had a very specific idea, and communicating those was quite difficult. Our creativity was certainly on fire, but our communication skills took a hit. I suppose my key message for this post could be summarized as follows:

1. A team that has to come together to analyze and hence present their findings does not have to bother with creativity. These teams are generally very effective.

2. A team with multiple similar personalities can experience significant problems. If everyone is on the same page… that page might get slightly packed.

3. Creativity requires a different type of teamwork than any other assignment does. An organized pattern of communication is essential.

4. No conflict is to great to overcome. If a problem arises out of creativity. Use creativity to solve it.

Now back to my group projects.