Decision Making (for lack of a more creative title)

On Monday, the 3rd of March, in Management class, my heart broke a little as I received our first test back, with my painfully low grade (71%). However, half way through the class Prof.Kurpis salvaged the day by explaining his offer. To negotiate alerations to this test grade, and the style of the next test, as long as the whole class could come to an agreement.

So, supposedly, this is how people "handle conflict":

Compete to win
Assertiveness to get one’s own way

Avoidance
Withdrawal; used when there’s “no chance of winning”

Compromise
Used with decision making under pressure; all members are equal

Accommodation
Seeing issue as more important to others than self

Collaborating
Requires bargaining and negotiation among group
Multiple group insights required



1)Which one of these ways did you personally use to handle the chaos during the class decision making exercise?
I used "compete to win", "compromise", and "accomodation".

2) Why did you choose this method?
I used "compete to win" because certain things were very important to me. I felt that i could addapt if needed for the next exam, and MY focus was on damage control for the first one. I was a little agitated by the amount of time being used for discussing changed to the next exam's format, given the shortage of time.
I used "compromise" because i understood that there was no way for me to have any more of a say than the rest of the students. Despite what i'd like to think, i was just one student out of 80, no more important, no less significant. Also, i understood that some people may feel as passionately about some aspects (say changing the next exam's format, rather than adding poiunts to this one) because they did not have my confidence for the next exam.
Finally, i used "accommodation because i knew that just as some parts were very important to me (such as curve/extra credit/dropping lowest grade) other students might feel as strongly about taking care of the next exam. and although i disagreed with some parts of the exam they wanted to change, i also knew that they could have struggled with those parts much worse than i had, and that in the long run, arguing it would just waste time. time that we simply didnt have.


3) Given that you know now the pattern of communications, the reactions of classmates, and the results of the decision making process, what OTHER way to handle conflict could you have chosen to get a more desirable result?
I think that the results were very good. also, we worked very well together. i felt that some people were being too talkative, and it was sometimes excessive, and a mistake to let them talk that much, given our very serious time constraints. Had i been the one in the front of the group, i would probably have tried to take on more of a leader role, and restricted the amount of comments each person made, since it was a specific few who i felt were wasting too much time.

4)Why would this have been better?
I can't say that this would have been much better, because i can hardly imagine any better outcome. However, i know that i was very tense throughout the activity, terrified that we wouldn't come to a conclusion, and therefore lose it all. Had we worked more strictly with time, we could maybe have finished a few minutes earlier, and been more relaxed about the whole thing.

My Egg failed me. Or maybe my management did.

So, as I'm sure all readers know, this blog is about the egg-dropping exercise from class. I thought my group's construction was very good, and I was surprised it didn't work, though to be fair, there was only a very slight crack in the egg...so I guess we came close =/



1)Which of the “Steps in the Planning Process” did your team actually go through?

Obviously, Step 1(Define your goals and objectives) was done for us. Professor Kurpis told us what our goal was.We had to find a way to protect the egg, so that it could survive the drop. He told us exactly what amount of time we had for each part of the process. Same goes for step 2(Determine your resources and current status vis-á-vis objectives); as we planned different strategies, we kept this in mind.
As for step 3(Develop several alternative strategies), some people would suggest ideas, then let the rest of the group critique them, enough so that we moved on to another idea, until we finally settled on one. once we settled on one...we didn't have back ups. there wasn't time for back ups once the 10 minute count started. We kind of did step 5(Implement the plan and evaluate results)since we obviously did implement it.

2)Which did you bypass? and why?
We bypassed step 4(Make a tactical plan) because there simply wasn't time, since we'd spent the time going through different ideas. Once the 10 minutes began, we each just sort of took roles upon ourselves, and either started working, or waited for another group member to tell us to do something. We also bypassed parts of step 5. we finished our egg-protector seconds before the time was up, and had no time to evaluate our work, or even think about changing anything.


3)How do your evaluate your team’s ultimate performance given the effectiveness of your planning?
I think my team worked really well. We went through many ideas, and were all honest and open enough to criticize each others ideas. Once we decided on something we stuck to it, and worked very well together. nobody really took the role as leader, but we were so focused on the time/resource shortage, that we all tried hard to help each other. our planning was good, i think, given how little time we had. i think we used our time efficiently. and the results? we really did come very close to getting those 5 points.

4)How could you have been more effective as a group in the planning of your task?
I know people say there is always room for improvement, but I really don't think there was in this case. we ommitted parts of the planning process that are not really necessary or available in this situation, where we were SO short on time/resources. Also, what we were building was not that complicated.