Kolb Cycle Learning Experience
The Cards for Play Experience:
The Cards for Play Assignment experience in BCT has probably been one of the biggest learnings for me. It left me thinking, reflecting and analysing my takings from the experience for weeks afterwards, and has affected the way I approached future assignments such as the current Data Objects assignment. The Cards for Play task forced the need to think creatively, yet at the same time critically. Forcing idea and concept development and redevelopment. It put me in the mind of a creative designer and forced me to think in ways I hadn’t previously. It set a good example for me personally of how a designer should think, and approach difficult scenarios.
Designing a set of cards that facilitates play sounded easy. A deck of playing cards flashes through your mind, easy. Simple. And yet, even within the first few days I was being forced to think in new ways, challenge myself and my “comfortable” design processes. The fact that it was a team exercise made me feel confident in my ability, as I excel in a group environment, being extroverted. I find it easier to bounce ideas off others and thought that working in a team would be easy and would accelerate the solving of the ‘problem’. Throughout the experience this assumption was proven wrong however. At first the group couldn’t think of enough ideas, and then we boxed ourselves in by deciding on one that was complex because we wanted to do something ‘unique’ and ‘risky’. As the experience neared its end we had cycled through so many different concepts, and ideas that didn’t work that by the time we had one that ‘might’ be workable it was too late to back out, and we had to rush through and complete the idea we had due to the now miniscule time left before submission. In the end we finished the morning it was due and looking around at other team’s work I realised our project was one of the more ambitious ones, and while it had worked out in the end, it was shallow and not as fleshed out as it could have been due to being rushed. I think the lack of clear focus and proper productivity in the beginning of the experience really held us back as it came to the later weeks in the assignment. By the time we had all found our ‘places’ within the group and started to work efficiently it was already almost too late, and we found ourselves panicking and rushing to finish our project.
I believe one of the major challenges to face in this first assignment was that for most of the group, this was their first proper University assignment. This meant that a challenge to tackle as a group was the independency, and the need to self-direct ourselves as an efficient team. Luckily, the team was confident that we would be able to create a unique set of cards that fit the brief well. Often ‘Team confidence is related to, but distinguished from, efficacy and group potency. Efficacy researchers have shown that individuals who believe they can perform needed actions exert effort and are productive’ Steve Alper, Dean Tjosvold, Kenneth S. Law, Interdependence and Controversy in Group Decision Making: Antecedents to Effective Self-Managing Teams (1998). This added confidence in our own skills both independently and as a team meant that we were productive moving into the concept stages. I think that this was one of the major factors that helped our team pull through as we faced concept failure after concept failure. I noticed that despite our ideas often falling short, there was always another one to replace it, and the group never lost confidence that we would be able to complete a high-end product.
Something that I noticed throughout the project was that there tended to be a singular person, or two people taking control and guiding the other team members to a solution. This seemed almost natural, as certain individuals were more vocal leaders, and more outspoken. According to the ‘Babble Effect’ Daniel Levi, Group Dynamics for Teams, ‘Group members are more likely to select the most frequent communicator as the leader’ Mullen, Salas & Diskell (1989), Group Dynamics for Teams (10.1). Whether this is a subconscious or conscious ‘election’ of a group leader, I viewed it happening as my team members seemed to gravitate towards one person’s ideas and listen to what they had to say primarily. While this was effective, it was never clearly voiced that ‘this person is the team leader’. And while this doesn’t always have to be the case, the unproductivity of our group in the early stages could have been prevented if someone was to properly take charge and set everyone on a productive path.
It was interesting being in a group with largely Introverted or silent people, as they would only contribute ideas when asked, or after others had put forward their ideas. The Extroverts seemed to be the ones taking control of the project and putting forth the ideas, ‘Intrateam communication will be more natural for the extrovert than the introvert’ John H. Bradley, Frederic J. Hebert, (1997) Journal of Management Development. However, upon reflection, everybody had ideas, the people who were more silent and ‘introverted’ just required more prompting to divulge their ideas, whereas the more vocal and ‘extraverted’ required none. Prompting the more silent members of a group proved to be vital towards the end of our assignment, as some major problems were solved with their input. Knowing this now will enable me in the future to take into consideration even the those who don’t seem to want to talk at first sight but might have crucial information or concepts in their thoughts.
On reflection of the project, the early weeks where the teams were told to constantly scrap their ideas and start over make a lot of sense. I believe it was this that nailed in the message of learning from failures, and always striving to improve. As more of our joint ideas “failed” the group strived to better the concepts and learn from past ones to come up with more effective solutions.
The project taught me a lot about how to manage and work with different learning styles and personality types within a group. This was one of the most important take-aways from the Cards for Play experience because for the rest of the time I will be working as a Creative Technologist I can expect to be working with many different types of people. And understanding how best to work well with them, and slot into my own spot within a group dynamic is important. Not knowing how to do this before Cards for Play affected the speed with which we were able to reach an effective solution. I believe that If I had known how to mesh better with a team and work together in a self-directed environment sooner we wouldn’t not have been as rushed and unrefined by the end of the project. Being able to take that knowledge into future projects will enable me to more effectively work with differing learning styles and personality types while staying productive.
The skills I can take away from this learning experience are endless. The different ways to approach problems and constantly better my ideas kindly ‘hammered’ into me by the repeated process of scrapping and improving one’s ideas, to the ability to quickly get a team into a productive headspace. Being able to take these skills forward has already helped me, as the Data Objects Assignment has in my opinion progressed much smoother now that I have a greater experience in with properly working and meshing with different learning styles.
Daniel Levi, (2015) , “Group Dynamics for Teams”, https://books.google.co.nz/books?hl=en&lr=&id=l3tZDwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PT18&dq=group+dynamics+teams&ots=GlazVg2Yf4&sig=DgSs1e6SS-kwUZqw0X2tMftb2QE#v=onepage&q=leader&f=false
Steve Alpera, Dean Tjosvold, Kenneth S. Law, (1998), “Interdependence and Controversy in Group Decision Making: Antecedents to Effective Self-Managing Teams”. https://www-sciencedirect-com.ezproxy.aut.ac.nz/science/article/pii/S0749597898927480
John H. Bradley, Frederic J. Hebert, (1997) "The effect of personality type on team performance", Journal of Management Development, Vol. 16 Issue: 5, pp.337-353, https://www-emeraldinsight-com.ezproxy.aut.ac.nz/doi/full/10.1108/02621719710174525
