WEEK 4: Design Team Dynamics
Design Teams, Work Teams, Creative Teams, Sports teams, or structural teams all have one thing in common. They take individuals skill & energy and turn them into a combined effort to accomplish a common goal. The idea that working together can have greater benefits for the collective than working individually has been clear to humans since the beginning of hunter & gatherer societies. We could even say, that our very distant mammal relatives, the Chimpanzee's had already figured this out. Although this example takes it a bit far, the idea behind it is clear; Collaboration is a quintessential to Human progress.
However intuitive & important teamwork might be in our society, it is not always as simple as we would like to think. Efficient team management starts by addressing individual needs of the team. In order to understand the many different levels of needs people can have, I like to use Maslow's Hierarchy of needs to break up this aspect of human psychology. When using this hierarchy as a structure to map out individual needs, we can start seeing a relationship between peoples needs & their living situation.
Having said this about team work, i want to finish by reflecting on our team work. The last 2 weeks have become a lot more productive for the team as a whole. We managed to divide tasks into smaller groups, and all have something to contribute. With a larger group like ours, individual participation sometimes is a problem as not everyone knows what to do, or has a clear task in mind. It has always worked best for me better when we managed to divide up tasks and connect our efforts. As a team we are also trying to apply what we are learning about Team Work, directly to our challenge. In order to keep this up, I think its important that we stay organized, and all have an idea of what has to be accomplished, and each person can take a part in it.
