Decision Making = CHAOS

The first word that came to my mind about the class’ decision making process on 10/15/2007 is chaos. There were some limitations that the professor set at the very beginning, so we have scarce resources in determining our decision. This gave the biggest problem of all because the class is not going to know if the decisions that we made will work/approve. Then there was the person in charge issue because there were a couple of people in charge, in which each have their own opinions that then leads to poor communications.

The test result was that a majority of students didn't do so good since the curve was made with one grade higher than our originally grade. This wasn't satistfied by the majority of the class since there were proposals on giving extra credits, rewriting the essays, and making some changes to the next exam due to its difficulty on this one. And the chaos starts right here. During the class’ decision making process, the majority of the people handle it by competiting to win their own idea. Everyone have their own ideas to try to make their grades more desirable and meaningful. The whole class seem to can not decide how many extra credit points to have until the last couple minutes of class, we finally made some compromises and collaboration.

I personally was very into the dicusion at the beginning, but turned into avoidance after afterwards. Everyone in the classroom were yelling back and forth at each other and shouting out all kinds of ideas that people don't tend to agree on. I then realized that we are heading nowhere if this chaos continues, so I just lean back and watch what will happen at the very end. After getting more information about the decision making process, I think the best way to handle this conflict is through collaboration due to the fact that we have a large discussion group. We should have divided the class into groups and let each group come up with ideas due to a large number of people involved in the decision making. Then the class as a whole will vote on the best one stating that "it is either this or that" idea. This method save us some arguing time and give more desirable results. I think this method will be more efficient in decision making with some many people involved.

Let Go My EGGO!

I think my team did almost all the 5 steps of the planning process. We know very clearly what the objective was, which was to design some kind of contraption to hold an egg. We only have our limited resources of 8 straws and 2 feet of tape to build this model that have to show at least 50% of the the egg. My team came up with quite some models and discussed if it would work if it were built. At this point we started to argue with model to build and would actually work with our limited resources. We all have different opinions on with of the couple of models we came up with would work best. We just picked the last model we had.

I guess my team and I didn't really take step 3 into consideration, which is generating alternative scenarios. Because we have very limited time to develop and take of the plan, we had to rush. Due to the limited time and resources available, we were kind of rushing when it came to building our model. I think that we had a little more time and get a chance to play around with the limit resources we have, our model might be better. Overall, I think my team is pretty effective. To be more effective, I think we should assign a task for each person and start from there.