I feel like this reading was prescribed this week to get us to start thinking about the essence of team work and the importance that developing these skills will have on the rest of our career.
The reading speaks about improvisation as a priceless skill to instigate new ideas on the game of Basketball, but we can link this to working in a team at university. By improvising we are taking our ideas and mixing them with other team members and growing out ideas and learning collaborative skills. I believe the reading and what it says about, by improvising as a group and truely working together, they can achieve “group flow”. This is where the team will reach its ultimate work ethic and be producing their best work. Personally, I think to achieve this, you need to be comfortable with your group members and everyone needs to be actively contributing. It is going to be interesting to see if this is achievable in our upcoming assessment as we are being placed into pre-organised groups. I understand the reasoning for this, but I also believe that we don’t have a huge amount of time to gain comfort in our group and really understand the way each team member works. So, this will be a pretty interesting experience. We are still very near to the beginning of our course, so we really don’t have much idea on where we ourselves are going to stand in the make-up of a group let alone the other members of the group.
The reading suggests that in order to achieve this “group flow” we need to follow a 10 step process to success:
- Identify the goal of the group
- Active listening
- Concentrating completely
- Having control (of your own thoughts)
- “Blending egos” (allow each persons’ thoughts to be just as important as the next)
- Participate equally
- Comfort and familiarity
- Communication
- “Moving it forward” (listen, extend, then build on these ideas)
- Realisation of the “potential for failure”
1. Keith Sawyer, 2007, Group Genius: The creative power of collaboration, New York: Basic Books, 2007, pp.39-57.
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