Friday, September 7, 2007

Immersion -- Week 2

Communication

This week, we spent some more time reflecting on how each team member processes information and perceives our environment. And we had our first team meetings without the instructor. I took the lead creating the agendas and facilitating the meetings. The main focus of our first meeting was to establish some regular processes and roles that will enable the team to operate smoothly. But, we ended up spending the majority of our time trying to establish the ways we will communicate with each other and what mode of communication will be used for specific issues. And while this totally derailed our agenda, the process of communicating about communication was essential and revealing ... and it dovetails nicely with the teamwork exercises we are walking through with the instructor. While I understand what my Guardian/Idealist temperament means in my individual contributions to the team, it is harder to grasp where everyone else's temperament fits in when considering the team as a whole. This was further demonstrated in our second team meeting when we tried to work collaboratively to refine initial questions for the project SMEs. While again, this took most of the team meeting, it was necessary to move slowly through this process as team members with concrete and more abstract perspectives put forward their thoughts about the questions and, little by little, met in the middle to comfortably accomodate the perspectives of both to craft a team product.

1 comment:

elaine said...

Sounds like another busy week -- but things were accomplished. Sometimes someone has to take the reins.

The alarm clock sounds like a nifty little invention -- might be worth a try -- and "trying on your husband's nerves".

Good luck in Week 3!!