2/18/2009 -- Tower Building

When a person/ leader holds more power in terms of information of a task an interesting thing occurs. The team naturally strive to understand and quickly, since it was time constrained, all shoot out ideas and follow through after some approval either from other team members or the leader himself. Yes, I am describing how most groups work for classes but also in the work place. There will always be someone that knows more than you and by getting that straight in your head will be able to help lower anyone on their high horse. Yes the leader in our situation knew more than our team, but still other team leaders seem to get a slightly different message. This is important because When information is given multiple times it is similar to the game telephone, either something is added because it was forgotten previously or something was omitted, which all ends with a different interpretation of the message. The ideal situation is to be able to understand and receive the message as well as relay it to your team as it was specifically as possible and then we move on from there. Since there was so much leeway with our tower building, our leader brought the main tools for building the foundation of our tower and asked each of us to print out a picture of ourselves having fun. By adding personal touches to the tower it made us feel as a team with all our inputs heard and more blatantly apparent on the actual tower. I believe ours represented our team very well because we worked together and pulled each other's strengths to offset any weaknesses. Ideas were thought through and given multiple suggestions for improvement. Since we could not have everyone working on the actual tower, we split into two groups: creative and foundation. The foundation being the tower structure and the creative being the design team. We did not just split the groups randomly but said if you are better at decorating then please help the creative team and vice versa for the tower structure. Having only a short amount of time, I believe we handled our timing very well with time to spare for clean up and for moving the structure inside the room. It was interesting to see the other towers and how they were presented. Although, I believe there were towers that would have received higher marks if the presenter was personally more excited or elaborate on their descriptions. This was their chance to tell the class about the team and the last group, who won, did it very well in making sure everyone participated in the tower by showing their support system and being able to describe their actions.