Disaster in Decision Making

During our in class activity, to determine the faith of the class' first exam, many conflicts broke out. Many people took different approaches either to favor themselves, or to favor the class as a whole. The way I see it, the conflict was devided among two different topics, the first one being the exam that we took, and the second one being the style of our next exam. For the first topic, I picked "Compete to Win." I received a grade of 88. I was strongly voting for the curve, because with that curve, my grade would have been boosted to 95. People who did better than me, or way worse than me picked drop the lowest grade as an option. I took "compete to win" as a way of solving this conflict, is because I believed that it would benefit me enourmously, and it would also benefit the class. Nobody would be hurt if the grade is curved. The professor said that we need everyone in the class to agree, and I would not agree if it was anything besides curving the grade. I am sure most people had the same look on this as I did. Amazingly enough, at the end we got to please both, the people who wanted the curve, and the ones that wanted their lowest grade dropped. On the second part, where we were picking the format of our next exam, I took the "Avoidance" way. I decided to withdraw. I believed that if everyone keeps throwing their ideas in, we will never get anything done. Unlike the first part where we had much more time, for the format of our next exam we had almost no time. That is the biggest reason I chose to withdraw, just to come to a common conclusion. Given the reaction of my classmates, I would have prefered to devide the class into certain groups, which would elect leaders who would represent them. This way we could have had, about 5 people speaking at a time, representing their group, instead of 80 people screaming out their ideas and causing great conflic. Since we were caught by suprise, and in the heat of the moment, people's selfishness did not let them think properly.

Great planning led to failure

Given the task at hand, me and the team decided to follow the typical procedure of planning. Step one is to define your goals and objectives. Our goals and objectives were clearly given by the professor. Our goal was to give a secure base to an egg so that when we dropped it from approximately 10 feet high into the garbage bin, it would not break. In step two, we looked at our resources which were eight regular drinking straws and about three feet of tape. When giving out positions we picked the shortest person to drop the egg, so that the height would have shortened from which the egg was dropped to reduce the amount of force our object would encounter when hitting the bottom of the garbage bin. Then we went around the group asking each person what they think about how the egg should be secured, which would constitute as step three. Some ideas were dismissed given the proper explanation of why it might not work, and others were considered. Then we picked the best one as a team. The design was very good. As we got our resources, and as we started putting things together we fell apart. People were innovating and focusing on things that were not supposed to be innovated or focused on as much. The execution was terrible on or team, even though the design was very good and would have most likely worked. If I was to take back time, I would have clearly stated which things were more important, and on what we needed to focus most our time on.