Self-reflection
of High Performance Collaboration
Lead-in
Over all after the happy ending of our
collaboration exercise, I shall conclude that the overall collaboration
experience was rich and meaningful through the entire semester, which had been
fulfilled with various kinds of discussions and knowledge sharing, and also
provided the real-life case studies by involving me in the creative thinking.
Reflecting back through the entire process of gaining the knowledge of
collaboration, it is definitely not easy at all because human are
unpredictable. I use to believe that collaboration is just the higher levels of collective
work, but after the systematical learning about the collaboration, my
perception towards the meaning and reflection of the collaboration is changing.
Collaboration is not only about of gathering people in a group to achieving
certain objective but also about of more collectively and cohesively knowledge
sharing and building consensus. And before achieving consensus, it’s not
possible without serious effective negotiation.
Aiming for consensus
Team logo –
the first team work
The perception error- our first conflict
Our first team work was designing our team
logo, which was a very surprising for each one of us. Previously we had
experiences of initiating teamwork such as ice-braking, but none of them required
us to design a team logo. And in my perception, only marketing students are
requiring to design the logo for their learning purpose. Therefore, the purpose of
designing the logo wasn’t that clear for me and during that time I don’t even
consider such task was difficult which means it’s not necessary to spend much
time on it. Come on! Logo designing? Since the first day when we went for
school, the first class the teacher was asking all the students doing was to draw
something. And till today, we had millions of experiences of drawing,
thus how difficult would that be? After acknowledging this task from Frank, I
told to my team mates: we shall only spend half an hour to finish this. But I was
wrong, and in fact,in the whole afternoon of our first meeting, we got nothing
at all.
The conflicting problem was evident, once
everyone believes they got the most creative ideas, they want the idea to be
included in the final outcome. And the first meeting was very chaotic and full of
disagreements where no one was able to agree on other’s idea because arguments
were about whether each of our proposals was captured the meaning of our team
name, or whether it was meaningful. and indeed every group member was doing equally well at that time. Therefore,
the difficulty that we were facing was to achieve a cohesive agreement. The
conflict was occurred because of the perception error over the different ideas
between the team members which had created difficulties to make an effective
group decision. However, through fewer discussions later on, we were able to
overcome that and finally solved our conflicts through numbers of negotiations. And at matter of the fact, the conflict was functional that effectively help us to improve our team performance after.
Perspective taking
After we cooling down our burning brain,
and starting to work on our ideas of team logo together in our second meeting. Then, we were began to share our knowledge and thought
proactively through active brainstorming. And we had discussed issues such as what was the reason of putting that symbol, why should we
keep that or where to keep that symbol. The meaning of original design was very
unreachable and complicated. (But it was described by me as “Classic”). At very
beginning I was insist to keep the shield and also the Latin motto
The first conceptural logo
because I believe such design would be rare
and attractive which was representing the concepts and the ideas of
collaboration by using heraldry and Latin motto. However, other group members reminded me that
if we use this logo, it’s difficult to emphasis the theme of our logo which is
the tie in the middle and such complicate design was actually more distractive
and meanwhile it wasn't so creative to the audience. Also the Latin motto
wouldn’t convey its meaning rightfully because no one in the class can read Latin. After hearing
all the comments from all the team members carefully, I was starting to
reconsider my idea from another perspective. And through the Perspective
Taking, I was able to understand the think and feelings through the audience’s
perspectives which was essential to recognize such design would not easy to
understand even with an explanation in detail. Therefore, the proposal of using
the complete design of this logo wasn’t passed in our discussion, but we had
kept the concept of keeping the knot for extending the concept of our team
name.
Therefore in our next design, we had come
out an idea with more easy and simple logo design, but another problem has also
reflected out that whether such design was too simple to accept by audience?
And by using the perspective thinking, the logos in our second discussion were
not able to capture the intentions from audience either, even though there are
differences in valuation and expectation within different people. Yet
Conceptual logos (2)
We have all agreed that the logos in the second
discussion shouldn’t be the final settlement, and certainly we didn’t finalize
any outcome at the end of second meeting. But through the overall meeting, we
were able to share more knowledge and opinions, and more proactively and
constructively involved into the team discussion. Certainly, with the improving
qualities of team performance, the efficiency of our team work is getting
better and better. Therefore, even after second meeting we were still not
achieving any workable outcome, but such improvement was very
essential for our next incoming team collaboration, because the improvement of
our communication quality and knowledge sharing was representing our team was
starting to achieving coherence and consensus.
Achieved successful consensus
Finally, the last discussion was very
successful which has certainly reflected high quality of team collaboration.
The final design was merging our ideas which have successfully established the
meaning and the concepts, and also with our efficient
The Final Outcome
collaborations. The idea of the tie was
come from me, the colour and the shape was come from Mi and Xan. The final
design was able to capture every points and considerations that we have shared and reflected from our
first meeting. We were all happy of this outcome, and it had become out team
logo finally.
Until the last moment of this team work, I
have suddenly realized that why we were request to have a team logo, which was representing
collaboration experience. The whole process of designing logo is for learning
the collaboration and through the numbers of discussions, knowledge sharing and
negotiations, we were able to achieve coherence because we have learnt from
each other, and through the perspective taking we were able to understand each
other therefore we were able to ahead towards the same direction. The successful
establishment of our team logo has represented our success consensus in our
team work, and most importantly our relationship was not damaged because of our
initial conflicts at the begining of the team work. And in the end, the conflict was also
successfully solved and meanwhile our trust level within team tie was also
enhanced and increased.
Project 4.23
– Virtual Collaboration
Perhaps I shall share more about my feeling about the
virtual project at beginning in this subtopic. I use to think that was
impossible for such virtual collaboration once after hearing from Frank, because
the morning group and evening group were facing the completely different
schedule and time line, and clearly I think the whole class was trying to avoid
from part-time students because they might have difficulties of fully
concentrating on school projects due to their heavy daily workload and job duties. Such
perception has been confused me for quite a moment before our first virtual
meeting with evening group, which is true I have no idea what were we going to
face for.
Communications – virtual team meetings
A gentle touched down
However, surprisingly we were facing a very
dedicated and proactive leader in the evening group who had took the first
initiation by sending me an email which she suggested that me and her should
have some touch bases before our official group virtual meeting, also with her
expectations on virtual meeting channels such as what’s app group and a
software called Visimeet which most of my team members didn’t really familiar
with. Therefore in the replying email I have also listed our expectations
regarding how would we conduct the virtual meeting and our preferences of using
Skype and QQ etc. And later she had replied that with a very gentle and negotiable
attitude which has actually changed my past perception of her. And because of we
had conducted exchanging our ideas in advance, so the possibilities of potential
consequences such as conflicts and misunderstanding had been largely minimized
therefore I believed the beginning of our dual-team collaboration was very
successful.
First email from evening group (click to view big picture)
First replying from our group (click to view big picture)
The first gentle touch down (Click to view big picuture)
Aiming for mutual agreement
Our first meeting was hold through
Visimeet, but it wasn’t work in a very perfect condition at start, which was
wasted almost half an hour for us attempting to solve the issue. The causes were primarily
because of the stability of the internet connection and some technical issues
which we were unable to overcome due to our limit knowledge of the IT, which had
disturbed the quality of the communication. Therefore we used our cellphones as
the supplementary method to resolve the voice issue we had faced. The first
meeting was aiming for finalizing the project schedule and settled the topic
we shall focus on, which was very effective done by us surprisingly without any
conflicts. That’s probably explained why our conversation in advance between
the leaders was important for us to achieve team coherence. During the meeting
we had effectively exchanged our thinking and knowledge regarding our entire
project structure and concepts. And we have all agreed that the virtual
platform should serve the purpose that would improve the efficiency of the organizations’
operation and also help people under different circumstances. Right after we
finished the knowledge sharing and comparing the ideas from both team, our team
had short discussion of the idea from evening team and decide we will follow
this idea which is the virtual community shall serve a charity purpose
especially under the emergency situation, that because we have all agreed the
idea of charity is creative and the value which is reflected through the charity
and humanity would be grateful and meaningful than any economic value reflected
from business activities. In the end, we morning group had dropped our original
idea which is a car renting platform and redirect our focus to the charity, which
is due to that if we only haggling over of a single issue which is our idea and
ignore the future perspective of achieving consensus, it would hardly for both
our parties to achieve the coherence in the end, however, which does not means
we were giving up so easily and just compromising during the negotiation, but
because of the charity topic was also very interesting and also was very attractive
to us, therefore we had made a tradeoff and therefore reached a mutually
profitable outcome (Thompson, 2009).
The first meeting was very success, and
through the meeting we will be able to achieve coherence which is a very good beginning for both of us. Our virtual meetings in the next sessions were majority
was through video conference associating with email, and the usual practice was
that after the video conference we will communicate through email of
summarizing the contents of our last meeting. The evening group was providing great
meeting minutes which were helping us to be more clear and firm about our goals.
Example of meeting minutes (click to view big picture)
Efficiency and effectiveness – not always
perfect
Usually the inter-team video conference was
hold once per week regularly before the Easter break which allowed us to follow
the project schedule progressively and be able to correct the mistakes as earlier
as possible. But after the Easter, we had felt that our project was very
progressive comparing with other groups, therefore we thought that we may
temporarily stop the video conference, and switched to use smart phone apps and
email as our communication method for the next part of the project. Then the
problem occurred, and evidently I felt the communication effectiveness was
decreased comparing to our usual practice. Through the email communication, it was difficult to have a progressive mutual understanding because the email and
the mobile apps generated little feedback about how the recipient’s is
reacting (Gwynne, 2002), which was different from video conference, we were able to see
other’s face and understand whether the recipients were responding or not. Also,
the responding time wasn’t instant which took some time to receive the reply, and
waiting for the responding was also created certain negative impacts of our
overall project effectiveness. For instance, after the Easter break, our group was waiting for the feedback from the evening group about our last amendments of
project finalization, however there was no responding from them until I made a
phone call to seek some advice from them, and it was a misunderstanding because
the evening group thought that last email was the finalized version and the
project can be arranged in different perspective there won’t be necessary of
further discussion anymore, and such misunderstanding indeed created the
biggest confusion in our group in the overall project. After all, the
experience was very identical to reflect the advantage and disadvantage through
virtual communication which was meaningful and thoughtful to me, so in the
future, if under any possibilities of working through virtual communication, I
would be more considerable of the distortion and possible misunderstanding in
order to avoid ineffective work and operation.
Collaboration is an art
At the end of my learning reflection, I
wish to say that the collaboration is an art which would allow strangers to
transform into team partners and also make them work cohesively towards a same
goal, the consensus. It is not easy definitely, that makes the way of achieve
and cultivate collaboration more important which may influence the consequences
of successful team goals. It is also worth to mention that through my past
experience about the virtual cooperation wasn’t that smooth at all, primarily
because under that circumstances, I wasn’t able to well manage the entire
process due to lacking of knowledge on virtual collaboration, therefore I
wasn’t able to capture the opportunity last time and lost a lot of money when I
was trying to attempt in to online business few years ago. During the learning
process of achieve collaboration, I have learnt how to manage people that we
were not familiar, such as how to organize them in meeting on time; how to make
an effective negotiation, such as using perspective thinking and trade off to
achieve a win-win goal; and even how to make an effective communication through
virtual environment. All of these knowledge and skills are forming a valuable
and creatable experience and knowledge which would be invaluable in my future
career because there will be surely a similar or even more complicated
situation are needed for my knowledge on collaboration. The design of the
learning experience was creating a real scenario that may anticipate the future
practice, therefore which was very helpful of creating knowledge base and skill
cultivating. After all, the art of collaboration would surely cultivate my
knowledge to be a capable and knowledgeable manager in the future.
Thompson, L. L. (2009). Win-Win Negotiation: Expanding the Pie. In L. L.
Thompson, he mind and heart of the negotiator (3 ed., pp. 74-95). Upper Saddle
River, New Jersey, USA: Pearson/Prentice Hall.
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