FINAL DESIGN 1: Good conflict

As Jim Grey (accessed October 30, 2012) explained, conflict is important in collaborating as it uses the groups differences to make something better. There were a few small things where this was true, but the one major one where this was noted and true was with our three presentations. For the first presentation I spoke by myself having been identified at being a strong public speaking personality and that went well. We got a 6+ and we were marked highly on the basis of having a fun and engaging presentation. I noted privately to Alec (not thinking that it was really something of importance as it was kind of an obvious observation) that most of the speakers on the day turned out to be industrial designers, seeing as this was a heavily industrial project. When it came time to present D2, we had done so much back work but hadn’t planned and left enough time to do up the presentation. There was a moment of communication breakdown with our usually well put together, well discussed group and we rushed our job. It all slightly fell apart around us and because of this we arrived at our presentation  not ready, unpractised and more stressed than we would have liked. While I was assumed to be the speaker again because it went so well last time, this time it had gotten to a point where people understood the parts they had investigated better than others and since we didn’t leave time to prepare for the speech, I couldn’t learn the intricacies of what my team members had individually been working on. Therefore, we made a rushed, poorly thought through decision to all talk and explain our individual points. Also Lisa thought that it was a good idea to try and do a round table discussion like we had the week before as it seemed to go so well but what happened was that we didn’t really as a group assess the situation correctly and it turned out to be a little more formal than we realised, as we got very comfortable in our little family community and felt we could be casual around Helen and Billerwell.

 Had we had time to test this out and practise we would have realised that this was not a good idea. We went terribly over time and tended to ramble a lot more than we would have liked; Rather than laidback and confident, it seemed rushed and anxious. We quickly agreed that for D3 we would shorten the number of speakers to one or two. As I was unable to attend on the day, Steve (being the other industrial, and quite a shining, enthusiastic personality himself) took the reins and everything went much better

While the architects are confident people and speakers, they both had reasons for not wanting to speak. Caitlin wasn’t particularly confident in public speaking and while she does it well, she gets very nervous and scared.

Alec felt that it made more sense for an industrial speaker to talk about an industrial project and that since we had set the scene with me in the past we should stick with that as it went so well the first time. “Don’t try to fix what aint broken” (Alec Palmer, 2012). But again, the reason it didn’t end up  going well was the fact that we ran out of time.