Blind Cooking

So in class, our professor (who I am beginning to think enjoys coming up with new and exciting ways to torture us) decided that it would be fun to take us on a field trip into the faculty cooking area, and have us do a team building/group dynamics project that involved blindfolds and making eggs.  It was perhaps the most interesting class I have ever been to to say the least.

One person was picked at random to be the cook, they were blindfolded, and then a group of three people were assigned to tell them what to do, however this group of three was not allowed to touch him, or help in any way except telling the blind victim what to do verbally.  As you can probably guess, this wasn't the easiest way to handle things.  To make things worse, the rest of the class was not allowed to help and at random intervals our professor would switch out the people in the group of three.  Things got pretty chaotic pretty quickly.

Group dynamics were constantly changing as you can probably guess, with people being switched in and out the group never became a cohesive team as the person who took charge was always changing, the vision of what the eggs should be like was constantly changing (For instance, the original group thought that two eggs required half a f***ing stick of butter.  But I'm not bitter.) but what was interesting about this is that it paralleled how things can work at a job with people quitting and being fired all the time.  So that was quite interesting.  It was also interesting to see how well the group started working towards the latter part of the exercise when everyone figured out what exactly they were doing.  Unfortunately at this point, it was too late to save the eggs, which were disgustingly underdone.

And we had to eat them.

Like I said, I think my professor has signed death warrants for all of us, but that's just my guess.  Fortunately there was no food poisoning or salmonella to be had by me ... yet, there's still time I think.  Despite this though, it really did help illustrate how roles in a group change constantly as the group changes, everything is constantly in flux, until after long enough and after people have enough experience, people start understanding their roles better and almost become teamlike.

Sadly, the project ended before a full team could be created, as is expected from a class that lasts just over an hour.  But it was still a unique and quite educational (and somewhat sadistic) experience.