So in class a few weeks ago, 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.
Now, to relate that to group dynamics:
FOCUS: Well it seems like we sort of weren't allowed to do this all that well honestly. It says that decisions should be decided by the group and so forth, but unfortunately that wasn't exactly the case. Our professor decided many things for us. The group of three who was instructing the blind man did decide things as a group usually, but the rest of us were forced to remain silent and we didn't really have a choice as to who was selected to what or when.
CLARIFICATION: One of the things that was interesting about this particular experiment is the fact that several of us didn't know what to do or what we were supposed to do. At first, the task at hand was hidden, we were just told snippets of it. Eventually we got the whole story, but only after we had bumbled a bit first. Then at the end, when the task was clean up and so forth, we couldn't find all the members of the pre-selected cleanup crew, so that was fun. Clarification of the task and our own roles would have been nice, but part of the experiment was to make sure we never got too comfortable in our chosen role, so clarification as a whole wasn't happening.
THE MOUSE: In this case, the mouse was everyone not in the group of three telling the blindfolded person what to do. We were told that we had to be quiet and not interact at all with the group cooking, so we kind of did what the mouse does, we stood in the corner quietly and hoped for the best.
THE LOUD-MOUTH: This would probably end up being our professor because she controlled all the decisions that were made essentially, so overall it would be her. But in the group of three that was telling the blindfolded member what to do, there was usually one person that would take over telling the person what to do more so than the others. I know that Sean and Cabana were definitely this, I probably did it a bit too.
THE WRITTEN RECORD: Ha! What written record?
FEEDBACK (NEGATIVE): Well I know that I gave some negative feedback that wasn't exactly the most constructive, as did several others when the original group of three decided that a half stick of butter was needed for two eggs... (I'm sorry but have these people never cooked before? That's f***ing ridiculous.) Anyway, we commented on it negatively, but we weren't allowed to really talk or give feedback to them directly, while they were telling the blindfolded member what to do, so we could only tell them after it didn't really matter anymore.
FEEDBACK (POSTIVE): There was definitely this, especially towards the blindfolded member, any time he did something right people would compliment him (or her) because they couldn't see what they were doing, and it was great when they did something right. I don't think one piece of feedback was negative towards the blindfolded person, so that's good.
HANDLING DEADLOCK: Essentially this just turned into one side going ahead and doing something without the other's permission, before the other side had a chance to react. At least, that's what I saw. Not a bad way to handle deadlock, but it certainly wasn't the best. (Which is compromise.)
SIGN POSTING: Yeah, this would have been helpful. Sometimes it seemed like we lost track of things, like how much time we had to take care of the problem, etc. (Also, the washing of hands thing every single time got annoying. The food is going to get cooked, it's not like you're touching raw meat and then vegetables, it will be okay if their dirty hands touch the spatula and the frying pan. /rant) If a person would have constantly been reminding us about time and so forth I think it would have gotten annoying but it would have helped out overall.
ACTIVE COMMUNICATION: This seemed to work really well, the people in the group of three were the main communicators but a lot of times I heard the blindfolded person ask questions like, "Am I doing this right?" and "How much farther until I hit the sink?" things like that. I know it made my job in the group easier when they asked questions that I could answer, or if they expressed their concerns.
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