Cape Town BUS 2033 – A reflective blog on teamwork

Cape Town BUS 2033 – A reflective blog on teamwork

Subject: General Questions    / General General Questions   
Question

Write a reflective blog on teamwork, similar to below:

Example:

The article I chose for my reflective blog is "Edward De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats". I thought that this reading showed a constructive way to better organize teamwork to come about a better solution to any problem and ultimately achieve the goal of the team.

In my own teamwork experience this year, I found that we were a functional team who managed to coordinate effectively and communicate efficiently in order to achieve our goals. While there was some conflict, it was quickly eradicated through communication on a good level. There was no undermining of ideas, rather building on ideas. However, the article poses some ways in which we probably would have been able to succeed even better.

The 6 Thinking Hats illustrate a way in which to tackle a problem and analyse it from every angle in order to cover all bases. The article states that people in a team try and tackle a problem from all angles at once instead of separating the issues and discussing them individually. This is what we did. We found an article stating that SnapChat was one of the biggest marketing trends in 2016 and within 15 minutes we had our solution. If we has discussed issues differently according to the 6 Thinking Hats, I think we would have arrived at a similar answer, only with a lot more background discussion to back up our solution.

A hat which we rarely used is the Black Hat i.e. looking at the weak points of the solution. Only when someone from outside the team brought up a snag in our plan, did we consider the ways in which our proposal could be discredited. The thinking hats allow a plan in order to make sure that this does not occur. It is important to realize that every proposal will have flaws, but if you know them and discuss them they can be eradicated.

We also lacked in the white hat department as we had some data, but not quite enough to back up our facts to the fullest degree. We did not fill in the gaps as much as we should have.

As for the other hats, I think they were used effectively although we didn't know we were using them. Though we did not stick to specific roles such as chairperson, we conducted ourselves so that the team was controlled (blue hat). Every team member brought creative (green hat) ideas to the table which could be built upon. We were definitely a positive group (yellow hat) who thought that our proposal was great. We also managed to look at the problem from a red hat perspective using emotive responses to our solution.

All in all, it probably would have made our solution even better to use this form of thinking, but I enjoyed the team I worked with and I am proud of the proposal we managed to put together.