From Playing to Reflecting
From Playing to Reflecting
The course has officially started today and we had a little surprise waiting for us : As an ice breaker and a first team experience we participated to an escape game on the theme Magic School.
I expected this activity because friends who took the course last year told me about it, however I felt really excited and looked forward to it since it was my first time doing an escape game.
On the way to the game location my team did not stay together and we arrived at the place without a team name nor a goal. I thought the team spirit was not very developed so far and tried in a nice way to push my team mates to find a name. We ended up chosing "the Icebreakers" for no apparent reasons but all thought it was cool. This helped us to start having a team dynamic.
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I was then assigned the leader role for our team. I often get this role because I am usually a decision maker. I like when things are moving forward and therefore ask often direct questions. In our case I admitted during the class-time before the activity that I am an organized person, that I can easily remind people of deadlines and after a moment of hesitation I also asked my group to refocus on the project rather than talking about the Brazilian election (even-though I really wanted to engage in the discussion just BECAUSE !😨). In other words, the fact that I am in control of the situation makes people think that I can lead the team but the tricky thing is that I manage projects well, not people. Most of the time, I accept the role that is given to me but don't feel like "using" it by fear of being annoying or not having the authority to be the leader. As a matter of fact and as I will later explain, I completely lost this leader role while in the game.
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My first impression after the game was : We got better with time !
Indeed in the first room our team was completely disorganized, people were in all corners of the room playing it mostly solo and going here and there as interesting things were reveled. With such a functioning system we were able to progress but lost a lot of time informing each others about the progresses that were made by everyone.
In this first room also, the resolution of enigmas were pretty solitary. At some point Andrea managed to unlock a padlock and people moved on, in a rush, to the next step while I was trying to spread the victory vibe between us (cheering and making a quick pause to acknowledge our success).
The hardest thing for me at this point was to accept the different acting/thinking styles of the team members. I could feel we all had the same goal but that the paths to get there were different and instead of forcing people to think my way I forced myself to listen more to their ideas and make them fit with mine.
In the second room we were much more efficient and I think this is related to the fact that we were grouped. On the lighting map for exemple we all focused together and even though we had to ask for help for this enigma, its resolution felt much like the fruit of a common effort than in the previous room. At this point the time left was critical and we knew we would not win the game but my motivation really increased and we moved on to the last room in a positive spirit.
Finally in the last room we had a completely different functioning system than at the beginning.
Maybe it was because the time was counted but we naturally split up in sub-groups of two. I was with Alexander on the potions while Andrea and Alexander B. were working on the cupboard enigma and Corentin and Dalil were focused on a trap door. We still did not make it but were very close and far more effective than at the beginning of the game.
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I think the good point in our team is that everyone is confident about what he or she is doing. No one seemed shy or impressed by an other member and on the whole we all engaged to the game. What I fear is that we won't listen enough to each others and that our different styles of project handling, instead of helping us building a better work will make it poorer because of a lack of coordination.
If we were to do it again I would personally try to get to know people strength better in order to build on them and I guess take my leader role seriously. Concretely I think this would mean stepping back a bit from the game itself and having a clear overview of the situation to better coordinate the team.
As a team I also think we could have engaged a bit more. Because the escape game is part of a course that requires us to rethink our working methods I had the feeling we were all pretty reluctant to see the positive side of it. Thanks to the game we were able to see that our newly formed team can actually work and we can now involve ourselves fully.
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The plan and task strategy are still very hard for me to put in place. I can speak for myself and plan to show more assertiveness, take the organizational aspect of the project under my scope and simply voicing my concerns in oder to be a good leader but I don't feel like I know my team mates enough to advise them tasks that would suit their role.
My plan for tomorrow is actually to put in writing a coherent and realistic team charter to build up a little more the team vision.
We may not have escaped this game but at least :