Acting as part of a collaborative team feels different each time and with every team. Experiences I have had with teams in the past help inform me about how to work in the next. In my day to day work, I am part of a design team that has one common goal, to aid profitability for the store of a popular home furnishing brand. This common goal helps guide us not only as a team but also individually to ensure that we make the correct decisions and helps to keep us on track.
This MA experience is no different, however, this collaboration has different goals and outcomes. It is interesting to note, that this collaborative team also involves various disciplines that I have never worked with before. Upon learning that the TMA1402 module, Creative Innovation and Entrepreneurship will be a collaborative project I was naturally nervous. From a personal and somewhat selfish level, I am precious about being on this course and dread initially filled me. The themes of "what if I get a bad team", "what if they don't do the work" and "what will they be like" started to fill my mind. It was with pleasure then that when our groups formed and sent to have our first Microsoft Teams call that I realised my team seemed to almost bond. I believe the concept of all of us being in the same situation, the understandings and misunderstandings of our task helped to progress the team spirit and comradery with ease.
There are certain characters, I find, that always appear in whatever team you are part of. Characters that may not show themselves until later on in the collaborative process. For example, the leader, the silent type, the last-minute dasher, the literal thinker, the worker bee, the speaker and the clueless. The names of these characters speak for themselves and are familiar to teams you have worked within the past. Over the past couple of calls, our team has had, both through the university scheduled calls and our self-directed calls, I have slowly started to see these characters arise. With the project still being fairly infant, I am yet to see the last-minute dasher thankfully.
When working in creative teams, there is always a possibility of a creative war as it were. A situation where team members disagree and the project stands still. Being in the devising and iterating stages allows for lots of dialogue with discussions about various aspects of the project. In these discussions it seemed, for now, agree on mostly everything, everyone is heard and every member of the team is free to voice their opinion or thoughts should they want too. However, is it not healthy for a team to disagree? To have a confrontation? Will this pleasant energy ultimately fail us? I have to wonder if the act of doing this project online, for now, is blocking the space for disagreement?
Being part of a team enables us to grow as individuals. We learn the "soft skills" that education can not teach us. Creativity has been ranked as the third most employable skill ("The 10 skills you need to thrive in the Fourth Industrial Revolution", 2016). Being part of a creative multi-disciplinary team facilitates creativity to flow and for us as creative practitioners to reflect off of each other's concepts, birthing new ideas in the process. Creativity is obviously the top skills for us, however, what about negotiation, problem-solving and cognitive flexibility? These are the skills I am hoping to develop further through this experience. My weakest, I would say is cognitive flexibility. I can hold various concepts at the same time, however, to what detail with having to use tools to document these before moving on with them? I am keen to see how I see these skills improve as the project advances.
As we work through this project as a team, with one common goal of passing the module, only time will show the characters of the team, the outcomes and ultimately the learnings that we will take with us into the next collaborative opportunity.
References and Figure List:
Fig 01
Takahashi, M. (2020). Working from home. [Image].
The 10 skills you need to thrive in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. World Economic Forum. (2016). https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/the-10-skills-you-need-to-thrive-in-the-fourth-industrial-revolution/.
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