Jack Sherman

Blog #9: Team Prompts:

1. What are the common personal goals within the members of your team, and how can you leverage those goals to build collaboration

For starters, I would say that the common personal goals within the members of our team add up together to form a much larger goal that we all have. Jashlyn’s personal goals are to successfully find testing kits for the bacteria that we currently have growing in our system along with testing different NFT variables. For the design aspect of the team, Sofia is currently working on developing a couple versions of designs that the EcoRealms could potentially have. Then Bella is working on utilizing those designs to speak with interior designers, architects, and people in corporate office spaces to determine which design we should pursue. For the more financial aspect of our project, Jack’s personal goals for the project revolve around applying for funding so that we could develop a prototype. 

2. What are the common project goals within the members of your team, and how can you leverage those goals to make progress?

For one, the team aims to improve our EcoRealm partitions to make them more visually appealing and enhance the vision of being immersed in an environmental space. To achieve this goal, we are redesigning our current prototype and contacting interior designers for guidance, feedback, and insights to improve our partition further. We also strive to create a self-maintaining partition. Reducing the need for regular upkeep will make the partitions more convenient and cost-effective for users. This coincides with the improvement of our NFT systems, in which we plan to observe how the plants react to certain test variables.The team also recognizes the importance of clear communication and accountability in achieving our goals. Communicating with one another ensures that everyone is on the same page, working towards the same objectives, and making progress within our project. 

3. What are some biases that might become a barrier to your project goals?

From time to time, we experience each of the biases in the article. Primarily, we need to overcome the bandwagon effect and confirmation bias. As new members on a team that has already existed for 2 years, it can be easy for us to defer to the tenured members and agree with whatever input/advice/recommendations they make in regards to our action plan. We can avoid this bias by ensuring that everyone understands the scientific facts relevant to our project and make decisions based on factual evidence. The blind spot bias is another important factor in our work because we all specialize in different components of the project and have different priorities in regards to which courses of action to take. We encountered projection bias this week. Two members of our team had conflicting views of our business model, and we disagreed on whether or not a subscription model works well with a wholesaler. We seemed to be speaking past each other because we made different assumptions about our supplier relationships. The last bias that we need to overcome the functional fixedness bias. Our team members have identifiable roles, which makes some sense because we are far along in our product development and need to fill many responsibilities. However, we succumb to the bias by delegating work that specifically fits our role, instead of adjusting our roles to handle the work. For example, the design of our product is a huge priority that needs to be completed before we can make further progress in our business model, technical development, etc. Since  this is a relevant bias for us, we are working to overcome it by holding a design retreat in which all team members can contribute to the product design.

4. What type of decision-making system will you use and why?

We do a lot of differences with experts in this group. We are all incredibly specialized in our knowledge sets so it is easy to just let the person who specializes in the specific discipline to make the call. This allows everyone to contribute to the group in a meaningful way and have a voice with a specific topic. If there are general ideas to discuss, we go with the majority based on reasonable conclusions garnered from group discussion.