I think I personally compromised to the decision making in class because I was not only thinking about myself, I was also thinking about what was best for the whole class and what would benefit the most people; so we could get to an unanimous decision faster I agree with whatever made most people happy.
The way I would handle conflict differently would be separating ourselves into groups and each group would have to come up with one or a group of possible solutions; I believe this would have worked better because people would have contributed more; as a result, we would have had a lot more choices to decide on; there were some who were afraid to express their opinions because everyone just wanted to agree on the limited alternatives we already had.
Unfortunately, we had a time constrain that worked against us and maybe separating into groups would have made it harder. On the other side, I think there would have been better communication between us therefore better results.
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6 comments:
I agree with your idea on how to handle chaos. Too bad it would never work in our MGT class :-)
i also agree with you but more with adam, our class is not one that would listen well. they were more concerned with the time constraint that they didn't care for anyones opinion, they wanted to get their way as fast as possible. the group idea might have work but it might have also caused more chaos. the issue was very important to us so we needed to come up with the best idea that will benefit us which caused some tension in our class.
Seperating the class into different groups is definetly one solution.. It would give everyone a chance to speak, especially for those who are shy to speak to the class. But with the time constraints, we wouldn't of ever come up with a solution. Its hard enough to have just a few people conform- so imagine for every group, half believes in one idea, another half believes in another... It would take so much time to just get everyone in a SMALL group to conform- b/c in this case, everyone would speak up... At the end, were you satisfied with our proposal?
I agree with your idea of separating the class into groups. It was total madness what happened there on monday. Everybody was talking at the same time and whenever somebody wanted to say something they were told to shut up. I'm sure a lot of people had good ideas but were just afraid to speak. At one point I wanted to say something and i was also told to shut up. Breaking up the class into groups would have created smaller, quieter environments. We could have done that for the first 20 25 minutes and have the best ideas put on the board.
I agree with you that if the class was separated into smaller groups more people wold have felt more comfortable voicing their opinions. I did read in some of the blogs that people didn't comment in the class because they were shy.
I felt that we were racing against the time trying to come up with the solution.
Unfortunately we had the time constraint and if we were divided into smaller groups the process would have taken longer than the time we had available.
The technique you used seems very plausible. But like you suggested the key to successful group negotiations is barainstorming ideas. This was especially important in our situation because of the time constraint and stipulation of 100% concsensus.
It was interesting to see the dynamics of the group discussion. I was not surprised by the differing modes that our classmates chose to handle the conflict. Some people were just interested in getting the process over-with, rather than thinking through all the possibilities. i guess this kind of conflict is expected in large groups with several differing opinions and goals.
In the end I was happy that the dissenting classmates decided to do the utilitarian thing.
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