The Lego activity (building a structure in silence while each person had an assigned individual agenda to complete) complicated collaboration attempts because of how each individual was focused on their own task, rather than paying attention to other people’s tasks and how they might interfere with others. My own assigned role (the leader, to help ensure everyone completed their tasks, which felt like a daunting task for me) helped me figure out halfway into the game that we needed to pay attention to others’ tasks to succeed. If one person was consistently changing the bottom four layers of the structure, everyone else needed to leave that part of the structure alone and adapt. We needed to note this without talking, showing the importance of awareness of others and consistently thinking about the greater good, especially within collaboration. It was because we didn’t do this that the goal wasn’t achieved in the end.
The discussion we had after the activity when we all revealed our roles helped us figure out these truths, and we started to see how each of our individual roles would influence other tasks. When reflecting, we each took turns to share our roles and our feelings about them, and I actually feel like the discussion helped to strengthen relationships between us as we listened to each other and saw the activity from their perspective.
This activity revealed a lot about the nature of collaboration, and that everyone always has their own individual agenda, however, the key to collaboration is awareness of others’ agenda and then adapting your own to fit theirs in order to achieve a greater good. Compromise, assuming positive intentions (the other people usually only interfere with your activities to achieve their own agenda, never out of malicious intent for you) and awareness of self and others proved the key to succeeding, so in the future, these are the things that I would like to focus on in order to become a more effective team player.