TEDx: SCAMPER

TEDx club, as the name implies, is a club that organises and hosts the annual TEDx talk at our school. As a group lead by two staff members, together we are exposed to all the backstage work that goes into the event from working with various stakeholders to marketing our event to the school.

LO 1 Identifying own strengths and develop areas for personal growth: Students are able to see themselves as an individual with various skills and abilities, some more developed than others.

Scamper, not the verb for running with excitement in quick light steps, but rather the reflection and analysis of our strength and weaknesses as a team member. At the beginning of today’s session we were told to get 7 sticky notes each and a pen. Letter by letter, we took (a very short amount of) time to analyse ourselves according to SCAMPER. Below is what SCAMPER stands for and you can click on each one to read a short paragraph on what I think of each one!

When unfamiliar with the people I am working with, sometimes I can be timid and not as proactive as I should be. To become a better collaborator I should be more vocal about my thoughts and ideas and share them without the fear of being wrong.
Personally, I found this one particularly hard since many factors contribute into good teamwork. But for me awareness and communication are the two keys to success. Not only do you have to be aware of your goals, teammates, and surroundings, you also have to be aware of your own and other member's capabilities. Communication will also affect the efficiency of the group. If members do not communicate, three members could be working on the same task when they could have been spreading out the work evenly or all doing different tasks. Both these concepts rely on one another and together, people can work efficiently as a team.
As humans, we are not as familiar with change as we're supposed to be considering all the constant change happening around us. Personally, I am the type of person who would stick to a plan rather than go with the flow. It may take longer for me to adapt to new changes but I try my best to familiarise myself with change as soon as possible.
When working on a task, I tend to be detail oriented. This is a good quality but it sometimes leaves me in a tunnel vision, ignoring the bigger picture. I need to find the right balance and ensure that my effort is spread out evenly throughout the entire task, not just a tiny aspect.
From experience, the best outcomes originate from everyone's contributions. Teams work best when everyone trusts each other to complete the tasks they are responsible for in the best quality and in a timely manner. It is not ideal for the whole team to be waiting on just one person to complete their task.
Although this is hard, it would be great if miscommunications between members can be eliminated. Groups that work well together often communicate well between each other. Being comfortable to be honest with each other and raise concerns, if any, when needed as well as commend each other's progress or achievements.
I have been told by other people that I can always be relied on to complete tasks. I can agree on this to a certain extent because I feel that once I am assigned a task, I feel that it is my duty to complete it on time and in good quality. However, there are times where I complete tasks last minute and perhaps not to a high standard.

Although we only had 90 seconds to work on each topic in the session, I decided to expand a little bit more. As you can see from the featured image, I couldn’t exactly string all my thoughts into words in such a short period of time. I feel that this is a great starter activity since it immediately allowed everyone to reflect on themselves and their work ethics. The easiest one for me to write about was perhaps Modify and the hardest was Reverse. This makes sense because as humans, we tend to feel more comfortable finding and discussing about our weaknesses rather than our strengths. When talking about ourself, we don’t want to come off as overconfident.

Knowing that we have less than 10 sessions left before the real TEDx event has given me a reality check. It has just kicked in today that we have so little time but so much to accomplish within these coming months. Because of this and my SCAMPER analysis, I feel that my main area of growth is Adapt. I need to be more aware and more adaptive to all the changes going on around me that leads up the event. I feel that I need to be more proactive and contribute as much as I can right now, to make this event the best it can be, for myself, the group, the speakers, and all our audience. So by the end of our event, I can be even prouder of what we will have accomplished by then.

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One thought on “TEDx: SCAMPER”

  1. Hi Tammy,

    Thanks for reflecting on the reflection–I’m pleased to see you took so much away from SCAMPER…it is important for us to challenge our own assumptions about how we work. If you are interested in activities like these, I would highly recommend you check out and read regularly from this site, I think this link in particular may interest you https://hbr.org/2007/01/how-leaders-create-and-use-networks

    Reply

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