Egging it On

This task was unique in the sense that it required out-of-the-box thinking. This is the first time I was involved in a task like this which seemed at first to have relevance only in a high school physics class. But now that I've had time to reflect on this activity, I have realized that this activity epitomizes the management experience. The planning and execution of this activity as elementary as it may seem requires the team to have a clear objective, promote teamwork, come up with strategies and evaluate them, and finally implement the best strategy.

Our team understood the task really well. The objective was to try not to break the egg from a height of 10 feet using 8 straws and 2 feet of tape. We conceptualized an idea really fast but we didn't take into consideration other possible strategies mainly because of time constraints. So skipped step 2. There seemed to be skepticism from some group members whether the proposed idea would work. But from the confidence of other members who came up with the idea, we seemed to ignore our doubts. In fact, once the model was drawn it seemed like the egg would withstand a drop from 10 feet. But we never discussed Step 2 of the planning process where we needed to evaluate group strengths that work in our favor and group weaknesses that could've held us back. We were vary of the small amount of time to conceptualize a design and hence we skipped those steps.

Once we were given the material to build a design, chaos ensued. The race was on and we had to bring the 2D model to life. As the building process went along, we all realized that it looked much prettier on paper than it did in the implementation. We seemed to stray away from the model that we drew because of difficulty trying to build it and the constraint that 50% of the egg shouldn't be covered. What resulted was a pretty bad model that was a mush of straws and tape attached to the egg. The problem was that we didn't evaluate possible setbacks associated with the design. We also didn't clearly evaluate the resources and how they would work together.

Once the model was built we also saw that the model wouldn't stay on its base and rollover to the side exposing the egg. We tried to fix it last minute...our last desperate attempt. Once the time allotted was ending, it seemed we were relying more on divine intervention than our confidence.

The result from the experiment is shown above : (
Humpty Dumpty (our egg's name) had a great fall.

We seemed to skip a couple of steps and didn't properly execute others. But our biggest problem was that we didn't consider or develop alternative strategies. A better way of saying it would be that when the bus was going down the ditch we didn't make an effort to try to stop it, we let it go down the ditch hoping that it wouldn't be damaged.

The biggest problem we faced was time constraints. We didn't have time to evaluate setbacks and in retrospect we should have done that. We also should have made plans to make an alternative model just in case the first model didn't look like it was going to work. We also should have taken into consideration other ideas and input from everyone.

Overall, I think in our haste to complete the task, we did a less than commendable job but I am sure with more time to conceptualize and implement, we would have come up with a better model.

Our egg had the loudest crack noise which fits my theory that if you do something bad...you should do it REALLY bad so people remember!

Song I'm Listening to: Good Morning by Kanye West