MANAGING THE CHAOS

Firstly, this was a very generous gift to all of us as well as a very difficult managerial project. My first response was a sense of agitation…I was dissatisfied and a bit depressed when I received my exam, and I also felt skeptical toward the plausibility of the project. I anticipated that due to the large group of students in the class and the vague task assignment outlined by our professor, it would be difficult if not nearly impossible to succeed in producing a “reasonable solution” to the project. Then when the chaos that I had expected began, I took two behavioral positions: Compete to win and Compromise. Naturally, I hoped that everyone in the class would support my ideas, however as there were 50 other students with the same objective as I had, I needed to compromise for the common wealth. I made two propositions regarding solving the dilemma of what do with the exam, as well as using organizational techniques to determine a class decision. I tried to be respectful and listen to the other students’ ideas, however I did shout a few propositions from my desk when we began to run out of time. Generally for the tasks like this the model when a big group of people divides into smaller groups for decision generating purpose works better, but the time factor didn’t allow us to use this strategy. Even when such proposal arose our group used the common sense to reject this idea and we managed the project quite effectively.