Final exam Flashcards
- Be able to describe the 4 basic rules of brainstorming and the conditions under brainstorming works the best.
Brainstorming works best when there is free movement of information where people are not scared to speak no matter how silly their idea is. Has an effective way to capture all the ideas. The team is well experienced and a well-defined process of solving conflicts exists. Works best when professionally facilitated.
the 4 basic rules of brainstorming
- Every contribution is worthwhile - even weird, way-out ideas, confusing ideas & specially silly ideas (freewheeling is welcomed)
- Suspend judgment: don’t evaluate ideas until you finish generating them. This means during the idea generation process we don’t evaluate each other’s idea or censor our own ideas
- The quantity of ideas is the goal – the more you think up, the more likely you are to find the best idea.
- Build on ideas already generated and look for combinations of ideas
- Every contribution is worthwhile
even weird, way-out ideas, confusing ideas & specially silly ideas (freewheeling is welcomed)
- Suspend judgment:
don’t evaluate ideas until you finish generating them. This means during the idea generation process we don’t evaluate each other’s idea or censor our own ideas
- The quantity of ideas is the goal
the more you think up, the more likely you are to find the best idea.
- Build on ideas
- Build on ideas already generated and look for combinations of ideas
- Be able to describe your primary “thinking preference” and give me an example from your own experience that demonstrates how it impacted your behavior in a team setting.
Analytical
- Logical problem solving approach
- Analytical & quantitative
- Rational
- Learns by mental analysis
Logical Problem solving approach example
- Stating the problem – we need to make a $250 donation from selling doughnuts
- Hypothesis-in a group of 5 each one of us needs to make $50 profit. If each box makes $3 profit then a minimum of 17 boxes. Which will be easy if we sell in 6 days it will be easy for each person to sell 3 per day.
- Test the hypothesis-we did a test run to see if it would be easy to sell doughnuts
- Collect the data- did a count on how many each person sold
- Analyze the data- each person sold 3 boxes in reasonably easy amount of time
- Draw conclusion- We realized it would be the easiest way to sell the doughnuts since we would not have to carry a large amount with us around campus and not have to worry about selling them all on the same day.
- Be able to describe how the Delphi concept can be adapted to a team setting to facilitate reaching closure on “Importance” and “Achievement” scores.
- Develop consequence matrix
- Using multi voting for the importance to establish the one with 100 importance
- Also “lock-in” by criterion, an achievement score of 100 for the alternative that does the best at meeting the criterion
- Round 1 data collection: each team member independently assigns a complete set of importance scores and achievement scores to all “un-locked” boxes
- Doing 3 rounds of data collection with each round having a summery for members to understand where the mean and standard deviations are
- If a team member on round 3 still wants to assign a score that is significantly higher or lower than the mean, there will need to be a reasonable written explanation.
- Do your trade-off matrix calculations to determine the teams chosen alternative
- Be able to describe and illustrate with an example the idea of “multi-voting”
- Voting for more than 2 outcomes or solutions. It is a prioritization method that is used to quickly reduce a list of options down to a manageable number In a regular vote a person either gets a 1 or 0 for each person’s vote, but for a multi vote there are multiple candidates and the voter can give a vote to each item that they think is important. Each individual has the same amount of votes and are typically 1/3 of the possible solutions/candidates. The votes are tallied up
There would be more than 1 round of votes where the most important ones are voted on again and again until only a few are left.
Multi Voting example
Deciding on which items to address in a meeting about improvements specified by current employees from a list of 1000 suggestions from the suggestion box
- Be able to explain and illustrate with an example how the “is/is not” method of identifying root causes works.
what didn’t happen is just as important as what did happen
1. You should know what ought to be happening and what is actually happening. By comparing them you can recognize if there is an importance difference or “gap”.
2. In organizations many deviations may exist at any given time. Therefore, it is important to ascertain how urgent or serious each one is, either now or likely to become so, and pick a problem to work on.
3. You need to investigate and identify the specifics of the problem deviation - that will entail knowing:
• What deviation occurred
• Where did it occur?
• When did it occur?
• To what extent did it occur?
• Who was involved?
4. You need to also identify those features that distinguish what the problem is from what it is not. I will distribute and discuss a worksheet that can help you with this step
5. At this point you are ready to start identifying potential causes or contributing factors leading to the occurrence of the deviation or problem. These should be clear-cut events or changes that are clearly associated with the occurrence of the problem, that is, with what the problem is (its presence) but not with what it is not (its absence)
6. Examine the potential causes that meet the “is - is not” criteria to see if they can reasonable causes. Your aim here is to infer or hypothesize how this potential cause could result in the observed problem
7. Now test the potential cause, checking to be sure it is not only the likely cause (the occurrence of the problem is always associated with this cause), but also that it is the only cause ( the occurrence of this problem is only associated with this cause). In some cases, the occurrence of the problem may be associated only when 2 or more causes occur in combination with each other.
- Given a short scenario & simplified version of the “is/ is not” worksheet, be able to illustrate how you would use it to (1) help you organized the information you have and (2) identify what questions you will need to ask to obtain the additional information need to help you identify the potential cause of a disturbance problem
pick a senario. make up an example and go through the is and is not. damn this shit sucks. most likely will be on the exam
- Be able to describe the 4 ways of dealing with resistance to change
- Education- issue has to do with information
- Participation – involvement in process
- Facilitation- getting people connected by recognizing and meeting needs
- Negotiation- some come out ahead and some loose out
i. Give them something in exchange for what you want them to do
- Be able to describe and discuss “The Big 4” insights that change agents need to keep in mind about significant organizational change.
- Clear dissatisfaction with current process
- Direction must be clear
- Convey confidence to others that we will succeed in what we are doing-over convey
- Embrace it – accept the fact
i. Be prepared to meet and clean up the mess. Don’t waste time trying to figure out who to blame
