Today’s session (11 September 2017)

Hi everyone

Today was our practical day, as we applied our problem solving and decision making knowledge to The Ball Game and The Great Egg Throw.

(You will be asked about both of these exercises in Assignment 4 so, if you missed today’s class, please ask your classmates about what they experienced).

Both The Ball Game and The Great Egg Throw are opportunities for you to reflect on the ‘book learning’ that you have done so far, as part of this paper. What I would like you to do, is to think about how useful these various PSDM models and techniques are in solving ‘everyday’ problems.

Quite often we just ‘do’ something when confronted by a problem. There may be no obvious process of identify-define-explore-action, DECIDE or ‘applying the scientific method’ in these situations. Today was an opportunity to solve a problem, to make decisions and to reflect on how the theory works in practice.

We started with The Ball Game. This is a simple exercise in which a team has to pass a ball between team members in a shorter and shorter period of time. Between attempts you should have thought about what is going on and how you would describe the process that you used.

On the first attempt, our first team took about 29 seconds to pass the ball eight times. Both teams quickly got this down to ten seconds and less, finally getting close to two seconds. However, along the way, the team had to try different methods / solutions to achieve better and better times.

As the pressure went on to reduce the time taken to pass the ball, the teams had to find new / better ways to complete the task. On reflection, the earlier methods used were time-consuming and offered little opportunity to reduce the time down to the target time of less than two seconds. This required us to go from a programmed decision making response, towards a mix of critical evaluation of the rules of the ball game and creative input to find a workable solution.

Some things for you to think about include:

* Whether you used any identifiable process to accomplish the task?

* What steps you took to get your time down to two seconds or less?

* Whether there are any applicable decision making models that helped you?

* Were there any particular problem solving techniques that you used during the exercise?

Often we begin solving a problem by starting with a ‘familiar’ solution which we have seen before, such as standing in a circle to pass the ball. As the task becomes more difficult (but still straight-forward) we might introduce critical thinking to help shape our solution. This approach is logical and sequential (e.g. “we can pass the ball quicker if we stand closer together and if we practice our passing technique”). If the task becomes ‘unrealistically’ difficult (e.g. get you time down to under two seconds) then we need to think more creatively by checking our objectives, questioning the rules and / or finding new ways of doing things. Our method of passing the ball through multiple hands was quite different at the end of the exercise from what it had been at the start!

From there, we moved on to The Great Egg Throw.

The Great Egg Throw (hereafter GET, for short) is a team challenge in which you need to devise a way to throw a raw egg further than any other team, without breaking the egg. Each team was given a raw egg (wrapped in gladwrap!) and roughly an hour in which to scavenge any resources that they needed to complete the task successfully. Each team was also given an instruction sheet with various additional rules (e.g. stay on the campus; don’t use the faculty admin office; make sure that you behave ethically and responsibly; etc.)

When you reflect on your performance after the event, you might like to think about some of the following:

* Planning the best solution to the GET (this is the Task Problem)

* Finding resources which could help you (this is the Resource Problem)

* Bringing it all together (this is the Execution Problem)

* Examining how you make your group decisions during this exercise

* Considering ethical and socially responsible activity during this exercise.

There are also various PSDM decisions which you may need to make along the way. For instance, how did your group handle disagreements or different opinions? Did your group solve problems by making:

* Random decisions?

* Take turns deciding?

* Delegated authority?

* Shared discussion?

* Participatory voting?

* Consensus (unanimous; disagree and commit)?

You might also like to think about how ethics and social responsibility affect your choices, with regard to:

* Ownership of the resources and materials which you used in the GET?

* Permission to use these resources and materials?

* Safety?

* Fair / unfair?

* Sustainability?

* Wastage?

* Clean up?

(In previous years, each team has been asked to test their activity against one of four PSDM models which we have discussed in class and you might like to try this in your own time, using some of the models that you are familiar with.)

Those students who have started preparing their answers for Assignment 4 will know that today’s work is very relevant to this assignment. The practical element of today’s work is intended to encourage you to think expansively about how you might arrive at solutions to various problems. It is one thing to ‘do’ a paper on PSDM but if you aren’t applying what you have learned to everyday problems then it all remains rather ‘academic’.

Please complete the handout that I gave you today and return it to me. This will help me to check that you are on-track with your study and it is a valuable reflective opportunity for you.

Pics from today’s Great Egg Throw are available on Moodle, under Session 7.

Please note that next Monday we have our first industry guest coming to talk to us about Problem Solving and Decision Making in industry. This session will be held in room WK 254, starting at 1:00pm. Please be there early so that we can welcome our guest and make a start on time.

See you all next Monday!

Cheers

Phil