Facing New Challenging Environments

If someone asked me, how describe the days spent on the XX seminary I definitely would reply: a fist in the stomach.

I mean, working as an Engineer I used to face with duties to complete in days sometimes also in months. Past Wednesday, I learnt that a seven people team could complete a task in just 8 minutes. It was the case of the tennis ball task. To be fair, I felt disoriented when my fellows started to perform the task without any prior brainstorming and I was also more weirded when we were able to complete it better than others winning the competition. In that precise moment I understood to have lost too much time in my life in theorize things that only needed to be done.

As first day, in a practical environment I felt beaten since I was not part of the team but my performance was not to be thrown away completely. Indeed, I unconsciously worked for the group as observer. This unwitting role gave me the opportunity to have a look at the group dynamics and provide useful feedback during the first briefing with our coach.

However, life is not only made of success and if you let your guard, the defeat is just around the corner in a ‘car park’. Therefore, when Ian provided us this timed task we boldly started to face it. After 45 minutes, the disappointment to not have completed the duty was so big as to leave us speechless. However, our failure was the Ian’s lesson. Our coach really appreciated the share of methodology and a certain rudimentary form of time management but nothing else. I believe that this failure was the milestone of the next achievements. As evidence of that, we learned how to set properly a timeline, read and really understand the topic through the brainstorming, the importance of the roles assignment until the final product requested.

Therefore, when we received both the structured approach diagram and the quadrant of aims we understood to have two powerful tools to tackle the