Reflection on the Outdoor Workshop – Communication in Other Environments

Group and Leadership 

My group didn’t appoint a team leader and no leader naturally emerged either. This was due to us all finding our own roles within the team and all being responsible for something. We found our roles naturally and no one delegated these to us. I think everyone was happy with the way our group worked and we didn’t think we were at a disadvantage due to the lack of a team leader. The most challenging thing for me was not knowing everyone’s name. This made it difficult to communicate as i struggled to get the right person’s attention without me knowing their name.

 

Explaining  

I think the group explaining to us did a good job at explaining how they made their den but not why they made it like they did. This could have been to a lack of time to prepare a presentation as they were still making finishing touches until the time was up. The presenter spoke clearly but didn’t seem very confident or sure of what she was saying.  Again, I think this was due to lack of preparation and this was one of the 5 P’s that I think was missed out. Another one of the 5 P’s that was missed would be postmortem. This is due to finishing the task set and not really thinking about how it went or what could’ve gone better.

 

Environment

The wind and noises of nature meant we had to project our voices and speak louder than we would need to in a classroom setting without losing clarity. It was quite difficult and sometimes it was necessary to repeat myself or ask someone to say something again. I was also more gestural and using more forms of non-verbal communication to help further get my point understood. When listening, the environment did tend to distract me as there was always something going on. To overcome this you would need to find a spot that wasn’t very stimulating or had a lot going on behind it to avoid total distraction. I don’t think it is possible to completely stay focused in an environment like that for the entire time.

 

Negotiation 

Our negotiation task was to get a bit of equipment that seemed necessary and important to another group. We failed in our negotiation as we didn’t have anything worth while to offer s we had used all our best equipment to build our own den so nobody found it a beneficial swap. The most challenging part of that was trying to decide how to tackle the negotiation and what strategy to use. We decided on a humorous approach but this was unsuccessful.