Keir Duncan Situated Communication

Group & Leadership 

Within my team, there wasn’t an identified group leader. Instead, everyone brought different ideas to the team which were then included in the final model created. However, it could be said that some group members took more of a leadership role in the sense of contributing more to the group and making their ideas heard and telling others what to do. I found this useful as at times the group reached a stage where we didn’t know what to do next, but ideas from these people sparked creativity in others. What I found most challenging was compromising with some ideas created by the group and not solely basing the model on my own ideas.

Explaining

During the den building exercise, another group explained how they came about building their model. I felt as though that the team explained their model clear and concisely due to the fact they started from the beginning about how they decided the spot they had chosen and then went on to talk about materials and the process they went through to build their den. However, at times there were was more than one member of the team speaking which meant information could have been missed by recipients. I think this was due to a lack of preparation within the group, due to the short time frame given and most time being spent building the den.

Environment

Due to the fact that it was dry, communication wasn’t impacted massively. I feel as though being outside provided an informal environment in which to work with people I wouldn’t normally work with in university. Furthermore, being outside I felt as though we used informal language and had more of a laugh than when in university or the classroom. I think that if it had of been a windy day, then we would have had to spoke louder in order to be heard. Furthermore, if it had of been windy I think that gathering the group into a quieter area to discuss instructions and explain ideas would prove useful. When listening to instructions at the start of the task I was distracted by looking around to see where my group could build our den. This meant I wasn’t fully listening to instructions given and could see that others around me were in a similar situation. Furthermore, when teammates were communicating their ideas, sometimes I wasn’t fully listening due to the fact of being distracted by what other groups were doing and saying. In order to overcome this, I think I could have concentrated more on what others were saying to me as there was plenty of time afterwards to go around and see everyone else’s ideas.

Negotiation

My team had to negotiate with another team to let us join up with them and share their den. This proved to be difficult at first as other groups dens weren’t large enough for us all to fit into. However, we soon found a group to share a den with who agreed to share if we met their negotiation of giving them a team member to join their team.