A Dream Come True

The past couple days I have been passing out the gift certificates to the winners who were not present at the bowling night. Since we went around to dorms on campus before our event selling the tickets, there were some students that won raflle prizes that weren’t there. At the end of last week I had e-mailed them and told them that they had won and how/where I could give them their prizes. I went to a couple of the dorms and found the kdis and gave them to them. I thanked them for their participation and their support of our event and the Room to Dream Foundation. It was very important to me to give them to them in person (versus putting it in their Friarbox or sliding it under their door) because through that direct contact I felt that it would make the greatest impact on them for what they had done for us and the charity. In this manner it would continue to raise awareness about the Room to Dream Foundation and perhaps they may be inclined to do the same thing in the future.

On Tuesday, Jeff, Sabrina, and I met in Feinstein to do the final edit of the video for our project. I arrived and they explained to me what they had gone through a day previous. Despite their efforts for many hours they had nothing to show for it and we were starting anew. I felt bad that I had been unable to join them on Monday but I had a take-home test and paper to work on and did not leave the library all day. We got there and the two of them had already been schooled as how to use the software and had seen the cut of the video, it seemed, about 3 dozen times. At one point while doing the editing Sabrina was predicting the things that were going to happen next, including an exclamation by myself. We sat there for a couple hours working on the cut.

One of the things we were most disapointed about was the inability to include the Room to Dream Video in our final cut. The video was a marketing piece about the Foundation and some children that they had helped and the different things that they had done and the impact it had. Since the video included the story of a few children and their medical conditions we could not reproduce and show it because of HIPA (Health Information Privacy Act) regulations. When we watched the video on the night of our event I think everyone there was especially moved by it and it is unfortunate that when we show it to the class, which includes some students who did not see it the first time, they will not be able to share in that. I think seeing that video would help to create some passion, for the cause of children and those that are chronically ill, among more of our classmates. 

After a couple hours working on it we finally came to our final draft which lasts about 12 minutes and shows us setting up, people arriving, Kris and Stefan speaking, and people bowling. In is a good comprehensive overview of the actual event. I guess this blog is everything preceeding and after the night. While the video copies were burning we worked on our presentation. Jeff had brought along the guidlines from Tom along with the notes that he and Sabrina had made the day prior. We divided those up and made our powerpoint slides with information about the event, our finances, what we learned, and what we would have changed. We divided it all up and tomorrow we are meeting to discuss what we will say on Saturday. Since our video is 12 minutes long, and we only have 20 min. to present, we will all need to be very succint.

When talking about the things we learned it is going to be difficult to ecapsulate all of that into an eight minute talk (divided by three people). I personally learned so much about the power of collaboration. As someone that had never really stepped outside of the bubble of the college environment to seek outside assistance it was amazing to me the things that could be accomplished. Through the help of people like Bob, Dean Gemma, and Stefan we were able to put together a successful event. With people like Bob and Dean Gemma, who did not have a stake in our event, they gave us great ideas for how to improve it and helped us put together something great. From nothing came this bowling event with sponsors, prizes, and speakers all through the collaborative efforts of some many people. Thank you so much to everyone that helped us get there.

Another thing I learned was the ways people are willing to help. When we went out to seek sponsorships from restaurants and others It was amazing to me that people would indeed do so. While searching for these sponsors we tried to convey to them the benefit that they could derive from it as well. As we’ve touched on before, when seeking partners it is important to make them feel as if they are indeed a PARTNER and not just someone that is being utilized without return. This holds true for our event and outside into the business world. I hope these people did indeed feel like they were a part of our efforts. If they did not then I am even more grateful for their willingness to help even though they felt there was no return for them. Thank you.

Tomorrow we meet to wrap up the presentation and Saturday we do it. Then the class is over…

-SRD

Jeff and I met in Feinstein on Monday to begin the tape to DVD conversion process in the media lab.  Luckily, Shaun spoke to Matt Marchant at the beginning of last week who informed him that this was a somewhat time consuming process.  This was good information to have, because it allowed us to plan our time accordingly.  I also passed this information on to Chris Braga.

(Shaun was unable to attend Monday’s meeting because he was studying for finals.  For this reason we planned another meeting for Tuesday, so that we could all be present.)  Jeff and I weren’t entirely familiar with the software, nor how long this process was going to take, so we wanted to get a head start. Upon arrival, the tech people on site were helpful.  Going into the meeting Jeff and I knew we were going to have to cut out one major component of our event out of the tape. The taping of the event included the Room to Dream DVD.  This is an absolutely wonderful piece which shows some of the RTD children, the before and after of their rooms, and the construction process.  Unfortunately, due to HIPPA laws we are not allowed to show the DVD to the class, and had to edit it out.  However, Jeff, Shaun and I wanted to maintain a copy for ourselves.  So before we began to cut and edit our tape, we wanted to convert the unedited original into a DVD.   While we were waiting for our uncut tape to convert into a QuickTime, Jeff and I began to plot out our presentation.  This was an enlightening process for both Jeff and I as we were able to reflect on our project together, and come up with things we would have done differently, and the tremendous lessons we learned.

One of the lessons that we learned, which I was able to directly relate to a past theme was the utilization of technological resources, which we discussed in written response 6.  This was something our group did not properly take advantage of until later in our project.  As I have discussed before, once we smartened up and used the other blogs/wikis, we obtained some of our best information, which undoubtedly enhanced our event. The ideas that were generated by our peers far outdid anything that a Google search brought up. Looking back, Wikinomics was a great source of examples of people and companies that are adjusting accordingly to a world fueled by technology. What many of us fail to realize is that we do not and will never have all the answers.  Instead of hoarding information, it is time to open our eyes to the exponential progress that comes from sharing knowledge.  The modern organization is not about hierarchies and downward management.  Today’s organizations call for people to be prepared to build sustainable firms by managing intricate webs of collaboration.  Oftentimes, these organizations will utilize tools such as blogs and wikis to create an open system that embraces the free flow of ideas.  This project then gave us the most relevant experience with technology and collaboration that I have had to date.  It also provided us with concrete examples of the benefits that can be attained from utilizing these tools.

A key component in this environment is trust.  Our class was initially extremely resistant to the utilization of these resourceful tools, and ultimately lacked trust.  We were clearly still very much trapped in our bubbles, and were incapable of seeing the utility that could come from sharing our findings, and learning from others’ findings.  Inside the bubble it makes absolutely no sense to share successful practices, or ways to advance.  However, outside of the bubble, it was easy to see how information from say PC Youth Outreach’s blog could help our event.  Once we began to actually collaborate with one another, we were able to increasingly build trust.  This then translated into our discussions and posts.  Eventually, everyone was willing to share useful information with one another.  It was great when we could finally come to a point where we would have open dialogues where questions were asked, and advice and pointers were given. I now see how imperative it was for us to realize that we could attain significantly more success in conjunction with one another.  Towards the end of the semester our class began to take the shape of an organization, whose departments were mutually accountable for one another.  We even went as far as to base our success on the collective.

Jeff and I also discussed how much more energized we became once we were closer to the cause.  The closer we were to the cause, the more energized we became, and that was the point when our project really took off. Chapter 10 of Senge’s book really spoke to me.  I was engaged in this project from the beginning, but our first meeting with Stefan and Bill created a devotion I never knew I had in me.  Stefan and Bill had so much knowledge to offer Jeff and I.  Through talking to them we gained invaluable information. I vividly remember getting home from that meeting and feeling different, unlike my usual self.  I came to realize that this was because I finally felt genuinely connected to cause, and motivated to make a difference. This fundraiser allowed us to work toward something that was so far beyond ourselves.  I personally felt like I finally found my niche.  The meeting made such a tremendous impact, that that night I decided to “[take] stock personally,” and found myself constantly re-affirming that this charity, and others like it, are what are important to me, what energize me.  I genuinely care about creating a better, more sustainable environment for these children, and at our event, we were able to see how our efforts were going to improve their lives. Our group was fortunate enough to have dealt with inspired people and ultimately, leaders, whose energy was so captivating and contagious, that we could not help but be drawn to their ideas.  Because of the wonderful relationships we had with our partners, our visions were possible.  With this said, I wish we had created this passion earlier in the game.  Reflecting back on everything has been a very enlightening process, and I know I could go on for days.  Reading some of my past blog posts, I am also trying not to repeat myself.  I am happy to say that my group did a pretty decent job reflecting on areas where we could have improved, and lessons we learned all along.  I also don’t want to bore anyone, as we will be discussing a lot of this in our presentation.  I could talk for days about the lessons that were learned while doing this project.  But I will leave some of that to Shaun.  Thank you for an interesting and insightful semester everyone! I look forward to presenting, and hearing everyone else’s presentations.  Good luck next semester : )

I remembered reading about termites and how they organize themselves to complete a task.  The reading is called “Strategic Termites: The Power of Self Organization”.  Here is a passage from the reading…

 “The termites begin their work by moving earth in a random fashion. Gradually, distinct piles of earth begin to emerge. These then become the focus of sustained building activity, resulting in columns located in more or less random positions. These are built to a certain height, then construction stops. When columns emerge that are sufficiently close together, building resumes until they are joined at the top to form a rounded arch. In this way the termite nest evolves as an increasingly complex structure, with the arch as the basic unit. The approach eventually results in a kind of free-form architecture, comprised of interlocking caverns and tunnels that are ventilated, humidity-controlled and beautifully formed. African termite nests may rise twelve feet high and measure a hundred feet across. They can house millions of termites. In terms of scale, they’re equivalent to human beings creating a building over a mile high.”

I noticed some strange comparisons between our groups and termites.  Essentially, we were given one task to complete:  Perform a fundraiser for a local charity organization.  Immediately, ideas began to flow and we all worked randomly on different leads and different ideas, without really knowing exactly which direction we were going.  Furthermore, no one was telling us what to do, when to do it, or how to do it.  We were a group that consisted of individuals working randomly on tasks that would ultimately come together.

Along the way, there were moments when our progress, and essentially our work, stopped.  We ran into road blocks that caused us to stop and essentially rearrange what we were doing to overcome them.  Obviously this is not an extremely close relation but I think a lot can be drawn from this comparison.  Essentially, order emerged out of the chaos that the termites were in.  Both our group and our project were FULL of chaos in the beginning, and ultimately up until the last few weeks.  Eventually, however, everything began to just fall into place.

I think one lesson I took away from this is that mangers do not necessarily have to micromanage everything!  There are of course instances where managing minor details is important, but it is equally important in other instances to let your employees work and allow things to come together.  As the termites have proven, self-organization can result in tremendous accomplishments, but there are certain elements necessary.  The termites do not have direct orders or “complete plans”; they are free to do whatever they want to ultimately contribute.  They have “plans” but they are not constrained or limited by those plans.  This basically translates into the fact that they know they will encounter things that disrupt their plans and they will have to change.  Our group did just that.  We changed our event a few times because the system of our group allowed us to do so.  We did not have complete plans that we HAD to follow.  I think as a manager, I will understand better that certain tasks require some guidance, but not necessarily micro-management and “complete plans”.

Jimmy’s suggested to have Tom put up the comments about why we received the grade we did so we could learn and grow from this experience was a fantastic idea.  This concept immediately made me think of our project, and about the importance of evaluation and continuous improvement.  Throughout the project, the only real evaluations that we had were the few peer assessments along the way.  However, the peer assessments focused entirely on individuals within the group.  The comments were posted so that we could improve in the areas that needed it, and I think that really helped us grow as individuals

I started to think about what things might have been like if our group developed a weekly assessment system where we ultimately evaluated where our group currently is, and where we ultimately want to be.  I think we made a serious error by not evaluating ourselves (as a team) along the way.  By not doing this, we completely took the continuous improvement element out of the picture.  I think a lot of the things we are currently coming up with concerning what we learned or what we should have done differently, are all things that we could have discovered earlier by simply talking about our performance.

I think our group became so caught up with the external elements that we were dealing with that we forgot to analyze the internal.  When we did in fact find time to focus on the internal, it was directed towards focusing on the individual.  One of the things that we came up with that we decided we would have done differently was to have a set meeting schedule (i.e. Mondays and Wednesdays at 8:00).  We had trouble dealing with our schedules but if we had set a time that we ultimately managed the rest of our schedule around, then it would have been a lot easier.  This is something that Matt Marchant’s group recommended to the rest of the class, and is something we agreed was a great idea, but for whatever reason never decided to implement it.  In our weekly meetings, I think we could have taken 10-15 just to talk about how we are doing and set mutually agreed upon goals which we could strive to achieve.  At the next meeting, we would take out our goals and evaluate our performance based on those goals.  I think continuous improvement is something we focused on in class, but our group never really managed to incorporate it into our group.

As the semester is coming to an end, we all are involved in many different team projects.  I have had two other team projects that I just recently completed and it was almost comical to compare them to our team in this class.  As I have said before, I have never been on a team for a group project which requires so much collaboration, and so much interaction.  The same thing can be said in our class.  I have never been in a class when I knew every single persons name and actually cared about their performance in the class, not just my own.

One project in particular really made me think about the system that Providence College, and many other colleges have in place.  The group consisted of six people.  I can honestly say that I did not know the names of 3 of them people until we came to the end of our project.  Also, I think I had only interacted with 2 of them before in my whole career at Providence College, even though I have been in some classes with them.  However, when we look at our group, not only do I know all of them on a level much higher than what is required to complete the project, I think we are forming friendships through this whole project.  It is actually funny because I have been in a group with Shaun before, but the focus was simply on getting the work done, and it never required this type of interaction.  Yet when we came into this project, I really didn’t know that much about Shaun or about Sabrina.

I started to think about whose fault it is that I didn’t know the people in my group of 6 for the other class.  The first thing I thought was that it must be my fault.  Partly, it may be, because I could have taken more of an interest in the people I was working with.  However, mainly it was the system.  The system that the college uses, in general, does not allow for these relationships to exist.  Ultimately, as we learned before, we are working towards grades, not collaboration, networking, passion, etc.  On this project, our class and our group was working towards all of those things. 

What will it take for this to change?  In my opinion, experience is everything.  I don’t think that other students, and the administration, will truly understands how it feels to be on a team like this until they actually do it themselves.  However, I don’t know if this is very feasible, because so few members of the administration buy into this, and ultimately they are the ones making the decisions.  Hopefully some day, they realize the value that could be gained here, and eventually change…I guess we will have to wait and see.

I think this is something I can take away from this project for at least the last semester of my career here.  Even though I might be going against the system, I now realize the importance and the value of relationships in groups, and I am going to strive to create these relationships in whatever group projects I have left.  I think this is something I can take into the business world as well. As we learned before, sustainability is based on relationships. I think that if I could do something differently in other groups, it would be to focus on getting to know the other people before focusing only on the task at hand.  Ultimately, this extra time spent on this is not time that is wasted, but time that creates value. 

Jeff and I met tonight to fine tune the excel spreadsheet containing our finances.  Our main agenda though was to write thank you notes to four individuals who were crucial to the success of our event.  We wrote thank you notes to Kristen Kuliga, who is my boss, Kelly’s contact, and the donator of the Doug Flutie signed photographs.  We also wrote a thank you to Dean Gemma, for all of his insight, his charitable donation, and for attending our event.  Our next thank you went to Joann Suletenfuss, Executive Direction of the Room to Dream Foundation.  Joann was more than willing to help us, and ultimately got us all of our printing materials for free.  The last one went out to Bob Rothenberg, our contact at the Ronald McDonald house.  As Jeff and I were writing his thank you, we realized all over again, what an amazing person Bob really is.  Bob didn’t know Jeff and I from a hole in the wall, but volunteered his time to meet two complete strangers at Starbucks to discuss a fundraiser.  Jeff and I discussed that we rarely cross paths with generous people like Bob.  It was refreshing and admirable to know that there are people like him who are willing to share their wisdom.  Bob was resourceful, and a breath of fresh air compared to what we had dealt with throughout this project, and we wanted Bob to know how much we appreciated everything he had done for us.

We still have one last thank you write.  We need to write a thank you to our guest speaker, but after writing four thank yous, we were pretty burnt out.  Although we realized after the fact that we should have written Kris’ thank you first, it’s okay that we didn’t, because we want Shaun to be apart of this one.  Shaun didn’t have direct contact with the other four individuals, so it wasn’t a huge deal that he couldn’t make tonight’s meeting.  We also have not yet written a formal thank you to Stefan or Bill Hughes, because we want to wait until our debrief to present them with some sort of token of our appreciation.  I think Jeff mentioned in a previous post that him and I met after the event to write a quick thank you email to both Stefan and Bill, where we expressed our gratitude, and explained that we were excited to extend a more formal thank you at our debrief.

Reflecting back on the event, overall, we were extremely fortunate in the help and guidance we received.  Jeff and I realized that we made some amazing contacts throughout this project.  After coming to this realization, we not only wanted these individuals to know how much they impacted us, but we wanted to ensure that we kept in touch with them by keeping the communication channels open.  As we mentioned very early on, one of our main goals of this project was to create relationships that would extend beyond the scope of this project, and we feel as though we will be able to genuinely accomplish this.

As I was writing this I decided to take a quick peek at some of my past posts and I naturally ended up reading four of them in their entirety.  I hadn’t realized what a tremendous amount of information was contained in them.  It’s funny to read those posts, and only now realize that we had no idea how resourceful the information in those early posts are.  If I wasn’t so exhausted I would apply some of the materials now, however I can barely keep my eyes open.  I will surely be on soon to correlate that information to our fundraiser.  I just thought it would be important to keep everyone updated.  Jeff, Shaun and I will be meeting early next week to plan out our presentation.  In the meantime, Jeff is going to speak to his father about ways to appropriately thank our guest speaker.  Also, prior to our next meeting, we must convert our camcorder cassette to DVD.  We are still waiting for Stefan to contact us, so that we can schedule our debrief dinner. I know he has a Gala coming up, so I can only imagine how busy he has been, but we look forward to hearing from him, and will keep everyone updated as soon as we know when we will be meeting.

I started to look back at some of the readings we had earlier on in the semester and I came across the reading “Kerr, On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B”. Kerr’s Reading talked a lot about how the system is designed to reward one thing, while the subjects within the system are actually striving for another.  I started thinking about our project and what we are actually being rewarded for.  The structure of the assignment is such that you are not rewarded based on how much money you make.  The project is designed so that the reward is the experience of networking, planning events, collaborating, and dealing with problems as they come up.  Essentially, the reward is based on how much we are able to take away and learn from the process.

However, I started to think about what reward I was actually seeking, and what reward I think our group was seeking.  Our group wanted to raise as much money as we possibly could and make a difference in these children’s lives.  The intrinsic reward would be knowing that we helped in the process of giving a child “room to dream” by raising additional funds for the organization.  In this case however, although we were striving to raise the most amount of money (which is not what our systematic reward is based on), we were also seeking the rewards of the system.  We all recognized how valuable this experience was and how much we have learned and grown through this experience.

            One important thing to realize about this project is the reward we were not in fact seeking was just a good grade.  In all other projects, and experiences at Providence College, although teachers may have wanted us to get something out of whatever experience we were involved with, our primary goal ultimately boiled down to getting a better grade than anyone else.  This is not the case here, and I think that is part of the reason why this was such a great experience.

I e-mailed all of our raffle winners who were not in attendance on the 19th so that we can get them their prizes.  Now we just need to get their prizes to them.

The next step is working on our presentation