# Reflection - WRSX Team Work **Date: Monday, May 10, 2021 20:32** # Reflection ## 1. Describe the situation > Describe the situation, the stimulant for reflection. Try to pick “high value” experiences. This is: • an event or outcome(s) • an issue, or set of theoretical concerns. As part of my Executive MBA I was asked to complete a simulation event on a fictional marketing company called WRSX. We used the same teams that had been prepared for our previous assessment, a critical analysis of a 'Bed and Breakfast' Hotel in Scotland, the Oak Tree Inn. The team submitted two formative assignments in advance of starting the 'board meetings' phase of the simulation, the first assignment was a strategic analysis including a SWOT, PESTLE, Ansoff, Five Forces, and VRIO analysis. The second assignment was a review of the strategic choices available to the organisation. My aim was to do well in the simulation, for several reasons 1) I want to do well in everything I put my mind to 2) I was genuinely interested in the content and also the 'gamification' of the pedagogy and curriculum 3) I knew it contributed to my final module mark. ## 2. What was good/ bad about the situation? > The aim is to highlight two things in order to articulate your 'theories of action' that I used in the situation: > - **Value judgments**. Reflects presumptions you have about the _goals_ of the situation- *why* you believe those things. This exposes your presumptions about what the goals of the situation were about. > - **Causality** This highlights what the goals were and what the theory was about how the goal was to be achieved. I recognised the importance of the team to our success and therefore my success from the outset. Realising that context is king, and that it was very unlikely that we would ever be able to meet up face to face, it was important that the group established a comraderie, albeit one still based on professional principals. I also recognised that students studying for an MBA are more likely to be executives who are used to exerting influence over their colleagues, whereas in the MBA context we were all equals and we had to treat each other as such. Finally, I realised that although the WRSX scenario was artificial in its nature, that none of us had ever been forced to work together in this way previously. Given this I quickly tried to establish baseline information, including what names people went by, where they worked/ their background, and established the principle that collective decision making was critical. This also helped me to establish the working culture of the group, and how their current working environment and personalities informed their approach. I was also keen to establish myself as an enabler of the group, whether that was by helping to facilitate decision making, prompting that opportunities were arising, facilitating technology and collaboration or even just socialising and joking more generally. I was happy that the team was working effectively, and that I had adopted a leadership and organisation role within the group. I was also pleased that I had started an action log and everyone was getting their due credit for their contribution to the group and overall analysis. To me, having parity of esteem and parity of contribution across the team was an essential component of effective group work. I did not want anyone to think that there was a leader, but that we were all *[[primus inter pares]]*. In terms of team dynamics, it was clear that Rob was eager to help collate and synthesise the module content. However I found that by using the same shared document for his notes and our analysis it became difficult to navigate and disentangle 'the signal from the noise'. Tom's contributions were often insightful in that he had a different perspective and skillset. His contributions were often helpful to keep the team on track, and it was clear that he had clear standards and a clear vision for how he expected assignments to be completed. Nick felt more of a junior partner in the team as he was often quiet, he is probably introverted. Shoaib was often very logical in his approach and wanted to feel that he had explored all opportunities before progressing. I believe that this approach laid the bedrock of the ultimate success of the team. I am happy that we all got through the simulations and all assessments without arguments and with a collaborative approach. Perhaps in hindsight the collaborative approach I had led in setting meant that people were unwilling to have disagreements for fear of having arguments. My only regret is that both individually and as a team I was slightly unorganised going into the simulation. I had not reviewed our business case in advance, so my knowledge and awareness of the simulation was rusty. Given that I had also not performed my best analysis in previous team meetings, I was happy to defer to other's ## 3. Evaluate > Put our assumptions regarding our 'theory of action' to the test. Ask myself: *How accurate is my mental model to reality?*. Theories of Action describe: • our presumptions about goals, • the presumptions about the extent to which outcomes satisfied these goals, and • our presumptions about what acts (our and other people) caused those outcomes The approach yielded dividends during the Oak Tree Inn presentation assessment as well as in the scenario. During the Oak Tree Inn presentation we had an unexpected technical failure and despite this we still performed well, professionally and as a team, as confirmed by feedback from the assessors: "Good spread of team contributions across the presentation; technical challenges were handled well to make the overall experience seamless" (assessment feedback). This set us in good stead for our WRSX strategy, as it required effective team decision making under pressure. This has been confirmed by a survey- as part of this assessment I asked all my teammates to rank each of the team members, including themselves, by who had contributed most to the team. Four out of the five team members responded and the survey results are included as Appendix 1. From this analysis it is clear that I was consistently considered to be a team player; overall I had the most consistent ranking of all the team members while being tied for the most contributive team member. While there is still a degree of assumption here, I believe my 'middling' ranking (no respondent thought I contributed the most) was due to that I had not been as prepared as I should have been prior to each of the board meetings. If I had been more prepared I think I could have swayed my team members further, and we could have achieved an even more positive result. ## 4. Conclude ### Notes from Tom - Year 123 business plan - Observational - Option about internal governance vs sell off. - Underestimated USA - Corruption - corporate responsibility - Tolerance of risk- went backwards - models we used - BCG, SWOT, Porters, VRIO ### Notes from Shoaib Internally we decide to get rid of the old people and bring in new culture, also outsourced HR department. Externally we didn't expand into China but did go India. The partnership in India was good choice because of the Bollywood link. Also we didn't sell off one of the businesses. ### Notes from assessment brief The coursework is assessed on: - The quality and depth of your critical analysis, that demonstrate your understanding of strategy, not whether you took the “right” or “wrong” decisions in the game (30%) - Use of appropriate model/frameworks/ theories/concepts (30%) - The quality and depth of critical reflection and what could be done differently (30%). - Style (10%) ### WhatsApp chat commentary/ log - Tom sets up Whatsapp group - Rob promotes collaborative working through Google docs - Ed gets right names and background infromation, searching for strengths - Ed checks that everyone is OK with Google docs. - Rob creates Google doc and shares it. Starts building content - General discussion of MBA and apprenticeship - Tom and Rob have general discussion about OTI - Ed suggests changing approach to the OTI assessment and prompts for questions with the owner - Further conversation about the company led by Rob - Rob updates Google doc following Q&A with OTI owners - 22/2 - Tom starts discussion about WRSX, shares relevant documents - Group meets to discuss the document so far and to submit the first assessment - Rob suggests logging each board meeting - Group organises meeting to discuss next steps and WRSX assessment 2. Ed tries to ensure all present. - 11/3 - Rob prompts to move forward with the analysis - 14/3 - Ed posts update re his work on the business plan - Shoaib sorts out inviting members to the teams meeting - Nick forecasts his availability and what he can do to offer support - Ed suggests using Pearson template - 19/3 - Ed submits WRSX analysis to the site following some work on it. - 23/3 - Shoaib sets up meeting OTI - Nick unavailable - work issue - 29/3 - Team meeting re OTI. Ed posts actions afterwards. - 29/3 - Tom adds docs to the OTI presentation - 31/3 - Nick contribution to OTI doc/ presentation - 1/4 - OTI Meeting and actions posted afterwards - Ed check that PPT will retain formatting - Lots of discussion about OTI presentation, content, timing etc. - 12/4 - presentation day. Tech issues. Law breaking. James unmuted. Rob ripping his dick off. - 13/4 - simulation day. Helping with tech issues. - ongoing discussions about each of the board meetings and our results. - Ed had to leave for a fucking study group. What a waste of time. ## Links