Our third class began with a very thought provoking Ted talk, called, “Are we in control of our decisions?” by Dan Ariely. He basically tries to explain that our vision makes innumerable mistakes, even about things we know and understand and illusion is just a metaphor. We feel like we are making decisions, but that decision is just an illusion in reality. He mentions several examples to showcase poor decision making. What I interpreted is that people tend to fall for options where there is a +1(extra) or something free mentioned, they choose that option even if they do not require that specific item. Companies just add a third option to play with the mind of the consumer as that is their strategy to sell their products. Therefore, in order to make rational and wise decisions, we need to know ourselves and our preferences well.
Further, we were made to do this exercise where we had to pick top 5 traits that suited us the most out of all the cards that were laid down on the table. The cards were either blue, yellow, red or green. Through this exercise I understood the meaning behind each colour, and the right mechanism of judging people based on the colours they had chosen. For example, blue signifies rational and logical ; yellow signifies creative ; green signifies organised and red signifies emotional. This also helped me understand team making by understanding the colours of personalities that would compliment my colour of personality, creating the balance that is required to make an efficient team.
The class ended with another Ted talk called “Build a tower, build a team”, by Tom Wujec. The speaker talked about how children did a much better job than the elders while performing the marshmallow challenge where they had to make a tower using spaghetti, tape, sticks, string and a marshmallow. This was because the children spent time on prototyping before refining their idea. People tend to put their ideas across without listening to others and also directly jump onto creating without prototyping, this is where they go wrong. I understood that specialisation skills and facilitation skills combine together to create success.
It was an extremely effective class. I understood the importance of prototyping before refining our ideas. I understood the need to know our preferences well to make right decisions. I also understood the importance of finding the right set of balanced team mates and how to judge people in the right manner.
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