Personally, the most reasonable way of doing this reflection assignment while incorporating most of what I have captured in terms of learning through experience, would be illustrating my own experience journey in the DStudio, while working with EY. My pre-departure phase was faced with the challenge of developing my own personal SWOT. Tough, yes but it was a really useful tool in terms of knowing and understanding my thought process as well as recognizing that indeed we all have personal battles with ourselves but identifying them means that one gets to work on them to improve who they are.
If I look back now and reflect on my day one experience, I felt so lost and confused by just sitting in a class that required me to throw out the window my typical Sauder student “hat” and switch on and off other different types of hats, the De Bono’s thinking hats. It was like practicing how to shift alter egos while still keeping focus on my thought process and that was not only difficult but scary. Being forced out of my comfort zone was reflected by having to work on huge group projects such as the design brief and solution, with different individuals, having different mindsets yet come to a similar but creative idea. Being different seemed to be the norm of this class. My doubts about this class that I had me consider dropping it because I was not too sure I was going to pull through a whole list of design techniques,when terminologies like Socratic thinking gave me the chills because I was never a philosophical individual. “How would I sit in a class full of brilliant minds and not feel small?” However, I was encouraged to share my thoughts because there was no right or wrong answer.
It was during my journey that I finally figured out that this was my leverage through which I could bring out my shy persona who wanted to learn new things and make her an inquisitive individual with constructive curiosity. This persona had gone through great lengths to acquire explicit and tacit knowledge.The journey was definitely not easy because having felt lost, I had to find my way back then continue on with my learning journey. However, as I reflect, I realize that feeling lost about and within my thought process was the whole point. How and what I used to find myself and my way back, was what really mattered. And this resonates with Albert Einstein’s saying on problem exploration, “if I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes the solution.” Indeed it took a while before the fog cleared up and I could carry on with my journey.
It was times like these that I zoomed in and out in order to see if I was on the right path or I took a wrong turn again.This required not only convergent thinking but also divergent thinking because a different thought process takes you out of the norm and throws you into an organic space that favors the incubation of sporadic ideas. This suddenly created a fit element as it ties into my team’s design solution. We literally threw our group meetings to an entirely different space and this shifted our mindset completely. It honestly felt like a magician was playing tricks on us because that is how our design solution came to be. How a simple change of environment disrupts thought process, is still quite a magical thing for me. I have recently implemented my team’s design solution to my own study environment and it has worked wonders because I get my work done both sufficiently and efficiently.
Although there are many positive moments especially now with the reception that my team’s design solution received, there were tough times that my team members and I went through before seeing the light. Team dynamics played hard ball with us many times and the frustration was sometimes unbearable but we conquered it. We put everything a side and focused on the important matters that would create meaning out of the entire experience, which is learning from the mistakes that we did and moving out of the grey area to clear blue skies. How you start does not really matter it is how you finish that makes the difference. I honestly have no regret having gone through this journey because the take-aways are simply invaluable towards my evolved thought process and personal growth.
http://www.debonothinkingsystems.com/tools/6hats.htm
http://mappingexperiences.com/