Video, photo, and graphic design have always been strong areas of interest to me. When I first heard that students would be producing a final video project in my Intro to Marketing course, I was excited at the opportunity to convey information using my creativity in ways that weren’t limited to PowerPoint, Prezi, and attempts at clever presentation taglines.
Visions of witty commercials, cinematic design, and professional effects filled my head while I prepared for our first team meeting to discuss the direction that our group would take the video in. After this meeting, however, I soon realized that my thoughts about the video’s potential were not at all on par with my teammates’ thoughts on the video.Since every person on our team had a different version of what they thought the video should look like, it took us a very long time to whittle them all down to one we could all feel a connection with.
Through the video project, I learned, and would still argue, that our team’s creative process became more difficult with an increase in the number of people that were involved in it; which almost seems counter-intuitive. I think that, in this particular instance, this may have been due to an overload in ideas, in addition to a lack of willingness to communicate honestly.
I think the true problem lay in the fact that our team was unable to communicate openly and comfortably about how we really felt about team member’s ideas. Many situations arose in which one teammate would suggest an idea but others in the group would have to mull over it for a while before unwillingly agreeing with it because they were resistant to potentially causing conflict. This awkwardness and reluctance to speak truthfully was a difficult problem to remedy. The fact that we knew that our team mates were going to evaluate our performance made us very careful around them. This fear of being disliked and potentially rated poorly could have been one of the reasons our team struggled to have honest open conversation.
In the end, however, I was extremely grateful for the product that our team managed to pull together and was ecstatic about not having to prepare a final presentation!