Week 3.1 – 11th June. 2021
Lencioni’s Theory
This week is a tough one, due to loosing a team member. But after reading Lencioni’s; “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team“, I can clearly see where we went wrong, and how we need to improve.
In Lencioni’s report; we learn that;
However, you must face dysfunction and teamwork as your first priority.
Lencioni’s 5 key questions;
- 1) Do team members openly and readily disclose their opinions?
- 2) Are team meetings compelling and productive?
- 3) Does the team come to decisions quickly and avoid getting bogged down by consensus?
- 4) Do team members confront one another about their short comings?
- 5) Do team members sacrifice their own interests for the good of the team?
Conclusion
After asking these questions to myself and about the team, I do have a clear answer for all. But as Lencioni states, if your answers are mostly no’s you are not going to progress very far, or in this case survive.
Further more in Alcwyn Parker’s video discussion on the book;
“The five Dysfunctions of a Team“, he reveals what it means to build Trust, and how starting small is the best way to begin the process.
Alcwyn explains that;
In order to reach this goal though, we need to socialise, out of work time, and get to know each other better, and to work on solving something together as a team. From this action, we should start to build more trust with each other and understand each others ability’s and start to open up and be honest about what we feel, and if we are struggling with anything.
Do we have enough trust to embrace conflict?
Alcwyn highlights a couple of exercises for the team to try out, but they are only going to have positive results, if the team has built their trust with one another first.
However these questions below, can now only be answered by the 4 of us, left in our newly formed team. I can only express, how I feel about loosing a team member who was focused on being the leader of the group, left us at week 3, but it was not confirmed until week 4 that she had left for good. We don’t actually know why, as there was no communication at all.
The leader tried to delete all the spreadsheets that we had worked on together.
I believe in being open and honest from the word go, especially if you are to build a solid foundation for a new relationship, such as a new team.
In my opinion if you are to be a leader, after reading many different articles and books, I feel it comes down to a couple points that are necessary to put into action, to help to build a small solid team.
- 1) Try and build a relationship with each new team member first, find out what they like and dislike, in order to get to know them. (This should help to build a solid bond between the team members, and allow trust to develop between one another).
- 2) Finally when you have worked on bonding, and have trust in each other, to start work on a mini project together, to understand, the individual skills of each member, how you each deal with conflict, when their may be a difference of an opinion etc., and how to openly say if you are stuck and need help.
Radical Candor
When I stated how I felt about leadership, and helping to build a strong team to one of my peers, they suggested I look at the book; “Radical Candor: How to Get What You Want by Saying What You Mean“.
I realised it linked to my point of view entirely. I have always been a caring and considerate person, and if I know how to do something that others can’t, I choose to show them, as I would want to be shown. But for this one module, I was expecting the leader, to at least say if she was struggling, or if she wasn’t enjoying the module, or anything. But we received nothing.
A lack of Communication
As Alcwyn states in his video discussion; “Effective Communication”. Miscommunication can lead to poor performance, and hurt feelings and a lack of motivation to complete the task at hand. This is exactly how I felt, and I think the rest of the team did too. We did break down, and we stopped communicating about certain things, and was paying more attention to working individually than with each other.
Back in Gear!
However we all had the same goal to complete this module, and create a really interesting pitch deck and a great prototype for a new adventure game, and from here we started to refocus on the important tasks at hand. We got back into action, knowing it was vital to pick up things from where they were left hanging and divide the tasks evenly, to suit our skill sets.
All Systems Go…
Team of 4 – onwards and upwards!
I feel we are bonding slowly but surely over the discord channel, and this is where things start to get really exciting, we all voted who out of the 4 remaining was to be the next leader, and plans was put into action.
It hasn’t been smooth sailing though, because we had to re-amend everything which did hold us up, but we have done it, and from here I shall show the development of my role in the team.
Personally I think we have now got enough trust in one another to take the “Team Effectiveness Exercise”.
Team Effectiveness Exercise – The Two Big Questions…
- What is the single most important/ characteristic or quality, demonstrated by this person, that contributes to the strength of the team?
- What is the single most important/ characteristic or quality, demonstrated by this person, that can sometimes derail the team?
Once these two questions have been asked, and answered by all the team members, openly and honestly, you should be able to see what area/areas you need to work on individually and as a team overall.
But I have Lencioni’s Conflict Resolution Model to hand to refer to, if conflict was to arise in the future.
Week 3.2 – 14th June. 2021
Guiding your Team through creative collaboration
After listening to a creative confidence podcast by Mike Peng, IDEO Partner and Managing Director, he discusses his experiences with creative collaboration, and helps his listeners to understand that:
He highlights that when teams come together, this is when the magic happens, and makes it clear you need different opinions and perspectives, however we must share our individual ideas to be able to know if it will work, he explains that we all need to be challenged by our ideas.
The first task to sort out who was going to do what. I suggested we split it evenly, so that it doesn’t fall on one persons hands, as we are over a week behind.
- I took over the Trello – Kanban Organisation board, I knew I could update it each week, with out no trouble, and just confirm what each person was doing, and had done or needed to do.
From the above Trello board you can see my tasks that I was asked to focus on, create a prehistoric background, and create natural looking isometric tile sets.
Here are a few examples, that I took a little inspiration from, in regards to the beach, and palm trees before drawing the below.
I wanted to search for prehistoric scenery, that would be attractive, especially as we was aiming for some kind of Flint stones environment, light, fun and simple, as the below demonstrates… this was just a very basic idea for background scenery.
Prehistoric Background
However, when we first communicated, to clarify who should do what, I was asked to research and to start working on designing some Isometric Tile sets. These are just a few examples that helped me focus on the angle, below in the grey circle;
(Isometric Game Art. n/d. Game Art Partners)
above left; (Isometric Forest Sprite. n/d. The Game Assets Mine)
above right; (Stardew Valley. 2021. Top-Down 2D Game)
The above gave me a better idea of how floor tile-sets could look, and I wanted to focus on adding texture to mine.
Considering this was my first time working on these, I was really pleased with the out come.
Problem
Only one problem arose from the grass tile set, there was a white line, around the edge, but I worked out it was from the effect I had used. The effect made the colour pull away from the edge of the box. But can easily be resolved…
Isometric Tilesets – Floor -Trees – Mud – Grass – Grass Blend
(Figure 4 : Norton 2021 Isometric Tilesets for Prehistoric Background)
Logo – Iteration stages
(Figure 5 : Norton 2021 Logo Iteration stages – for Keep It Burning)
Inspiration for Characters
One of the biggest inspirations for me was Pixars “Brave”.
My aim for the characters, was to focus on creating a caveman look, but with big hair, cloth like rags, animal skins draping and markings on their face to show how they are part of a tribe.
Composition
Below shows, how the concepts for the characters first started…
I tried out numerous compositions, but these where the final 3, that I narrowed the choice down to. As the main character was first introduced as the women with the torch leading the way, then the man who was slightly bigger, but would carry a bag, and finally the Elder, who is so wise he knows everything, but yet keeps his distance.
Game characters
(Figure 6/ 7 : Norton 2021 Concept for the main 3 Characters)
Week 3.3 – 15th June. 2021
Week 3 Activity – Six Thinking Hats
Dr Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats, didn’t really help at all, if anything we all seemed to struggle with this. I was the green hat, so I tried to think like these were elements of the new artefact we would be creating, and imagined the stages we may go though as a team, and what creative style we may add, or develop, and to mostly focus on ways to show humour throughout the game.
References
Brave Behind The Scenes – Designing A Character 2012 – Pixar Animated Movie HD 2013. Available at : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cecx5HVtUDY [Accessed 14/07/21]
Game Art Partners. n/d. Isometric Game Art – Royalty Free Level Art. Available at : https://gameartpartners.com/gallery_template_with_badges1/ [Accessed 15/06/21]
LENCIONI, P. 2002. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. Team Assessment. San Francisco, Calif: Pfeiffer.
PARKER, A. 2o21. Effective Communication. Available at : https://flex.falmouth.ac.uk/courses/913/pages/week-3-effective-communication?module_item_id=50031 [Accessed on 12/06/21]
PARKER, A. 2002. The Dysfunctions of Teams. Available at : https://flex.falmouth.ac.uk/courses/913/pages/week-3-the-dysfunctions-of-teams?module_item_id=50030 [Accessed on 11/06/21]
PENG, M. 2019. Guiding Your Team Through Creative Collaboration: SoundCloud. Retrieved 29 April 2021, from https://soundcloud.com/ideo_u/to-unlock-innovation-guide-your-team-through-creative-collaboration
SCOTT, Kim. 2019. Radical Candor : How to Get What You Want by Saying What You Mean . Fully revised & updated edition. London: Pan Books.
Six Thinking Hats. 2021. [online] Available at: https://www.debonogroup.com/ (Links to an external site.) [Accessed 26 March 2021].
Stardew Valley. 2017. Indie Simulation Role Playing game. Available at : https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/stardew-valley-switch/ [Accessed 15/06/21]
The Game Assets Mine. n/d. Isometric Forest Sprite Set. Available at : https://thegameassetsmine.com/product/isometric-forest/ [Accessed 15/06/21]
Full List of Images
Figure 1: Lencioni 2002 Conflict Resolution Diagram
Figure 2: Trello 2021 The Wild Branch Kanban Organisation Board
Figure 3 : Norton 2021 First concept Illustration for Prehistoric Background
Figure 4 : Norton 2021 Isometric Tilesets for Prehistoric Background
Figure 5 : Norton 2021 Logo Iteration stages – for Keep It Burning
Figure 6/ 7 : Norton 2021 Concept for main Characters
Figure 8 : Six Thinking Hats 2021 conflict resolution technique