We had another team meeting tonight, 8 – 11 p.m. It was productive and mostly efficient. It is easier to get to task and remind the team of what is next when an agenda is provided with the meeting invite. In last night’s meeting I volunteered to be the taskmaster keeping the team on topic during meetings. I did a bit of that tonight and felt that I was pushing progress forward without being too pushy. I’m mindful of the peer evaluations that will be completed and hope that I’m striking the right balance as a team member. At the end of the meeting one of the team members asked what we had learned tonight. I said I would take a stab at it. Let me see now if I can remember or reprise here what we learned.
We learned how to navigate and operate the Capsim application and each of the four main departments. We learned that we should make the decisions for how to complete each department as a team. We also learned how we make decisions as a team. We learned about the relationships between the departments, our decisions, and the scoring. The simulation is easier to learn by jumping to the decision making and completing the department numbers. This approach provides focus and relevance which improve comprehension and retention.
We spent the first hour on R&D after which everyone needed a 5-minute break. Then we spent another 45 minutes on Marketing. We hurried through Production and Finance to see how our Round 1 decisions would work out. We scored 63% which is above the required passing rate. Our leverage score was perfect and our company had a $7m loss. OK, we have some work to do. We were able to agree quickly on the Niche Cost Leader approach based upon one industrious team member’s readings of other successful teams. Based on preliminary results we can at least pass with our current strategy and maybe we’ll even hone our skills to reach the top results. After the second meeting I will say everyone is competent and one of the people was much sharper tonight than last night. We decided everyone needs to take some time tomorrow to do some reading and learning on their roles. We will reconvene late Friday night for one hour to attempt a true completion of practice Round 1.