“Sh**” is officially out of my top 10 words of the day. Actually, everyone’s top ten list. Two days have passed since the culminating exhibition of our Deep Dive project: “Lima Under Construction” and although only 25 parents came by obligation and 30 pictures were on display, it was much more work than one could imagine. The only reason I signed up to be part of the exhibition core team was to learn a thing or two about exhibition design. Funny thing is, I ended up learning about something entirely different: stress.
Stress first disguised into people. Ignorant, picky people who didn’t lay a finger in the planning of the exhibition yet had the guts to come and rant about how terrible everything was turning out. Dealing with so many complaints, I learned there were actually two types: the constructive and critical but with wise wording, and the illogical, selfish complaints. Both claimed that they were giving feedback for the “sake of the exhibition”, but you didn’t need to be a genius to figure out who was having a personal picky problem and who really wanted to make changes for the public interest. The second kind of stress came in the form of Murphy’s Laws: “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong”. Small details that the planning team hadn’t even considered at first suddenly started making us go crazy. Some pictures suffered from smashed edges in their frames, the PAC lights weren’t turning on, the white wall actually looked very dirty and some descriptions had terrible grammar mistakes. With unexpected obstacles doubling magically as we raced to finish the exhibition in time, also came the complains between the actual planning team. It was always either a: “You should have seen that coming” or “Why weren’t you more careful?” phrase, said calmly but with a body language that showed otherwise. Having these two types of stress is actually very normal for a group to have. Our mistake came from the way we reacted to this: with System 1 thinking. Problems were instantly rejected instead of solved, and every constructive feedback was criticized instead of considered. This approach to thinking also led to a terrible body language. After a discussion, instead of letting it go, the tense atmosphere remained there until everybody left for lunch. This didn’t only make us want to work alone and hence slower, but it killed the motivation to do work with detail, since we all wanted it to get out of the PAC as soon as possible. We were so stuck our rage and protecting our dignity of who was actually right, that it didn’t allow us to step back and realize the cycle we were trapped in. It was Mr. Bon who gave us a reality check of the kind of behavior that we were leading. It was so awing to realize that all this time we were stuck with System 1 thinking. Something so simple, yet caused so many repercussions in our group. And like any bad behavior, we had to pay. By waking up on Sunday morning to re-hang all of pictures that had a bad angle or done without a ruler. By sacrificing our time to read “Catcher in the Rye” to make sure everything was done on time. By learning to let go of our grudges, look at all the problems, and start to think.
Bon
11/30/2015 12:00:01 pm
Vale, the best thing about the type of projects we have is that they mirror the real world. Misunderstandings, selfishness and tolerance to frustration can often be exacerbated by the real context scenario. I know that many of you have experienced this intensely for the first time, yet I wonder if I've given you guys enough time to reflect on this. With the TED talks looming we moved on and forgot about it, but maybe we might need to revisit it. Comments are closed.
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