It is now one month from when our team left Finhaut, Switzerland to return to our home universities. It has definitely been a challenge to adjust to virtual communication, but I think our team is handling it well! We have weekly virtual conferences via Skype (we have found that this works better than Scopia or Google Hangouts) and we are making progress as individuals and as a team.
While we were in Finhaut, it took us some time to figure out how to work as a team. Bringing together people from diverse educational and geographic backgrounds can lead to communication issues and frustration, but it can also lead to passionate discussion and great ideation. Our group certainly experienced all of these things while in Finhaut! Over the course of the week, we learned more about how our teammates think, communicate, and what they prioritize. Once we realized that some people are more visual than verbal and that others are more grounded than creative, we had a much better understanding of how to work together as a team.
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| Team Lhamu enjoying some sun together in Finhaut |
Our team’s first big challenge was the elopathon. We had to come up with a plan for Finhaut to survive a huge population boom where the town would reach a population of several hundred thousand in just a few decades. Trying to come up with and agree on a solution for this problem was challenging and frustrating at times, but I think we were all thrilled with our results! We developed the idea of creating massive bridges that span the valley to accommodate all of these people while minimizing the impact on the environment.
This activity really got our creative juices flowing and it also allowed us to gel as a team and connect with our teammates. We needed to use all of this creativity and communicative ability for the week’s final presentation, where we outlined our 100 year vision for Finhaut. Our team decided to incorporate the “bridge” theme from our elopathon, since we all loved the metaphor of connecting people across various countries and topographies.
Now that we are spread across the world, we are continually trying to “bridge” the gap between us through frequent communication via Skype, WhatsApp, Facebook, and Google Docs. The biggest challenges thus far have been coordinating schedules so that everyone can make the virtual conferences and working individually to make progress toward realizing our team’s vision. We have continued to develop our vision and we are still working out the kinks in running effective, productive virtual meetings, but our group is moving forward with enthusiasm! As we get closer to our second review, we will continue to strive to work together to create an innovative, inspiring, and realistic vision for Finhaut.
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| Team Lhamu communicating over Skype from around the world |
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