A screwed presentation

It is only today when I realised how not having proper teamwork can cause unforeseenable failures.

During English lesson, Dillon, Nicholas, Hurberg, Leon and I were supposed to present our group work on the analysis of "To kill a Mockingbird". Only the previous night was the content of our presentation sent to me, when I was already in a sleepy mood. So I slept without bothering to check my email, assuming that the rest have completed their parts properly...which they did, only nothing was compiled. There is no blame to be passed around, but I thought that the presention slides were ready too.

Thus, the next day (today), we met in the computer lab to compile everything into a wordy powerpoint slides not worthy to be called a presentation. During our preperation for the presentation, I realised how messy the parts were and because i was only in charge of the summary, I did not have a minor clue on the organization of the rest, neither did I know its content. (I supposed there were a few others who did not either)

It ended up as a disaster for me as I contemplated how to explain the parts I first saw, sort of like an impromptu. Worse still, grammar and structural mistakes due to eleventh-hour compilation were everywhere so I did not know what I was talking about either.

I pondered about this for a while after the passing of this catastrophic mess. I think that the problem lies that instead of doing groupwork, we did 'splitwork'. Simply put, we split the work among ourselves such as editor, I/c of A, I/c of B and so on. We did not actually come together to think. Do, edit, pass...that was all. After the first person have completed the main content, it would not be very nice for the editor to change the content entirely if he disagrees, and now he would have to consult the previous. Troublesome and time-consuming, isn't it? At times, by doing 'splitwork', points done by different people might also contradict each other.

What we could have done? I thought it would be good if we could come together for an hour, brainstorm on the main ideas, discuss them, pick out the points, and only then, do we split the work, work as in doing the compilation of ideas.

We would probably fail this presentation. I have really learnt a good lesson about what teamwork is really all about. This presentation we have done, is none of that.