Structured Thinking & Problem Solving

Self Reflection Paper

My first class of this course was something different to which I was expecting it to be as I was
expecting a simple lecture that these are the ways of creative thinking and these are the steps to
solve it. But the reality was far away from my expectations and I thoroughly enjoyed my class.

These were the observations about myself:

 While ranking the objects my first instinct was not to reach the shore instead it was the
survival and I ranked the objects according to that. I got to know this mistake of mine after
the discussion in the class.
I realized that in order to solve any problem the objective and approach of solving the
problem should be crisp otherwise one can easily get distracted while trying to solve the
problem and reaching to a false conclusion.

 I got to know about two of my weaknesses which are –

1. In the activity, my individual score was far better than my group score. When I work
alone, I tend to do things much better than working in a group (including past
experiences). The root cause that I feel is lack of trust among group members & vice
versa and too many opinions where our egos clashes.
I need to overcome this weakness of mine as teamwork is one of the most
important skill that a manager should have.
2. The second one is that I have very poor persuading skills and after one attempt of
convincing my groupies I tend to lose my cool and frustration seeps in and I become
anxious. Another reason for my frustration could be that we all(group members) are
not good listeners and each person tend to impose their opinion that they are
correct.
Form next time I will try to put myself in the other person’s shoes in order to
understand the situation from his point of view rather than concluding that I am
correct. With this I will improve my listening ability and social imaginativeness.

I feel that after this class my opinion with a lot of things has changed. The way I see things is now
becoming different as now I notice a lot of things around me and I tend to think of using a simple
object in different ways and I am finding it useful in my daily life. This exercise is really improving my
creative thinking. For example-I turned an empty toothpaste cardboard box into a cell phone holding
container while charging.

I am hoping to explore this creative side of mine and try to solve my daily problems with that.