On September 19, 2001, the day after the service groups in our Management 101 class got a chance to present their service ideas to a stakeholder panel was the day that I switched coalition. I was part of the service coalition that wanted to donate the proceeds from our business project to the American Red Cross. However, due to a lack of a direct service idea, I felt that I could no longer contribute to this cause. Up until this point, our company's only business idea was "fleece hats". When we were getting ready to leave the forum that day, Professor Miller asked the class if anyone had any announcements for their company. Anna from our company announced that her coalition needed help, because they were not for the "fleece hats" idea, but needed help coming up with alternatives. I knew at that moment, that I had found a new coalition worthy of my time. I went up to

This experience showed that Groupthink could be a very damaging problem when you have to work with people with common interests. As for the company, I personally underestimated their ability to critically analyze. They clearly did a great job in risk assessment when they decided to go with the "fleece hats" idea. It was apparent that our idea had a considerable amount of risks. Nevertheless, I am glad I got a chance to work with the people in my coalition. I found out how committed and hard working they were. As for the "fleece hats" coalition, I don't think anyone lost points. They were just defending something that they felt passionately about. In fact, a lot of people gained points during this process and I hope that we as a company will maturely accept our new task at hand, and that is to put all our efforts into a project that we have chosen together.

Anna as we filter out of the forum and told her that I wanted to be in her coalition. She was glad that I wanted to join the coalition, and told me that they might meet at 3:30 and that Lorenza might call her, and she in turn would call me. Kimmie, who was in my first strategy team, told me that she was also joining the same coalition and to call her if we were going to meet. I was excited that I was now in a business coalition. My interests were always aimed towards business, but because I felt so strongly about the Red Cross issue, I was forced to choose the latter.

From this experience, it was clear that our coalition fell victim to Groupthink. Groupthink is the tendency for highly cohesive groups to lose their critical thinking capabilities. I personally was a victim to Groupthink when I censored myself from pushing the Hawaiian shirt idea, which I felt had merit. Furthermore, I caused the group to be overconfident in the fact that the females in the class did not like the "fleece hats" idea. We were so confident on our positive points that we failed to recognized legitimate flaws in our idea, causing us to inadequately prepare for the negative points in the WOTS-UP analysis. We also had Illusions of Unanimity because we were all working so passionately on the same thing that we tend to agree on issues without clear reasons. We did not utilize some remedies for groupthink like inviting outsiders to observe and comment on our process. This certainly would have helped, along with "second-chance" confirmation sessions to double check after each agreement. During our business decision debate, I felt that some parliamentary rules were broken. When we were presenting our idea, some members couldn't wait until we have said everything that we were planning to say. I noticed this especially from the "fleece hats" group. This made me, as the presenter nervous as to whether or not I will get to finish what I had to say before having to ta

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Approximate Word count = 1910
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)