As the first cooperative board game I have ever played, I was immediately fascinated by the absolute selflessness required from each player in order to win Forbidden Island. Playing the game taught me that there is a difference between a group of people working independently towards a common goal, and a group of teammates working together, cooperatively to achieve a common goal. The former scenario describes most of my past group experiences and the latter aptly describes my experience playing Forbidden Island. Prior to playing the board game, it seemed effective (and convenient) to have team members do their share and compile it to be submitted as the team’s work; it got the job done because everybody contributed and the team’s goal was achieved. …show more content…
It was a team of four which was tasked with attending to the needs of non-banking financial institutions. These clients were high demand and to efficiently serve them, each member of the team was given a special task to perform to ensure that clients’ issues are addressed as soon as possible and the team’s financial target was also met. The task interdependence in this team was reciprocal. I worked closely with another member who depended on me for information about the clients and status of their issues. This teammate used this information to communicate with banking operations who worked directly on the client’s issues. Another member of the team was tasked with communicating and working with credit operations because most of our clients needed credit facilities for their operations. The leader of the team handled executive aspect of the team’s tasks. She met with the CEO’s of our client companies to interact with them about the bank’s services and encourage them to increase their business with them bank so that we could meet the deposit target. She also met with the bank’s directors with information about the team’s work. To be successful, the team leader relied on each of her team members at different points in time for different purposes. Communication was critical in this team and as a team we excelled in that regard. Every piece of information was shared. We made it a point to copy every member in every email that was sent whether it was to clients or service providers within the bank (even if it concerned only one team member). After my experience playing Forbidden Island however, I have realised that most often the team allowed individual goals to overshadow the team’s overall objectives. Members of the team often became competitive and sought to prove that they were doing better in their aspect of a task than others. This caused us to lose sight of the