Quote:
Originally Posted by Molten
1. The individuals idea is indeed better. The team goes with this idea. However, when the boss goes to review the design, he notices what the individual has done. The employee has undermined the team by taking funds and distracting co-workers. That employee is on the fast track to getting fired.
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Congratulations, you just fired the inventor of Post-Its. (Not exactly, of course, but pretty close.)
It's not that easy in business, but the analogy is flawed. A robotics team is always under an artificial brutal time limit and can't make nuanced decisions. In developing new products in business, we hedge these kinds of bets all the time. There is some need to focus, but having a small team checking out the road not followed can be an effective strategy. On a robot team, this is always a bad idea.
The other part of the analogy that doesn't work is that in business the result is more important than the process. I've worked with product teams (new product development is what I do for a living) that all hated each other, and I've worked with teams that were practically mutual-appreciation societies. Some teams were more dysfunctional than a family on Jerry Springer and others practically sang Kumbaya every day. The teams that follow bad process and don't make the best of all team members sometimes make great products, and the happy cooperative teams sometimes stink. All else being equal, I'd rather work with the "nice" team, but I'd take bad process that makes good product any day over the reverse.
Having a mentor and a small team building plan B is distracting, but not fatal, if you can afford the parts and time. I have some sympathy with your mentor's position. Three times I've been on a development team that was racing towards a bad solution and being unable to stop the race were some of my worst experiences. Just because you are the majority doesn't mean you are right. Just because your mentor is in the minority doesn't mean he's right, either.
The thing that will save you (probably) is that there are usually lots of ways to make pretty good robots. There are even more than a few ways of making really good robots. It's not the approach, usually, it's how well it's executed.
It's important for students to remember that mentors go through learning just like the students. One of my most important jobs as lead mentor for my FTC and VRC teams (we have seven robots) is recruiting and training new mentors. It's much harder to bring in new mentors than new students. I have this little speech in my mind that I never deliver because it's impolite, but I'll share it with you because you are all my friends:
"I'm the lead mentor of this team. I am not a professional engineer. I have, however, been involved in writing software, designing products and running projects for 25 years. You are better at mechanical, electrical or <whatever> engineering than I am, but I know that I'm better at mentoring students through this process than you are. This is now my fifth year doing this and it's your first. If you won't follow my lead, I encourage you to leave now."
I seem to be drifting...
For what it's worth, I wouldn't have let a rookie team decide on an engineering approach. I would have walked the students through the process and then led them to the right choice. Learning the process is key, and the results don't really matter, so (as a mentor) I might as well lead our students to a workable strategy. If your lead mentor was on one side of the argument and the students were on the other, there's a pretty fair chance that the mentor is the one who is right.
Here's another bit of philosophy for you all: my job as a mentor is to get 1) a working robot, with 2) prepared students, to 3) a robotics tournament. Letting students on an FRC team violate rule #1 means I have failed as a mentor, and I am fully willing to override any sort of "vote" to lead my team into a successful year. This is NOT what I do with my experienced students. By their third year, they are clearly able to build robots with little or no input from mentors, and that's fine with me. It gives me more time to build my hobby robots while they work on competition robots. (This is a lot easier with Vex robots than in FRC. I love Vex.)
Good luck. Focus on what you can learn from this experience, and not on a sense that someone is treating you unfairly. I can tell you for sure that being treated fairly is not universal in business!