Political Issues within Team

[tjwolter]

In any group of people there will always be potential for conflict. Maybe a bit less when they have similar interests and goals. Maybe a bit more when they are under time and performance pressure.

One thing did catch my eye in the leading post. Mentors getting too involved in the design process. Was the issue that the mentors and students envisioned an entirely different machine? If so, I would vote with the students. Talk it over a long time, identify strengths and weaknesses, make it happen. I have been involved in student robotics programs long before I got pulled into the gravity well of FIRST and have seen some truely outrageous student concepts stun me by working much, much better than they had any business doing. OTOH, if the issue is not what will be built but how to get there, the mentors might have the better points...so long as they can be made and taken respectfully. I have also seen way too much magical thinking among robotics newbies. You can't wave your hands and create effective power transmission...it is not The Force at work, but Newtonian Forces.

We are a rather new team, second year, but I have been working with some of these students from middle school on up. Misunderstandings happen. We try to avoid them and to mitigate them when they do happen.

T. Wolter