Teamwork in Aerospace Discussion

Glenn Research Center

These pages describe an educational activity which I have presented at several different schools and workshops. There are two main objectives to the activity; one is to expose the students to the operation of the aerospace industry, and the other is a team dynamics exercise. After you've completed the activity, you are ready to discuss the results. This is the key part of the activity. You are the guide. Let the students talk as much as they want and pursue lines of discussion wherever they lead. I have prepared a number of questions to guide the discussions but the key element here is to get the students to talk about the design process and how well the teams worked together.

Here's the big overview:

Let's look at each question in detail:

This just gets things started. Did they work together? Did they run off separately? Did they have their own fly-off? How did they do it? Let each company talk in turn. Did certain processes work better than others? Usually some team takes ideas from multiple members and puts it together in one plane. That's a good one to pursue. Sometimes, a member of the team has never built a paper plane (hard to believe!). What did that person do then during the design process? Discuss your own experiences with good and bad team players.

This question starts to get into the relationship between team members and the captain. If you randomly selected a leader, it's fun to ask how the leader felt. Was she respected? Or ignored? How do the students respond to having someone else in charge? I usually re-enforce that in their career they will have lots of managers .. some good, some bad .. but you have to establish a relationship with the manager to get the job done. Talk about management styles that you have encountered.

This is normally a big discussion. Dominate people will insist that everyone participated but if you question some of the quiet people, you will find that they tried to participate but were ignored. Often I find that a clique of boys will ignore any female in the group. Excellent opportunity to introduce the problems that occur in organizations when we neglect diverse views (particularly when the offending company does not win the competition). Relate your own multi-cultural experiences.

This is also a good subject for discussion because you introduce the whole concept of time management and the problems that students face in high school or college. We are always working to some time constraint in aerospace and successful people learn to manage their time. Again, relate your own experiences.

This is fun question about industrial security and espionage. Some team will spy on another team. You can also introduce the problem within organizations when someone leaves one company and moves to another company.

Feel free to use your own set of questions. Wrap up by letting the students know that the problems they encountered during the exercise are exactly the same ones that we work on day-to-day. As an option, you can ask for the winning design and bring it back to the lab. At one time we were going to mass produce the winning designs for use at the Visitor's Center.