Getting Our Team “Unstuck”

By Jake Steinberg

Perhaps one of the biggest problems that our team faced during the semester was “getting stuck.” As we encountered a seemingly insurmountable amount of research pertaining to our project, it was easy to fall into ruts of inefficiency. It was not that our team stopped working hard; rather we lost our forward momentum. We were like a truck stuck in mud, the wheels kept spinning but the truck was no longer heading towards our final destination.

In the beginning of the semester, our goals were to learn as much as possible about anaerobic digesters, to find similar projects at other institutions, and to contact experts from the field to expand our scope. For the first few weeks, we kept compiling more and more research. I was adding papers based off their names, barely skimming past their abstracts. I kept adding more to my “to-do” list, not only the papers I was sharing without fully reading, but also the papers that my team leads and other group partners shared. Still, I was feeling productive, albeit intimidated.

After four weeks of this initial research phase, we realized we needed to narrow our scope. It was only then that we realized that we had gotten stuck, without even noticing. We had so much information, but it was not channeled toward a clear goal. I remember thinking that fixing this would be easy though. We just needed to solidify our goal. Of course, our final goal for the semester was to create a “scoping document.” Except we weren’t even sure what exactly a scoping document was... So, maybe less easy than I had thought. There was our first step, deciding what we wanted to put in this document by the semester’s end. Once we did this, we were able to break down and divide the work.

In addition to dividing and conquering, we also put our goals on a timeline. This supplemented our new focus with an added sense of energy and urgency. It forced us to actually read everything on our to-do lists by a certain date so that the final document could finally stop being just an idea. We also decided that any time we became stuck again, we would simply try to write through it. Doing this actually allowed us to find the gaps we still had in our paper, shining lights on current holes in our research without making those holes feel like impossible gaps.  

Most beneficial to our ability to get “unstuck” was our meeting with the team leads. As we began approaching the final phases of writing our scoping document, we were admittedly overwhelmed and exhausted. I know personally I felt like no matter how much work we put in and no matter how many more pages we wrote, something would still be missing.

In order to combat this dilemma, we set up meetings with each of our team leads. The purpose of these meetings were to give each team lead an opportunity to voice any specific concerns they had with our paper’s design and content before we began submitting drafts. I remember being extremely nervous for these meetings; this was not because I was scared of the team leads, but because I was scared that these meetings would result in our team leads explaining that we were still a long ways off from their vision. I am happy to say these meetings were anything but that. Each team lead began with praise of the work we had already put in and then helped us to consolidate and rethink current holes in our papers. They shared what they expected to see while helping us understand how to reach their vision. These meetings helped us finish the paper without having to push back our original deadlines. I walked out of each of these meetings confident in what my team and I had written and our ability to turn in a paper that met all of their expectations. I was confident that we would finish the paper efficiently now that we were equipped with the tips and the tools of our team leads.

I knew going into this Bass Connections team that, in order to be efficient, we would have to work toward a very clear goal. What I did not expect was just how topsy turvy the road to our end goal would be. The road was not straight and narrow, but full of curves, sudden stops, intense accelerations, widenings, and a fair share of bumps. Sometimes I found myself so far down a detour that I almost forgot my destination. By writing out our goals, mapping them on a timeline and meeting with our team leads I always found myself heading in the right direction. Maybe getting stuck isn’t so bad. It allowed us to slow down, learn more about our surroundings and feel more comfortable with our team dynamic. We had places to go, however, and refused to stay stuck for too long.

Learn more about this project team and how to get involved in Bass Connections.