14th week - UNITEC CAT course

This week progress seems to be slower though we have gotten to glue together the 12 mm bottom and the two 6 mm bottom bilge planks. Yin, John and I worked on the two other top 6 mm pieces of the top bilge planks. John and I having done the previous two pieces measurements and scarfing were able to use our learning to work on the latter pieces and became some sort of  "coach" in peer learning with Yin. Personally I dud learn some new pointers in this process of building on what I had done. We had shown a much faster and determined pace of marking and cutting out the pieces and then scarfing and joining the scarf was much faster. Our level of confidence also seem much higher than the our previous attempt - a consequence of the what Argyris & Schön (1978) called "double loop learning".

The pointers which Brett gave to James, Stephan and some of us were timely; examples how to measure the positions/points for the chines on the bilge pieces. This I see as similar to what Toyota Manufacturing system concept of JIT delivery- Just In Time; in our case it would be Just In Time learning. Though this did cause some levels of frustrations experienced in our works as evidenced by remarks of  "Why did he tells us earlier", Nevertheless I see this as appropriate timely interventions by Brett even though we had to "redo" what we had done. In the process, we had "relearned" what we should not do. Added to tension, is the fear (which get heightened as we progressed) of making mistakes, resulting in our pace of working and efficiency getting slow down further. At several points, we had to stop (paralysis) in order to double check with Brett whether our proposed actions would go in the "right direction". This paralysis was nevertheless good for our learning journey as we had to take time to reflect over before we take action.  I could also attribute this fear to the fact that there is a "client/owner" to our Dory project. Brian's appearance each time at the workshop could become an unwelcome sight. However this is a very real phenomena in a real working world - dateline and client's expectations and reviews or progress reports.

More positive points this week were my personal assessment that each one of us is gaining some level of mastery over some tasks we do. This is not to say that we have "arrived" but rather we are getting near to the destination. This can be seen in the Half Model project where I had lesser degree of hesitation and more apprehension and independence on carrying out the task ahead though there are areas in the half model building which I had not fully understand.

The level of teamwork in our group is also to be commended. Everyone present put in their share to get the work done (*much thank to Tiger who was not even part of our group) - when we had to work late on Tuesday to have the two planks scarfed and glue ready for the next day. However I was disappointed that we did not manage to glue on these two pieces onto the half finished Dory at the end of Wednesday.

I could also see many aspects of Action Learning taking places over the last couple of weeks in our group. Building on what we did (rightly or wrongly), we took the next steps using what we had learned to further advance the Dory building project.  I could sense that there is a lack of reflective on the parts of the some of the members when I heard remark like "I am getting bored". Getting bored would to me means that there is some gap in our learning progress - why are we getting bored?  Is it the expectations we have not being met? If it is, how then can they be met by us not someone else?  Action thus lead to questions/reflection and then further action and then reflection again - this is where learning take place (from what I had learned about Action Learning). This will be also where double loop learning take place.

A personal point of observation from a person new to boat building - there seems to be lot of costs/wastes to the building process such as temporary frames. Maybe the answer to this personal observation could come from the reading assigned for Chapter 17 of the Gougeon Brother book.     .

Another observation is the cultural differences among the whole class. Some are more reflective while others are more talkative/playful. Some however seems to be at a complete loss especially during the theory sessions. Being absent from class could also make the loss even greater. Like the Indian villager proverb says " each one of us has to face our own tigers" -  less we get eaten up by the tigers (that why they wear a face mark behind their heads while working in the jungles of Northern India.).