Word of the week: "Communication"

“Communication”

Feel the shiver running down your back!

In this blog post I am not going to talk about communication and a little bit about collaboration. And why I think that the two c’s are to 99% whats makes our yearbook production a good yearbook production.

I believe that communication and collaboration is focused on speaking to others, improving teamwork, expressing my opinions, listen to the opinions of others and solving problems in different ways. This is important, especially because yearbook feels a lot more like a job than I subject in school. Communication is also the key to teamwork and teamwork leads to success. That order always remains. I can’t have success, before I have teamwork and I don’t receive communication with the absence of communication.
Collaboration means involvement, cooperation, participation and assistance which is even more based on supportive teamwork. And yes, I even found I nice picture for this:

Improving c & c is not easy, therefore, because one cannot control all aspects of it and instead must seek to make gain a mutual understanding. Or in other words: If my partner is not willing to do anything, we can surrender after the first day. We are equally involved in this.

And in this case, it is the editor and his assistant. Colton and me.

We have come a long way in communication. I never really had to deal with Colton before yearbook and he never had something to do with me, so in beginning, we had to figure out how the other person “functions”. And in the first week, communication was often a little catastrophe. On a scale from one to ten, we would have probably fall behind three. And it wasn’t just Colton and me, the whole yearbook team had to find their way of collaboration and communication in this group of thirteen teenagers.

One of those communication problems was the layout orientation of the yearbook. Colton came up with the idea to make the book horizontal instead of vertical for several reasons. I was convinced pretty easily and we talked to the Artist, Jasmine who is doing amazing work by the way, to make the divider pages horizontal. And she did. Three days later, we figure out that we did not talk to anybody else about this decision. Nobody knew and everybody was surprised. We just assumed that everybody knew, didn’t communicate it at all.
We ended up having a vertical book, but only because entourage, the program we are working with, is not able to do it differently.
Those problems came up again - more than once. And it wasn’t just me and Colton. Communication was and still is hard for everybody.

When we sat down today, exactly one month after the start of the yearbook production, everybody shared their opinion about how communication changed positively and on what we still had to work on as a team.

These reflections where everybody has to say something about their experience and feelings with communication in the yearbook are so helpful and encouraging for me. We made it up to a solid seven on our communication scale - far more than I would’ve expected. And that is awesome. It shows me how much we improved in such a short and stressful time period and that leaves me optimistic that we can still raise the number.

I feel like everybody is in the place there they should be, working their best to be able to give even their grandaunts two exemplares of the yearbook because they are so proud of it.
Because I see myself in this position right now, I come into class knowing the tasks that lies before and behind us and that I can rely on everybody. Colton and I figured out the best way of working together and it really works!
So, now it is your time to say: “Yes, Mia. The yearbook seems to turn out wonderfully” and close the blogpost with it.