Team Building and Diversity

In my personal journey, I have studied, experienced, and worked with people from many cultures. I often try to look for similarities and/or growth opportunities in each new exposure.

🏛️ Abrahamic Traditions → Structure & Discipline

I find myself rooted in Abrahamic spirituality, guided by covenants, obedience, and the centrality of Jesus Christ. This path offers me purpose through steps, actions, and discipleship. I feel closely aligned with the practices of many of my Jewish and Muslim friends who also walk the Abrahamic path. In working together with people from these backgrounds, I’ve found that we share a deep commitment to discipline, process, and the careful construction of new ideas—with a shared drive to see things through to completion.

🕉️ Hindu Philosophy → Learning & Caring

Hinduism helps me think about learning how to learn—through concepts like karma, science and astrology, human care, and deeper spiritual dimensions. I’ve found friends and colleagues from this background to be both mindful and deeply caring. Their ability to balance philosophical depth with practical outcomes is something I greatly admire. They often bring a strong technical drive and a focus on building meaningful project outcomes.

☯️ Chinese Wisdom → Balance & Iteration

Chinese traditions, such as Taoism and Confucianism, emphasize observation, context, and balance. The people I’ve worked with from these traditions are extremely dedicated and methodical, with a strong emphasis on iteration and refinement. Because of their discipline, they often excel in bringing projects across the finish line with excellence. These philosophies help ensure that projects are carried through to completion with polish and care.

🧘 Buddhist Mindfulness → Multiple Perspectives

Buddhism, with its roots in mindfulness and enlightenment, has offered me valuable reminders—even though I’ve had fewer Buddhist colleagues. Its principles challenge me to pause, consider others’ perspectives, and express ideas in multiple modes to meet diverse learning needs. It’s a call to express complex ideas in ways that invite understanding—through multiple perspectives, methods, and formats.

🌿 Indigenous Knowledge → Narrative & Experience

Indigenous traditions have always filled me with awe. I grew up with a Navajo friend who seemed deeply at ease with the natural world. I’ve also known many from the Islands of the Sea, where tradition, family, and storytelling shape daily life. Their way of teaching through the earth, lived examples, and shared experience reminds me of the value of narrative. As engineers, we have the opportunity to build a culture where knowledge is not just taught—but truly transmitted.

👥 Gender Diversity → Professional Balance & Relatability

I have found gender to be profoundly impactful in all my engineering practices. Being a male working in an industry historically dominated by men, I found great balance when we added female members to our teams. Often, adding a female member would improve our professionalism. A gender mix adds to diversity and helps build character in all participants. As a project starts, ideates, prototypes, and finishes, you will realize a far more relatable and complete solution—compared to working in isolated male or female silos.

From Personal Diversity to Team Building

As we begin forming our project teams, I want to acknowledge that these reflections are personal observations based on experience. They are not meant to stereotype individuals or assign traits based on background. Rather, they highlight how diverse perspectives have contributed to strong, effective teams in both engineering and education.

The goal is not to label people—but to encourage us to look beyond the familiar when building our teams. We each bring unique perspectives shaped by culture, experience, personality, and values. Recognizing this allows us to build thoughtful, balanced groups that reflect both technical ability and human understanding.

💎 The Result: Teams that combine these strengths create solutions that are both technically excellent and deeply human.

Building Teams

🚀 Diversity isn’t just about appearances or identities—it’s about mindsets.

🎯 Today’s Task: Building Your Team

We’ll be forming teams of 6. If numbers require, we may have some teams of 5.

Each team will work as two paired trios, forming smaller working groups within your team.

Interview Each Other

If you’re bringing a friend, great—but only if your team gains diversity and stays goal-aligned. In years of teaching and a lifetime of engineering, I’ve found that all successful projects share two traits: diversity and shared purpose.

Consider learning styles, collaboration habits, and problem-solving approaches. When we embrace these goals together, we build something stronger.

I encourage you to think beyond friendship or gender groups as your default.

Ask Yourself:

🌍 Respect for Different Perspectives

  • Who brings a different way of thinking than I do?
  • ❌ Don’t build your team based solely on friendships.
  • ✅ Do build your team with varied perspectives.

🤝 The Best Teams Are Not Just Well-Rounded—They Are Whole

  • How can our team reflect a balance of structure, creativity, mindfulness, and narrative?
  • ❌ Don’t pick your team based on a single skill set (e.g., only coding).
  • ✅ Do include a mix: vision, organization, teamwork, and coding.

🎯 Alignment in Goals

  • Do my teammates share my learning and academic goals?
  • ❌ Don’t form a team if you can’t collaborate on the same expectation level.
  • ✅ Do form a team with shared academic purpose and communication clarity.

Let’s form teams that reflect the best of what each of us has to offer.

Build your team with purpose. Look for differences in background and similarities in ambition. Let’s model what it means to create collaborative, cross-perspective teams—just like the real world of engineering.

🛠️ Team Formation Process

👤 Individual Reflection → 🤝 Find Diverse Partners → 👥 Form Team of 6 → 🎯 Align Goals
         ↓                        ↓                      ↓               ↓
   "Who am I?"              "Who complements me?"    "What's our vision?"  "How do we succeed?"

💡 Pro Tip: Great teams look like a 🌈 rainbow - different colors that create something beautiful together!

📋 Next Steps

After forming a team you will need to start on the journey of acting as a team and producing as individuals. Here are a couple of activities to get you started.

🎭 Team Roles & Responsibilities

  • Teams need to consider roles. Some key roles will be discussed in the project requirements for the Sprint.

    👥 Scrum Master → 🏗️ Developer → 🎨 Designer → 📊 Product Owner

📊 Progress Management Tools

  • Teams need to manage progress. At the top of every repository in GitHub there are Issue and Project management tabs. You will need to become familiar with Issues, Kanban, and Timelines.

    📋 Issues → 📊 Kanban Board → ⏱️ Timeline → 🚀 Deploy

🔄 Agile Ceremonies

  • Ceremonies are key activities for teams. Sticky notes and Scrum boards are a fun and engaging way to start working as a team.

    📅 Sprint Planning → 🔄 Daily Standups → 📈 Sprint Review → 🔍 Retrospective

📊 Team Success Indicators

Your team is on track when you see:

✅ Daily Commits - Green squares on GitHub
✅ Active Communication - Slack messages flowing
✅ Diverse Perspectives - Different approaches to problems
✅ Shared Ownership - Everyone contributing to decisions
✅ Iterative Progress - Small wins building to big achievements

🟢🟢🟢 = Healthy Team Velocity
🟡🟡🟡 = Needs Attention  
🔴🔴🔴 = Time for Retrospective

🎯 Self-Reflection Questions

Before finalizing your team, take a moment to consider:

💭 “How do I see myself at the end of this course?”

🤔 “Can I imagine myself as a collaborator? A coder? A team leader?”

🎯 “What unique perspective do I bring to a team?”

📝 Action Item: Each of you should write your answers in your GitHub Issues as your first individual contribution to the team. Move comments to Done as you complete the task. Link the comment as soon as you start it to utterance location below.