Which Hat fits Best?

One of the most interesting aspects of the communications paper I have been doing, was learning about Belbin team roles.  The 9 Belbin team roles were developed by Meredith Belbin in the 1960’s and give us an insight into why our teams work well, why they don’t, and how to get a team to function at its optimal best.

When first discussing this at the beginning of the paper – after only a few weeks of knowing each other – we casually assigned each other the roles we saw fit (it seemed simple enough - some personality traits were already obvious).  These mostly stayed the same throughout the paper, with the exceptions of the leadership roles and those in red below.  These roles developed as the course went on, as we each found our strengths and worked in with other members personalities:

Gabrielle:	Shaper		Christina:	Specialist
	Completer Finisher			Implementer
	Implementer → Monitor Evaluator			Monitor/Evaluator → Completer Finisher
Myself:	Plant		Cherie:	Team Worker
	Team Worker			Resource Investigator
	Completer Finisher			Monitor/Evaluator → Coordinator
	Coordinator

With three quite head-strong ladies there was a little head-butting as the “leader” role wasn’t firmly established.   

With Gabrielle in the Shaper hat, she seemed to be the obvious choice for leader with her strength and gusto, but as our team members were each very motivated, head-strong and intelligent in their own right, the Shaper approach didn’t work.  She moved into Monitor Evaluator and Completer Finisher roles, keeping us in line with her critiques and helping us to get the small details right.

Cherie as a Resource Investigator and Team Worker fitted the leadership role well.  She was able to listen to all sides, appease any disagreements within the team, and whip the chain should anyone slack off (thankfully this didn’t happen too often!). The Resource Investigator hat proved useful for accessing outside contacts for our primary research and adding to this was a nice touch of Coordinator that helped to move everyone along.

The Specialist role was filled beautifully by Christina, who was very quick to act and come up with great material when it was requested.  This role is essential to any research team.  The one who can find the information.  Add to that the attributes of an Implementer – hardworking and just gets on with it… we would have been lost without her.  Her Completer Finisher skills were also invaluable at the end of the assignments.

For myself, coming up with ideas and brainstorming on how to implement the lecturers’ instructions put me in the role of Plant.  To then bring these ideas to fruition, involved me putting on the Coordinator hat and working closely with the leader to get all the jobs done through team work.  My attention to detail and slight touch of OCD meant I enjoyed proof checking and tidying up all the small details – Completer Finisher hat firmly on.

With both Cherie and I being Team Workers, it helped immensely in coordinating this group of very able, talented, strong-willed women.  All of us had outside issues causing us stress at times, and it is important for leaders to understand these and work around these issues with empathy to those involved.

No team could complete these assignments adequately without careful editing and error checking.  Our team was very lucky to have all of us as Completer Finishers to some degree.  No matter how careful everyone is – there will always be something that one person picks up, but not another!

Some roles we needed at the start of assignments; shaper, coordinator, plants - some during the middle; resource investigator, specialist, implementer - and some at the end; completer finisher, monitor evaluator.  We were very lucky to have all of these roles filled with only four people. 

I’m not sure that I could have hoped for any extra or stronger team members.  I believed we covered everything well.  For this paper, I am quite happy with the team I had and the hats I wore.

The Burning Issue of Ocean Acidification

One of the stand out scenes in the movie Dante’s Peak, is the grandmother jumping from the row boat into the lake – her legs dissolving in the acidic water as she pulls the boat to shore.  This scene is etched into my mind, so when I first heard about ocean acidification – this was what came into my mind.  Nothing beats heading down to the beach on a hot sunny day to dip your toes into the cooling water. Did this new threat mean that one day, that toe being dipped would be pulled back with a squeal of pain as it was burned by acidic seawater? 

Admittedly it seemed fairly far-fetched, so I didn’t pay too much attention.  That was until I went to a Café Scientifique meeting run by the local museum.  It featured a marine biologist who had seen shellfish stocks completely decimated on the west coast of America due to ocean acidification, and who was now in New Zealand trying to prevent the same thing happening to our mussel farms.  He talked about the small decrease in pH that was caused by the increased carbon dioxide levels, and the big impact this had to anything with a calcium structure in the ocean – including my favourite takeaways! 

Now I was concerned… but I was also pretty confused.  How did the increase in carbon dioxide in the air make our oceans more acidic?  How was a decrease of only 0.1 pH unit since the early 1800s (American Chemical Society, 2012), considered so worrying?  The answers came later that year while studying environmental chemistry – at last I had my a-ha moment – and my uh-oh.

The oceans absorb around 22 million tonnes of carbon dioxide each day – about a quarter of what is released by the burning of fossil fuels (Ocean Portal Team, 2015).  When the carbon dioxide in the air dissolves into the oceans, it combines with water molecules to produce carbonic acid (H₂CO₃), then disassociates into hydrogen ions and bicarbonate (HCO₃^-).  This increase in hydrogen ions is what lowers the pH (potential hydrogen) value. 

Creation of Carbonic Acid

CO₂ + H₂O → H₂CO₃

Disassociation of Carbonic Acid

H₂CO₃ → H⁺ + HCO₃^-

The oceans natural buffering system attempts to neutralise the excess hydrogen ions by pulling carbonate away from the calcium carbonate in shells and coral, and forming more bicarbonate. 

Disassociation of Calcium Carbonate

CaCO₃ → Ca²⁺ + CO₃^2-

Creation of Bicarbonate

H⁺ + CO₃^2- → HCO₃^-

This is what is causing the deterioration in the coral reefs, and the reduction in shellfish numbers.  It also has the potential to reduce populations of any other plant or animal species that requires calcium carbonate for their development, particularly in the early formation stages. The risk to fish who have calcium based skeletons could be potentially devastating to the world’s fisheries.

So while we may not ever reach the point of not being able to dip our toe into the water, and feel that cooling sensation, we do need to be concerned that the fish in our fish ‘n’ chips, or our fresh mussels that we tuck into on the beach after our swim, could well become a thing of the past.

References:

Middlecamp, C.H., Keller, S.W., Anderson, K.L., Bentley, A.K., Cann, M.C., Ellis, J.P. (2012). Chemistry in context: applying chemistry to society (7th ed.) New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

Ocean Portal Team.  (2015). Ocean Acidification.  Retrieved from http://ocean.si.edu/ocean-acidification