Assignment 3 Brianne Wingate

As I discussed on last week's post, last calendar year I served on my sorority's CMT, or executive board. The group functioned as a cognitive system because we had the shared goal of improving Delta Gamma week-by-week through different activities. Each week, we had a specific task, a CMT meeting, during which we discussed goals specific to our office and ways to achieve them.

We had both internal and external representations during these meetings. Internal representations allow the officers to commit information to memory, and then share it with the rest of the group. As the former VP Social Standards, I was in charge of positive programming and the honor board. As a result, I would use internal representation to pass on information to my fellow officers about different aspects of my office. For example, last semester I planned an etiquette dinner, which was co-sponsored by a men's fraternity on campus. I would have conversations with the fraternity's representative, commit the main points to memory (such as the cost of food and china rentals), and then share this information with the rest of the officers.

External representations were more rare during our meetings, but sometimes our president would use handouts as tools for leadership exercises. Additionally, she would prepare flyers to remind us of OFSA obligations we needed to fulfill, or to encourage us to get involved with philanthropic efforts from other Greek houses on campus.

The information was mostly transformed face to face at our meetings. Our CMT had untold shared meaning, whether it be commonly used acronyms that all chapter members knew (CMT, OFSA, EVC, etc) or one or two-word abbreviations for current chapter events.

This task was very tightly coupled. We interacted during CMT meetings and chapter meetings, but also during the week through e-mail, phone, or unplanned face-to-face contact. As I previously mentioned, many of the officers still lived in the Delta Gamma house, so in the event that one officer needed another, she could often just walk to her room to interact face-to-face.