Desert Survival

"Its 10 AM and you have just crash landed right in the middle of a desert." 

Thus started the exercise given to us as part of today's BIO(Behavior In Organization) class in order to make us aware of the decision making processes in a team and the various pitfalls associated with the popular decision making mechanisms. The exercise was simple. I will paraphrase it. You and a group of people have crash landed bang in the middle of the desert. The nearest town is nearly 110 kms away. You were able to salvage some articles from the wreckage and now you have to decide what should be the ranking of the individual articles. See this for similar but not exactly the same situation.


You are given ten minutes to make your individual priority order. After that you assemble as a group and you are given thirty minutes to decide, as a group, the priority of the items. After thirty minutes are over and you have arrived at a team priority order, you do some math and come up with the team synergy score which tells you how good you decision taking process as a team was. 


The items were knife, pistol, a liter of water, parachute, mirror, sunglasses etc. 


Not going in to the details of how our group went about the discussions, I would like to bring out some interesting observations about the decision making process.


1. Too many cooks spoil the broth - Not necessarily
     Common sense suggests that two heads are better than one and so on. But we have all been part of the situations where the whole was not quite the sum of the parts. So, what is the ideal scenario? What I observed was that the teams where there was just one candidate for the leadership of the team were the teams which did well. In my views, that happened because they were less paranoid about some one else usurping their leadership position and thus were more willing to listen to others and more amenable to change their opinions. On the other hand, the teams where their were a lot of contenders(real or perceived) contenders for the leadership role had a lot of chaos and people were less willing in those teams to concede ground to opposing viewpoints. And that brings me to my next point.


2. Leadership(the common perception of it) is overrated. -  Very true
    What happens when everybody leads? Well, there is nobody to follow and the team goes off at different tangents. This is also, by the way, my main pain point with the IIM and other MBA colleges selection procedures. They reward selfishness over team play. That is why you have a GD where nobody is willing to show the next person the courtesy of listening to the one line he has got to say on the subject, however relevant it may be. And by selecting the guy who got the most air time in the GD you are sending a message that I am going to select a guy who can get his voice heard. I, on the other hand, for the life of me, can not remember the last time I had to shout in a team meeting to get heard when I was working in Samsung. 
On a somewhat different note, I remember reading somewhere that when somebody complained to Pandit Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande that his school for music, the sadly neglected Bhatkhande College of Hindustani Music in Lucknow itself, was not producing classical singers who could perform very well, he replied back that the purpose of his school was not to produce Taansen but to produce Kaansen. Unfortuanately, IIMs as well as the companies which come to hire need only Taansens. 


3. BIO is crap - Not Entirely True/Not Entirely False(Depends upon whether you see the glass as half full or half empty)
   BIO is a great tool to analyze why did a particular turn of events take place. And like all tools which are great to use retrospectively, BIO is a perennial butt of the jokes much like Economics.A classic is "An economist is one who has predicted nine out of five recessions." 


All in all, the exercise was much more welcome than the dry lectures. If only, we can have these exercises in all the BIO classes.


Cheers!