Three Idiots Crossing The Valley

The session started with an interesting activity known as the idiots crossing the valley.It is an important  management concept of Team Management and Team Work,the concept which binds an organization together.

Activity:Three people had to cross a valley together carrying a single wooden rod upon their shoulders.The Distance between one side of valley and other side was greater than one step and less than 2 steps.The Task was to cross the valley together with the wooden rod.

Choice of three people:Now the question arises that the  three people should be chosen on what grounds?

Now when we performed the activity in class ,three interested people came forward and formed a group for the task.This kind of group is called Informal team,where people with common interests participate and contribute to the activity.
In organizations,this kind of arrangement is temporary and is called "task force". Organizations don't look at people,they look at work.Managers are solution designers and understand work very well.

Incentive Mechanism:They must be provided with some incentive to perform this exercise as danger step is also involved.Now two types of incentive could be given 

• External:Cash Reward,Life Insurance
• Internal :Appreciation from senior Management

Components of Excellence:

Now let us try to have a look at the components of excellence. We learned

Excellence = Efficiency X Effectiveness

Now how to elaborate it. Well, in simple words,  Efficiency deals with whether the given work is executed properly, whereas Effectiveness deals with whether the work given was rightly estimated.

Efficiency can be attributed to engineers, whereas Effectiveness remains a managerial concern. (Without any bias, any person who is able to imbibe the two features is both an engineer and a manager.)

The importance of organization structure is clearly evident from this.  The instructions that need to be followed by the people when attempting to cross the valley are not important in terms of our understanding of the management aspect of the problem, however one can list them as:

• The process needs to be coordinated and well-structured.
• The movement need to be synchronous.  
•  The persons should have faith in the solution.

 

Now there is a sharp distinction between Steps viz

• Safe
• Half Safe
• Dangerous    

  However the role of the management is to make all steps as one and remove the distinction.

 So the onus is on management to instill confidence among workers