It's a familiar team building exercise - you've been in a plane crash in the arctic. You have saved about 10-12 items and you must rank them in order of importance, first alone, then as a group. A video with a silly looking coast guard tells you what he would have selected.
My Scouting training taught me that when you're lost in the wilderness, you STAY PUT and wait to be rescued so I ranked the items accordingly. Fire (matches, hatched, a book to rip up for paper), then shelter (rope, plastic & sleeping bags) and everything else accordingly.
I was surprised when we got back into group and was outnumbered by my team who wanted to try and walk across the arctic to the nearest town - about 30 km away. I went along with the group and it's bugged me ever since.
The point of the task was to show that groups make better choices than the average of the members on the team. In fact, most of the time they do better than even the BEST person on the team. Not in our case - my team killed me and I still haven't forgiven them (HAHA, kidding!).
Today our case was on pursuading people on a team and I'm glad to have it. I joke that it is a manual on how to manipulate people. In truth, the entire class was meant to caution us against making rash group decisions.
The pursuasion techniques will come in handy the next time I am stranded in a harsh environment - perhaps in the desert next time.
No comments:
Post a Comment