A635.4.3.RB - Build a Tower, Build a Team

A635.4.3.RB - Build a Tower, Build a Team

 

I have been part of a group of industrial engineers (IE) who took this challenge. I don’t have an engineering degree, I have a business degree so technically I was a “methods process analyst” or MPA – but we mostly did the same job. Something I noticed within our group was that the “degreed” IE’s were more likely to spend a lot of time talking and strategizing about the tower. The MPA group usually just started throwing things together. If there was a team that had both IE and MPA participants it went a little better because there were people who understood some design and some folks who push the group to start putting things together. I agree with Wujec’s analysis of why kindergartners did better with this challenge because as he said, they didn’t spend their time analyzing and jockeying for power – they didn’t spend time trying to be CEO of Spaghetti Inc. (Wujec, 2010) Kids tend to work with pure curiosity and are not worried about making mistakes and they still understand how to work together. I’m not sure when we lose that – high school? I’m not sure. I wish we didn’t. Recent MBA students have just come from a very competitive environment where losing or falling behind could cost them their career choices. Kindergartners maybe just came from nap time so they are ready to go! (Just kidding.)  

I also agree that CEOs with an executive assistant perform better because the assistant handles all of the details of the CEO’s day – they are resourceful, patient, understand the work, and have a broad network to pull from. CEO’s have a job too but if they are too busy scheduling their appointments and dealing with travel plans and hotel bookings, they won’t be as efficient. The executive assistant being part of a group of CEOs doing this challenge would organize the executives and make sure they all stayed on task. In this situation, the executive assistant acts as the OD and uses process intervention to move things along. Process intervention is to help the work group become more aware of the way it operates and the way its members work with one another. (Brown, 2011)

I think the biggest thing I’d take away from this TED talk is Wujec’s comment about prototypes and the iterative process. That seems applicable in many aspects of an organization. I know that I have sat in many process improvement workshops where we spend most of the first day just validating the existing process. That’s great but after a few hours, we should have it figured out. Good facilitators understand what a “rabbit hole” is and what productive discussion is. When I was in the engineering group I learned quickly that those engineers loved to talk. They would pontificate about theories and possibilities, what if’s and how to’s - it became drudgery for me – I just wanted to get this moving forward. It was like being the guy who shoots the starting gun at a track meet. He’s there ready to get these games started but the runners are all milling about talking about how their shoes are technically superior to the competitors and how fast they are going to go. The guy with the gun is just waiting for everyone to get on their blocks so he can fire the gun, go home and have lunch with his wife. That analogy went on longer than I meant it to but my point is that kindergartners are right – just start modeling and doing the building and designing because talk is cheap and you don’t know what will happen until you start. There is a time for talking and planning and organizing but that can become a huge roadblock if there is no one there to say, “Hey, team, let’s actually put some of these ideas to the test!”

 

References:

 

Brown, D. R.(2011). An experiential approach to organizational development (Eighth ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

 

Wujec, T. (2010). Build a tower, build a team. TEDTalks.  https://www.ted.com/talks/tom_wujec_build_a_tower