THREE MONKS, NO WATER

Based on an old Chinese story, “three monks, no water,” this story teaches a gentle, humorous lesson about responsibility. Three monks allow personal pride to interfere with the performance of daily tasks, each believing that the other two should be the ones to go downhill to fetch water. When a fire breaks out, however, they understand how silly they’ve been and work together to save the temple.

PLOT

There was a small temple on a mountain and a little monk in the temple. His daily routine was shouldering water, chanting sutras, knocking the wooden fish, adding water to the holy water bottle on the table honouring the Goddess of Mercy, and watching over the mice from stealing food at night. His life was smooth and comfortable.


Soon after, a tall monk came. He drank half of the jar’s water as soon as he arrived at the temple, so the little monk asked him to fetch water. The tall one thought it was unfair for him to fetch water alone, so he asked the young one to do it together. They could only carry one bucket a time, and they would only feel content when the bucket was placed in the middle of the shoulder pole. Anyway, they still had water to drink in this way.

Then, a fat monk came. He wanted to drink, but there was no water in the jar. The short monk and the tall one asked him to fetch water by himself. He carried a bucket of water, and drank it up immediately. From then on, nobody would fetch water, so they had no water. Everyone chanted his own sutras and knocked his own wooden fish. As nobody would add water to the holy water bottle, the plant in the bottle withered soon. At night, a mouse came out stealing, but everyone pretended not to see it. As a result, the mouse was so rampant that it knocked over the candleholder and caused a fire. Only thus did the three monks make a concerted effort to put out the fire, and finally awaken. After that, they started hanging together and the temple never lacked water again.   

INDIVIDUAL Vs COLLECTIVE APPROACH

·      To put off the fire each monk got panicked and tried his best to run down the river and bring the bucket full of water. But this process was very tiring, and also had many glitches on the path. So it proved to be ineffective.

• Coordinated effort dosed off the fire easily and without being tired.
• Productivity is important.
• Productivity determines how well an organization converts its resources into results.
•  Workplace productivity is all about how firm can utilize its labours and skills, innovation, technology and organizational structure to improve the quantity and quality of their products.
• Basically, it is all about exploring the ways that can make working environment much efficient.

Why is productivity important?

·         Basis for improvements in real incomes and economic well-being.

·         Monetary policy (inflationary pressures)

·         Fiscal policy (financing of health, education, welfare)

·         Slow productivity growth = conflicting demands for distribution of income more likely

Creativity & Innovation

Creativity refers to the invention or origination of any new thing (a product, solution, artwork, literary work, joke, etc.) that has value. Creativity can also be defined "as the process of producing something that is both original and worthwhile."

Creative insights and illuminations may be explained by a process consisting of 5 stages:

(i) Preparation (preparatory work on a problem that focuses the individual's mind on the problem and explores the problem's dimensions),

(ii) Incubation (where the problem is internalized into the unconscious mind and nothing appears externally to be happening),

(iii) Intimation (the creative person gets a "feeling" that a solution is on its way),

(iv) Illumination or insight (where the creative idea bursts forth from its processing into conscious awareness); and

(v) Verification (where the idea is consciously verified, elaborated, and then applied).

The entire hilltop is divided into three sections, with the monk close to the river filling the bucket and the monk at the top dousing the fire with water in the bucket with the monk in between acting as a liaison between the two. This could have very well happened before but it did not as the monks were thinking on individualistic terms rather than unite as a group and work for the common cause of bringing water for the monastery. When the necessity of dousing the fire came to the fore, individual goals were forgotten for a common goal of dousing the fire. And this, in turn, led to the realization by the monks that bringing water would be much easier if they were to collaborate with each other each day as per Method 3. As they say, two hands are better than one! Just that in this case, the third hand made a lot of difference as well.In everyday thought, people often spontaneously imagine alternatives to reality when they think.

Responsibility

Human responsibilities are the universal responsibilities of human beings regardless of jurisdiction or other factors, such as ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sex. 

Collective responsibility is a concept or doctrine, according to which individuals are to be held responsible for other people's actions by tolerating, ignoring, or harbouring them, without actively collaborating in these actions. Collective responsibility is widely applied in corporations, where the entire workforce is held responsible for failure to achieve corporate targets irrespective of the performance of individuals or teams which may have achieved or overachieved within their area.  Where corporate targets are achieved, however, rewards are carefully targeted to those perceived by management to have contributed, often disproportionately concentrated at senior management levels.

Crisis Management

Crisis management is the process by which an organization deals with a major event that threatens to harm the organization, its stakeholders, or the general public.

When the entire monastery is on fire and the monks realize that their livelihood is at stake, the monks naturally fall in line and collaborate to douse the fire.

Crisis management consists of:

• Methods used to respond to both the reality and perception of crises.
• Establishing metrics to define what scenarios constitute a crisis and should consequently trigger the necessary response mechanisms.
• Communication that occurs within the response phase of emergency management scenarios. 

The credibility and reputation of organizations is heavily influenced by the perception of their responses during crisis situations. The organization and communication involved in responding to a crisis in a timely fashion makes for a challenge in businesses. There must be open and consistent communication throughout the hierarchy to contribute to a successful crisis communication process.

Following are the management lessons learnt:

· Teamwork enhances the efficiency in the working of task.

·  Disputes tend to arise when there is more than one person involved.

·  Scientific and objectives measurements and instruments should be used to resolve the conflict.

·  The most efficient method to solve a problem evolves over a period of time.

·  Teamwork and team interest should take precedence over the personal interest.

·  Experience comes handy in crisis management to come up with new innovative methods to solve a problem.

·  Attitude of each member in the team determines the fate of the task and which further decides the success rate.

·  Synergy roles: Sum is bigger than each part individually.

Valley Crossing

The picture shown below is the classical example of team work.

But is it just a team work or something else is also needed to perform the task?  Which other managerial skills, do we need in this exercise of Valley crossing?

Probably, we have never thought in detail about it. We usually get content with the concept of teamwork.

Teamwork

 

Teamwork can lead to better decisions. It helps in finding solutions quickly.It makes any impossible thing, possible.

The quality of teamwork may be measured by analyzing the following six components of collaboration among team members: communication, coordination, balance of member contributions, mutual support, effort, and cohesion.

Well, no doubt, this is the essence of this exercise. But, if we investigate it further, we will find that it holds some very interesting management lessons inside it. The skills of problem solving, approaching the problem in right direction, decision making, interdependence, importance of effective communication, structuring the team, planning and execution are just some of  those!!!

Analysis and steps to execute this task

The problem statement is pretty self-explanatory from the picture. I don’t want get into much detail about problem statement rather than in its solution.

We can see that there are three persons crossing the valley safely without any trouble. It became possible only due to teamwork, which made this impossible task possible. This is the beauty of team work, the MAGIC works in this way.

This can be easily depicted using this model.

 

 

1. All three members have equal distribution of risks.
   
   High Risk     01 times 
   Half Risks     02 times 
   Fully Safe     02 times
2.  All members have the same role in terms of effort and risk. Nobody is overloaded or relaxed.
3. Proper communication and feedback is essential while working in a team.
4. Every member is indispensable in completing the task.
5. There are equal instances when one needs others support.

     The solution may seem simple enough, what we must not forget is the risk associated with it. We don’t know that all three persons are capable enough to cross the valley using the bamboo. We have no idea about the surface of the bamboo. If it is very slippery, one can’t grip it properly.

Whatever may be the situation, it is manager’s responsibility to make a right decision. Thus, before making any solution, it is most important to study all options, and risk associated with them. This makes the decision making an extremely important trait in corporate sector. An unwisely taken decision without complete analysis might lead to awry result.

    Managerial lessons learnt from this exercise:

    Responsibility sharing

Everyone must contribute in the process of crossing the valley and should take the responsibility that best suits to his/her skill sets. Similarly, in any organization, every member, be it the upper level manager, or a frontline manager or even a worker need to be responsible towards the organization. An individual shows his/her responsibility in his/her dedication to the work and justifies the significance of the work undertaken. If everyone takes the responsibility of the task provided seriously, the other person can do his/her work independently without worrying the fact that the remaining work would be done properly or not! Obviously, there is no "I" in the team.

Trust Factor

At any point of time, the valley crossing exercise must not get completely unsafe for any of the involved members. It is important, as if there is no trust among the team members, the efforts put in might just be futile. 

When the person is being sent to the other end of the valley, he must have trust enough that people behind him won't let him fall. Similarly, the last person must have enough trust that he won't be left behind. If any of them can't have this trust, the job might not be completed.  An individual can’t do the whole task independently. If the first person would not be willing to go ahead, and the last one would not put the complete efforts due to fear that he might be left behind, the job could not be completed.

In an organization as well, this holds very true. If managers can't trust the workers for doing their work, and vice-versa (Theory X type Manager), the workplace would not remain the motivating place to work.

 Proper Coordination

Coordination is the act of organizing, making different people or things work together for a goal or effect to fulfil desired goals in an organization. Coordination is a managerial function in which different activities of the business are properly adjusted and interlinked.

Coordination plays a vital role in the valley crossing exercise. As if the coordination fails at any point, all other factors discussed above will fail. Even if the persons are responsible, and have full trust on each member, this will be of no use, if the coordination fails among them.

In any organization, there is a large number of people involved, who need to work with each other. Thus, coordination assumes even more important role.Coordination is the important factor which made crossing possible. The same thing happens in any organization. The task is generally divided into the subtasks. People work on these subtasks and finally the whole task is completed. If there is no proper coordination among the employees, it might cause unexpected delay.

Equal importance of each individual

Everyone is equal in this exercise of valley crossing. All three members involved are equally important. No one is favoured over others. As already explained, the role for everyone are clearly defined, and everyone is responsible for their respective roles in the team. Everyone has equal roles and responsibilities.

Why is it so much important? It is a manager's job to get the result in best possible way with available resources and man-power. There is never a choice about what type of workers he/she gets to work with in any organization.

In the end I would like to say that no matter whatever task you have to make successful, the most important factors are trust, proper communication, coordination and responsibility.