The Blind Man's Tower

The last two sessions of POM totally revolved around the “Tower building “ activity. The task here was to build a tower by using wooden cubes of equal sizes. One student from the class was picked up after a lot of bidding J and on the condition that if he is not able to achieve the self estimated target ,he will have to give treat to the whole class .The bidding  amount here was 500/- only.

While the guy was busy building the tower, most of us were watching him and clicking his pictures and shooting his videos. He was doing it with full concentration and with a situation dependent strategy. He successfully made a tower using 16 cubes.

This same activity was performed in the next class but with a variation. This time a team of 8 students was formed .The team members were asked to select one person as a worker who would be blind-folded during the entire activity. There would be one person guiding the blind-folded worker. And the others were made to sit at a distance from the worker as managers. The team was given two minutes to decide their strategy and their height target. No one , except the blind folded worker could touch the tower. The team decided 20 cubes as their target .But unfortunately could manage only 7.

The answers to the below questions can serve the purpose of this activity:

·         Why did the team not succeed in achieving the target?

·         What was the objective?

·         How did the managers communicate to the worker during building process?

·         Was the worker trusting  the managers who were guiding him throughout?

·         What could have been done to improve the tower?

The 8-membered team failed to achieve their target because there was only one man working and 7 people directing him. Each of the seven having different opinions on how the tower was being made.

We can see similar kind of situations in our organizations .A situation where the worker is completely dependent on his manager’s ability to give clear and precise instructions. Sometimes the manager is assertive and but the worker is lazy enough to ignore his instructions .Sometimes the manager is indifferent to the workers  constrains and end up messing the situation by hurrying or shouting at the worker.Well Its rightly told..

                                      “The higher our position ,the more modestly we should behave”

The other aspect of this activity was to drift us from the craftsmanship level to organization level. For any organization irrespective of its size, its ability to excel depends on two things –Efficiency and Effectiveness.

Excellence = Effectiveness X Efficiency

But there is huge difference in the way the traditional craftsmen and the modern organizations work.Craftsmanship is an old concept but it is appreciated in all cultures. In craftsmanship, there is only one man crafting goods but he doesn’t have the knowledge to manage his organization. Motivation to work is solely derived from his paycheck and that is all what the worker cares about. He has to be master in all the processes involved in the production of his product. This makes his production process an independent one and the craftsman a highly skilled one.

But Modern Management is quite different from Craftsmanship. It is different in the sense that this kind of management helps a complex organization function as if it were one craftsman. There are many people working in teams on different levels and in various domains to simplify complex business processes. The division of work has helped increasing the organization’s efficiency but has also led to increased employee dissatisfaction due to the mundane and repetitive nature of work .Most of the organizations suffer from unnecessary and unstructured division of work which leads to confusion at many levels and reduced efficiency. These types of organizations work on the concept of parallelism. It is a process based entity. The various functions of the organization are not dependent on each other, instead are handled by a different manager leading his team. One of other major problems of today’s industrial scenario is “DESKILLING” which involves reducing the skill level of the job or the employee to lower production costs and ensure higher productivity. But I blame some of the humans for this. Humans like me .We want to work for a big organization, maximize our skills, and extract the best price for them. We might be the happiest if our job is being done by the push of a button. It can make life easier. And whether it is the push of a button or any other process that reduces the effort by human, if it makes management easier or lets say less skillful will be welcomed.