Team Experience Analysis of Everest Collaboration

Last week Maggie, Nate, Teresa, Will, and I ventured up Mount Everest. We entered the simulation excited and energized to be exploring collaboration through an interactive simulation. We concluded the simulation feeling disappointed with our results. We walked away from the experience a bit in awe of how a computer simulation could impart such real and applicable lessons on collaborating with partners.

Strengths and Challenges During Team Experience

1. Strengths: We succeeded in maintaining a positive attitude throughout the journey and experienced very little conflict. Because we sat in a circle and went around in a circle to discuss decisions during each day, it felt like everyone had an opportunity to speak and share out his or her facts and insights. The positive perception of this experience lasted until the simulation was over and we saw our lower-than-expected points total at the end. This positive perception was further shattered when we gathered with all the other groups and realized the mediocrity of our outcomes compared to our cohort mates.
2. Challenges: The biggest challenges centered around our effectiveness and our collaboration process/governance. Our determination to have verbal consensus at the end of each day coupled with our unwillingness to share information and gain information asymmetry on our varying goals hindered our success. Additionally, our assessment of whether conflict existed did not emerge until the end when we saw how effective we were at climbing based on individual and team points received. Towards, the end of simulation when individuals’ health started declining or started to risk our ability to summit, perceived conflict began to emerge. It was not until the simulation was over and the scores were provided that we all felt conflict but by then it was too late to re-do any of our decisions in this exercise.

Strategies to Increase Mt. Everest Performance

1. Use of Facts: Individual goals can seem selfish when framed as simply one’s own desires but where we could have all improved was framing our individual goals based on facts about the incentives and facts around the window of opportunity of each of our goals. Instead of powerfully advocating for our own goals, I felt a need to appear like a “team-player” and downplay some of my facts in order to move forward and look agreeable to all. The result of lack of information symmetry and essentially not providing all the facts meant that the central issues, such as our individual goals or our individual impediments (e. g. health preconditions) never surfaced. “Facts let people move quickly to the central issues surrounding a strategic choice. ”Sharing more facts would have encouraged more constructive conflict that we would have had to figure out together.
2. Create Common Goals: We should have created common goals from the start. We should have framed a few common goals in a way such that “everyone’s interest to achieve the best possible solution”For example, it could have been that we all wanted to avoid rescue or that we all wanted at least 50% or 75% of our team summit. We did not intentionally reflect at the onset and plan around any common goals, which meant we made a lot of assumptions of what our common goal or common agendas were. This hurt our end scores.
3. Challenge Group Think: The idea that consensus is always ideal or that consensus is always possible comes with a price, namely that “key issues can be forgotten and that there may be missed opportunities to think about different strategies and alternatives.

”More importantly, the value we placed on consensus as a group resulted in groupthink that often led to conclusions based on assumptions that were never questioned.

1. Work in sub-groups for certain decisions: We confirmed every decision as an entire group a loud and never had side conversations with other individuals or divided into sub-groups. Separating into smaller groups may have naturally allowed for different ideas to surface such that we could weigh them against other.
2. Invite outside experts into the discussion: Although it was not possible in this simulation, we could have benefitted from incorporating input from our skilled sherpas or from individuals not on our team (e. g. those at base camp monitoring weather or with greater knowledge access). The infusion of knowledge beyond our team input may have pushed us to consider factors we were not currently discussing or contemplating. The key here, though, is also discerning which discussions need outside experts and which do not. The areas where we were weakest such as calculating temperatures and wind could have benefitted from more exact data that could possibly have been achieved with additional input from outside experts.

Conclusion

Hindsight is always 20/20. If we could do this simulation again or a similar one, I think our approach would be different. We would plan out a bit more in the beginning instead of diving right in to allow for reflection on what the common purposes and goals are. We would try to be more intentional about not creating an environment where consensus is the ideal. That being said, some real gold nuggets emerged from this experience. Creating environments for constructive conflict during major decisions and being more aware to challenge situations where group think can quietly thrive are my biggest takeaways for working in teams that I can apply both in my current work and other group settings.