At 29,029 feet above sea level, Mt. Everest is the highest point on earth.
Its upper reaches are hostile to human life. Winds routinely reach hurricane force. Temperatures induce frostbite, and only 30% of sea-level oxygen is available for breathing, with eight to twelve hard breaths taken for every step at the upper reaches of the summit.
I climbed Mt. Everest in the Everest V3 group simulation. The simulation imitated the situation of working as a team to achieve the goal of climbing Mt. Everest. My team was other leadership faculty members of the Lake Forest Graduate School of Management.
Everest V3 is a Harvard Business School team leadership simulation, with each team comprising a group of five people. Each person on the team had a distinct role as either Leader, Physician, Marathoner, Environmentalist or Photographer. I was the Marathoner.
Making Decisions by Sharing Information
Working as a team, some decisions were made independently, and others we had to make as a group.
As a team, we faced different challenges as we trekked our way toward the summit, and we had to make many different decisions along the path. Some decisions were more difficult to make than others. All impacted the health of the team members and the preservation of life.
What was most interesting was while doing this simulation, as our team faced challenges while climbing Mt. Everest, we had to share, discuss, and integrate some unique information that each of us had in relation to our roles to be able to solve problems correctly, and make the right decisions.
Vision, Goals, Tension, Conflict
Layered on top of having unique information was that each individual on our team didn’t have only the one simple shared goal of climbing Mt. Everest. Each team member also had individual goals that they wanted to accomplish on the mountain. With this occurred some conflict and tension among the different goals that each team member had.
This combination of imperfectly aligned goals and unequal distribution of information reflects the real-world work circumstances and challenges that many teams and organizations face.
When we think about a group in the workplace, we think about us all having a shared vision.
We think about everybody coming together with the same information.
But that’s not the reality in the workplace.
The reality is we often come together with some shared data, but we also come with unique expertise and knowledge that we have, that others may not.
In addition to a shared vision and goal, we have our own personal and/or business unit goals that we are trying to achieve. Team members have to navigate these multiple tensions and drivers of conflict to make good decisions.
Key Learnings ACHIEVED by Doing
The key learning objective in this simulation that had to be worked out was how do you deal with unequal information, and asymmetric, even conflicting goals, as you work together as a team to successfully make key decisions, to achieve the shared vision and goal? In this case, successfully climbing Mt. Everest.
Going through the experience of this simulation we definitely experienced learning through doing.
We recognized our own misconceptions that everyone had the same information we did, which in many cases, they didn’t.
We learned that we had to ask more questions to get the information that we didn’t have.
We had to better listen to others, instead of talking more and pushing the information that we had onto others (wrongly thinking this would achieve a better decision).
We had to communicate better, and resolve the tensions and conflict that emerged because of multiple conflicting goals.
We learned some strategies about how to deal with the rather challenging situation of climbing Everest V3, which perfectly simulated the communication and decision-making challenges we all face while working in teams.
We each learned much about the sharing of information, communication, and decision-making challenges that exist on a team, and how to successfully navigate them.
This was a superb simulation, which strengthened my knowledge and skills to be able to develop impactful leaders.