The Valley Crossing Exercise

There is a saying "Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence wins championships."

Teamwork is defined as efforts done by a group of people to achieve a common goal. In essence, each team member leaves his/her individual priorities aside for a larger cause and works together.

The valley crossing exercise was performed to provide an idea of the concept of teamwork. 

Let us analyze the following example

In this, three persons had to cross from left block to right block. Both the blocks were separated by a distance of more than one step of each person thus making it impossible for single person to achieve it individually.

To accomplish the task, we derived a workflow and split the task into 9 steps. Then all the steps were followed and demonstrated in class to achieve the goal.

The steps are as follows

Three wise men Crossing the valley  - Detailed task process

Persons	First Person	Second Person	Third person
Steps
1	Safe	Safe	Safe
2	Half Risky
3	Full Risky
4	Half Risky	Half Risky
5		Full Risky
6		Half Risky	Half Risky
7			Full Risky
8			Half Risky
9	Safe	Safe	Safe

 Safe  - Both the legs  of the person  have full  support

Half Risky – One leg in the air and the other leg has support

Full risky  -  Both the legs are  in the air without any support

Learning from the activity

Workload Distribution

Working in a team has an advantage of the workload getting distributed among all the team members. With work properly distributed, you can concentrate on a single activity till the time you gain expertise in it and you not feel stressed out due to work. 

Trust

 The organization cannot be successful if there is no element of trust in it. As in the case of valley problem, persons can take the risk to cross the valley only since they trust the other two. Similarly for the organization to be successful, managers and workers have to follow the Theory X which tells the people or managers have trust on the other people or employees.

Responsibility

Everybody in the organization is equally responsible, no matter if he/she is the higher manager, manager or the engineer/ worker. Because if suppose engineer will not be able to do his job properly then not only he will be in the risk but there is the chance that the manager and the higher manager will be also be in the risk. And finally the task will not be completed.

Communication

When working in a team, communication will need to be established. If a team can't communicate - it can't and won't work. In a team, there are lots of different individuals from different walks of life, being brought-up in different environments. The individuals of any team will have varying personalities, and so working in close proximity with these different characters will get you used to how to communicate with them. Working in this environment will help to round-off and develop communication.

Increased Speed of Work

With many people handling a single project and doing the assigned work properly, the overall work speed increases and your team can complete the project well within the given time frame.