DAY 8: Valley Crossing Excercise(SKYWALK)

The ‘Skywalk’ exercise demonstrated in class today somehow brings forth a wide variety of management lessons to learn. Apparently, a very simple exercise with three people trying to cross a valley( which is slightly wider for a man to cross) using a long stick quite easily demonstrates the lessons of “Shifting of Leadership”, “achieving unreal goals”, “necessity of trust in an organisation”, “power of positivity” and most importantly “ how to shift from being an underachiever to the best performer. Here is a brief description about this exercise:

The activity involved three persons crossing a valley with the support of the rod. The distance between two ends of the cliff was more than 1 step but less than 2 steps. The activity was to be performed in such a way, that at any instance of time during the crossing of valley, not more than 1 member was at risk, i.e. if one person was at risk during the act of valley crossing, the other two members would take up that person’s weight. In this way the inter dependency between the members was tightly coupled which is one of the most facets of team work.

It is also to be noted that when one of the persons is at risk, that person has to trust the other two persons to ensure that the objective is achieved. In this way, during the entire exercise, all the persons are at equal risk and need confidence and trust between the members to achieve the objective.

Shifting of Leadership:

Here each one is taking the responsibility valley crossing for a certain time, then the responsibility transfers to someone else. In this way they were able to achieve this so called unachievable task. Had it been one leader commanding other two for the same it might never be feasible as risking one’s life blindly following someone’s orders demands a huge leap of trust.

Also, if all were leaders at the same time all would try to dominate and no one would be ready to follow, thus the situation could end up in stalemate.

Achieving Unreal Goals:

The task given seems impossible to performing individually, also working in a team might not work if one was leader or all were leaders at the same time, but innovating this new methodology of leadership made this task possible and hence they achieved this unreal goals.

Necessity of Trust in an Organisation:

Although everyone gets an opportunity to lead but initiating the process also demands trust by the first crosser, this immense trust comes only when one has full passion to complete the task and considers his team to be competent and faithful enough. Thus, developing trust in an organisation could lead to achieving highly unachievable results.

How to shift from being an underachiever to the best performer:

SAFETY	Average	Valley Crosser	EXCELLENT	WORST
Safe	3	6	9	-
Half Safe	3	2	-	-
Unsafe	3	1	-	9

This thing resembles to the manager who could take the organisation across the valley either by four ways.  Most of the managers comes in Average category, most of the workman who always complain and never like to work makes the organisation end up in WORST case. Valley crossing exercise shows great performance by being six times in Safe zone. But the ultimate and TO BE Aspired for is EXCELLENT.

Hence we must try to achieve this excellence, for this first we have to become Average -> Valley Crosser-> Excellent

It would demand a lot of patience and passion but once it is achieved we would be the BEST MANAGERS 

So the final words:

              I WILL ACHIEVE THIS EXCELLENCE