Lessons in Teamwork & Teachable Moments
"There are many teachable moments that arise when the game is being played," John Hollenbeck said. "Some of which are by design, and some of which just emerge naturally."
Fundamental attribution error. Take for instance the concept of the fundamental attribution error. In any group situation where something goes wrong, the first knee-jerk reaction on the part of the group is to look for one person to blame for the problem. In many cases, however, the true reason why the group failed might be due to the difficulty of the task or simply to bad luck.
To teach students this lesson, an exercise is set up where one of the team member's tasks is harder than the others, but this cannot be readily perceived. As time passes, the team can see that the score of this one person is lower than that of the other team members. At the halfway point of the game, the students are given a chance to discuss what they can do to enhance performance, and this discussion inevitably turns into a gripe session about how the low performing member is not working hard enough or smart enough.
When the second half of the simulation begins, the tougher set of tasks is then sent to one of the other team members, whose performance then starts to fall behind that of the rest of the team. This person quickly discerns this and invariably says, "It's not my fault. The game is a lot harder this time."
At this point, the simulation is turned off, and the teacher asks why this attribution was never raised during halftime. This leads to a discussion of the fundamental attribution error and how failing to make the right attribution can lead to missed opportunities and conflict in the team. Hopefully, this experience can change the way these students approach this kind of problem in the future and promote more thoughtful and reflective analysis of why any one person may be struggling with their role.
Past success and future risk-taking. Another exercise is designed to teach the students the relationship between past success and future risk-taking. A great deal of research suggests that teams that have been successful in the past become highly risk averse, often to a point where it leads to their eventual downfall.
To create this situation in the lab, Hollenbeck waits until the last week of the class when winning or losing depends upon performance in this final session. However, this final session has a new high-risk feature in the form of Unknown Tracks (UTs). The nature of these UT tracks can only be learned via trial-and-error experience, so there is an element of risk that is not the same as with the more traditional tracks encountered in the past.
Inevitably, teams that are in first place avoid the UTs and focus their attention narrowly on the familiar tracks with which they have had so much success in the past. Meanwhile, teams that are behind coming into the final session show a greater willingness to take risks and eventually learn how to deal with the UTs. Because the UTs become an ever-increasing percentage of the incoming tasks, eventually the first place teams lose out to the teams that started out behind them.
This serves as an opportunity to talk about how past success can lead to future failure with regards to risk aversion and complacency. As one student noted at the end of this session, "I know that in this situation you have to play to win, you can't play 'not to lose,' and yet despite this knowledge, I did it anyway. This showed me how strong this tendency really is."
Communication and isolation. While fundamental attribution error lessons and the effects of success on risk aversion are designed up front, other lessons emerge naturally and unscripted during the course of play. For example, in planning their strategy for how to defend against an incoming wave of tracks, a sports-oriented American male student noted that the team should "play a man-to-man defense with our air assets, and a zone defense with ground assets."
Hollenbeck quickly turned off the game and turned to one of the other team members, a female student from Japan, and asked, "Do you have any idea what he's talking about?" Of course, she didn't, and although this particular session was not designed to examine problems in cross-cultural communication, a discussion ensued about the cultural specificity of many metaphors and analogies. The team learned that while analogies can be powerful communication devices when the team shares a common background, in mixed gender, cross-cultural teams, they create a barrier to understanding and may even wind up isolating certain team members.