Problem
Think about your experience within your teams during and after the Mt. Everest Simulation and answer the following questions:
A. What is the correlation between how you thought your team performed and how your team actually performed? What is the correlation between how you thought you individually performed in your role and how you actually individually performed in your role? What role did decision-making have here? What might your analysis illustrate in terms of how you work in teams outside of the simulation? In future team work situations, what might you personally do to adjust your contributions to your team to produce better results?
B. Having a team with not perfectly aligned goals (asymmetric goals) and not perfectly distributed information (asymmetric information) is overwhelmingly common in teams within organizations. At what point during the simulation did you realize that you didn't all have the same information and perfectly aligned goals? How about realizing you had information overload? What techniques did you use personally to navigate this tension during the simulation? How might this connect to real challenges faced in the work place and what strategies and techniques might you use to overcome these challenges in the future?
C. In the context of a Mt. Everest climb, typically you wouldn't have a team comprised of group members who previously all had worked together for an extended period of time. What advantages did you have for the two groups that retained the same members throughout the case studies and the simulation and how did this connect to performance outcomes? What advantages did you have for the two groups that had mixed team members for the simulation and how did this connect to performance outcomes? For this question, select the scenario that applies to you and focus on that question. Having completed the simulation, if you were asked to design a team that would operate in a high-risk situation similar to a Mt. Everest climb, a rescue mission, or to solve a crisis), would you design a team with people who have worked together previously, or would you opt to incorporate elements of a teaming approach and design a team where members had not worked together before? Support your decision with course material or additional research.