- by Jaime Willis
Recently, I participated in a professional development day at work. One of the teamwork exercises we were tasked with is probably familiar to many of you--we were asked to prioritize a short inventory of things that would aid us in surviving after a winter plane crash in the Canadian Arctic.* After ranking the items on our own, we were given a short period of time to work as a team to create a team ranking of the same 15 items. Finally, the facilitator would give us the rankings assigned to the items by survivalist experts and we could compare both our individual and team scores to those of the experts.
*If you are interested in doing this activity first on your own, feel free to click on this link and scroll down to the "Problem Solving" section of that page.
As soon as we were able to begin our individual rankings, I began by creating my survival goal and then ranked the items as they impacted my ability to reach that goal. I figured that my best chance for survival was to be alive when the rescuers showed up, so I prioritized the items in favor of making camp -- having sufficient heat and shelter to combat hypothermia, having access to clean water and the ability to find/cook food, and finally the ability to signal to rescuers. Once I decided to make camp and prioritized the greatest risks of death, I was ready to rank my items.
When our team began talking through the rankings, I shared my strategy and encouraged the group to agree on a survival goal and then prioritize items from there. Although several members of my group initially agreed, many members were really focused on ensuring that their personal top items received top ranking in the team activity. Which is why, at the end of our discussion, snowshoes and rope were ranked higher than anything else on the list.
Unsurprisingly, our team did not fair well against the survival experts. What was surprising was that our team's score was still better than all but three (including mine--yay!) of our teams individual ranking scores. I think survival was truly won or lost not by the items themselves, but by the defined goal or lack thereof by the players.
How can you expect to succeed when you haven't properly defined what success looks like? You can define your success by following a few simple steps:
1) Define your core values and know your skill-set. In the above exercise, it was amazing how many of my colleagues flippantly stated that they would "probably die" if they were really attempting to survive a plane crash. Not me. "Choose Life" is a very strong core value of mine and I strategized accordingly. At the same time, however, I knew that hiking and orienteering are not my strong suit, so I quickly discarded the option of hiking out and opted to create a camp while waiting for rescue.
2) Define your goal and figure out what is required to make that goal happen. For me, the defined goal was to "survive the plane crash until rescued by eliminating as many high risks of death as possible." I knew that being cold and wet would likely kill me first, so heat/shelter was my top priority. After that, a clean water supply was critical to avoiding deadly dehydration. Then, access to some form of food would allow me to survive the weeks and even months until rescue was possible. Lastly, in the event that rescue arrived, I figured that having ways to signal my precise location would aid rescuers.
3) Choose tasks and resources that fit your goal requirements. If I were given additional time on the above activity, I would have begun outlining my own order of operations with the resources I'd chosen. First, I'd build a fire and get dry & warm. Then, I'd build a shelter to ensure that I could stay dry and warm long-term. Only after those two tasks were complete would I worry about water and food, and eventually signally for help.
I hope you can use this information to begin road-mapping your own goal survival today!
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