The Three Monks- Team Building and Coordination

Background

The film is based on the ancient Chinese proverb "One monk will shoulder two buckets of water; two monks will share the load, but add a third and no one will want to fetch water."

Some special features of this video:

·       The film does not contain any dialogues, allowing it to be watched by any culture

·       A different music instrument was used to signify each monk. 

·        The film tells the story from the aspect of the buddhist bhikkhu.

Plot and Problem

A young Buddhist monk lived alone at the top of a mountain.  Every day he had to fetch water from the foot of the mountain, using a yoke and two buckets.  That provided him with enough water for his personal needs and to water his small vegetable garden. 

 One day, he was joined by an older monk.  Their attempts to bring water up the mountain together, stringing a single bucket on a pole carried between them, were not very successful; and each felt it was the other’s task to fetch more water, so neither went.  The vegetables in the garden began to die.  Then a third monk arrived, and the situation worsened.  As each monk refused to give way, or compromise his stance in any way, the outlook became bleaker, and certainly none of them was composed enough to meditate or pray. 

 Then one day, disaster struck… Would they be able to let go of their antagonism and work together to put things right?

This is where managerial concepts come in.

Solution

Towards the end we see that the monastery catches fire. When this happens, all the monks forget their hostility and try to put out the fire. The dilemma of who will carry the water was quickly forgotten and a system arose out of the initial chaos. They all put out the fire quickly. Drastic innovation adds an altogether new dimension to the process and fundamentally changes it. That's what the monks did when faced with the fire at their temple.

Productivity is at its best. All are working together as a team.This is what happens in life. When I played football there were situations when no one cooperated no matter how hard I tried as a captain. But when asituation of emergency faed us such as whenwe were down by two goals in the dying minutes then everyone played as a team and gave his best. In these situations the efficiency and effectiveness is very high. So a manager should try to aim at this level of productivity in normal situations. 

Managerial Learnings

We generally do not excel at co-operating with each other. One of the reasons is that, from the beginning to the end of our schooling, our teachers have not paid enough attention to developing this trait. Year in, year out, we slowly get the bad habit of relying only on ourselves. Yet in real life, we encounter work that demands co-operating with others. We simply cannot function if we are unable to co-operate.

How can managers rectify this situation in the workplace? I think co-operative learning is one of the best managing strategies in developing the employee’s co-operative ability.

This is where co-operative learning comes in. This is a set of instructional methods in which employees work in small mixed ability learning teams. The employees in each group are responsible not only for learning themselves but also for helping their teammates learn.

These groups require a lot of teamwork and interaction: this way, employees learn to work with one another, to listen to one another carefully and to respect each other’s ideas; employees in their own groups have the opportunity to talk about subject content, to articulate their ideas and ask questions of one another; Everyone in the group is responsible for learning the material at hand. No one can just sit and watch, everyone is involved and responsible for learning.

Innovation shown at the end of the video in the scene when a pulley was used to draw water is also very important. This is very helpful in today's world when new technology can be used to make work easier. 

One of the major purposes of co-operative learning teams is to help employees, younger employees especially, work collaboratively with their peers, to share ideas, to listen to others ideas, to begin to see the joys of sharing a task with another person, to understand how assigning a number of people to a task sometimes makes accomplishing it a little bit faster and easier.