To think or not to think

I read something today that a friend of mine had re-posted on her Facebook wall. It was part of an article that suggested that if you want people to think, you should give them an end goal to work towards and let them use their own creativity to figure out how to get the job done.

The article pointed out that, instead of doing this we tend to give people instructions on how we want something to be done and then they just blindly follow the instructions on autopilot until the task is complete. Both ways gets the job done. But only one of them actually engages the minds of the people doing the work.

This caused me to be reminded of the Matrix trilogy. While there are tons of allegories, philosophical lessons and religious overtones, those movies drive home for me how most people live nearly their entire lives without doing any active thinking at all, once they get out of school.

People tend to make a few basic decisions that drive their life in a certain direction and then just tune out for the rest of their lives. The routine becomes all there is.

Wake up. Go to work. Come home. Spend some time with the wife/kids/computer. Go back to bed. That's all there is to Monday through Friday. Saturday and Sunday are for getting drunk with the buddies/homegirls, watching sports  and forgetting about the trials and tribulations of the week. And then its back to Monday to start the whole thing all over. This goes on for a handful of decades and then we retire. Shortly after we die of old age.

It has been said many times and many different ways that all that truly separates man from the animal kingdom is our capacity for rational thought. If that is true then why is it that 99 out of 100 of us insist on spending nearly our whole lives as zombies, just following along with the masses.

We have the ability to look at our lives objectively, to see the things that we like and do not like about them. We have the power to change the things that we do not like, to craft the life we have into the life we want. Why don't we? Why don't you?

I believe that giving people a task and letting them find their own solution is a tremendously good idea. It saves you the trouble of needing to figure out every little finite detail. Besides, someone else is bound to think of different things than you do, perhaps even better solutions than what you would come up with. And very few people, if any, enjoy being micromanaged.

Encouraging others to come up with their own way of getting a thing done, gives them the opportunity of warming up their little used mental capacities and then allows them the opportunity to decide for themselves if they want to continue thinking for themselves or go back into the Matrix and let their thinking be done for them.

Working together

I was listening to some friends playing an online game together earlier and through the bantering and bickering that was flowing back and forth it seemed that they were not doing all that well. They did manage to win the game, but only because they were playing against a remarkably stupid computer AI. Against real people their overall lack of strategy and tactics would likely have fallen flat. Just because there were several of them on the same team it did not mean that they were playing as a team.

What do I mean by this? At the beginning of the game they were all placed on the same team but they each had their own idea of what a good way to win the game was. And each was putting into play their own plan for how to make that happen. The problem with this is that their plans were mutually exclusive. Each plan called for each person to  be in a different location than the one that every other plan called for.So far we have not learned a way to be in two or more locations at once, so while any one play may have worked all of them together were bound to fail.

To work together as an effective team only one overall plan could be enacted. Elements from several of them could have been incorporated as long as they did not count on any one person being in two locations at the same time.

What should have happened before the game is that one person should have been selected as leader and everyone should have agreed to follow that person's instructions. It is not possible to have five different leaders on a five person team because you can only follow one set of instructions at a time. A team will almost always beat a group of individuals each doing their own thing.

One may not always agree with the plan and strategy of the leader but if you do not follow it, it can not work. It may not anyways, but if you do not follow the plan you will never know. If you follow it and it does not work, at least you are not to blame for the failure. Then afterwards you can take your turn as leader and show why your way may be better.By each taking a turn leading the team, you can find out who is best suited for leading the group. And if you each have an open mind, you can all improve your skills by learning from one another.

Also before the game started strategy and goals should have been discussed. To be a successful part of a team one must be aware of their role and what is expected of them before game time. Each person needs to know what is expected of them at any given moment. Knowing ahead of time how the game works and how the opponent is likely to respond in a given situation is good also useful. That way contingencies can be set up, on the fly, for the major changes that may need to be made to the overall plan, in order to ensure victory.

To sum up, being part of a successful team is about having a good leader, constructing a flexible plan, following instructions from the leader even if you disagree with them and most of all working together.