Team Simulations Report

Mount Everest, as the highest mountain in the world, is famous for the enormous challenge of reaching its summit. This analytic essay is an analysis of the management involved with the Everest Simulation created by Harvard Business School. During this 3hour simulation I was the team doctor and achieved all ten of the possible ten points available, therefore 100% of goals were achieved. This score is related to the goals I accomplish as an individual and as a team. I enjoyed the simulation and expanded upon my knowledge as it taught a profound understanding of team dynamics, the capability to accept change, a stronger ability to analyse available information and create effective communication. Our team as a whole obtained 94% of our goals.

After seeing what choices my assistant, Sarah, would have made I continued the simulation when I encountered my first obstacle. Harvey, my choice for Assessor and Advisor was running into a conflict with the other team members because he was not available to them as much as they would have liked. I met with the team members and explained that Harvey had been given the technological tools necessary so that web conferencing would be able to take place whenever

Students enrolled in MGTS1301 participated in a three-hour Mount Everest Simulation which involved a team of five people. Each team consisted of a team leader, physician, photographer, environmentalist and marathoner with a common goal of reaching the summit and avoiding rescue. On our team, I was the team leader and completed 40% of my personal goals while our team achieved 44%. After the simulation, I realised I lacked in developing managerial efficiency such as strategic thinking and decision making which led to poor task-structure related to task clarity and the means of leading my team as we progressed through the simulation.

Success in the Mount Everest Simulation was not defined as reaching the summit of a mountain, but rather in terms of strong leadership, positive team work, logical decision making, and effective communication and dispute resolution to accomplish a specific task. Based on my personal experience, I realize the importance of knowing and understanding all team members. Fluid, open communication and positive feedback are key factors. Active listening, motivating, engaging, and valuing each team member’s contributions create an effective work environment. Mistakes happen, but valuable learning comes from the mistakes and our understanding of the challenges and opportunities to overcome them. If we, as team members, learn from our mistakes and are fully committed to the success of the team, we all

I started simulation by testing all the possible outcomes from challenge 1 to 5 and used the best scenario from one simulation to the other step by step and drew the conclusion at the very end.

For the second simulation, I adopted a situational leadership style with a mix of both

The In-Basket Simulation that was done in class was an effective and eye opening experience. It was helpful in working with teams and break up responsibilities. The simulation was an amazing experience because the different scenarios were real life things that happen on a daily basis at school. It is an eye opening experience and it shows us the major responsibility that we are taking on.

Everest simulation helped me saw the importance of communication as a team. This simulation was set up so that we all have individual goals to complete but we must work together to complete our goals. Given our roles beforehand allowed us to interpret and understand what we need to complete but this left us out from considering other team members goals. This simulation also allowed us to consider outside factors that happen to us like the difference in health conditions. With unexpected conditions and temperature, I realized that as a team we need to work together and pull all our information to complete the task.

The outcome of the simulations was positive for me because I used the right tools at the right time in order to implement change. Effective communication played a vital role in simulations. Knowing how, when and what to communicate will help us to have a smooth change process. Additionally, implementing change quietly is very important for a change agent. In both simulations, I used private interviews and walk the talk as my main tool in the first weeks of the change process to aware people about the change. I interviewed almost everyone and that helped me to understand about people, what they want from the change process, who is their allies, what are their interests, and if they are resisting to change what is/are the reason(s) behind that. Change needs time and I did not rush the process. Waiting for the right time to take a decision and ask for others (consultants and internal) supports increased my credibility.

While in storming stage all the team members shared opinions and ideas of what to do during the simulation. Furthermore due to the limited amount of time given and clash of timetable for some of our team members, we had to rush through the first Everest simulation which resulted many decisions made thoughtlessly. For the first Everest simulation, two hour was allocated for it to be completed. Furthermore many important decisions such as allocating oxygen tanks and whether to proceed to next camp were made without much discussion. On the other hand it was observed that the marathoner in our group was the follower as she conformed with the fast moving pace of the simulation when she actually needed more time to forecast the weather of whether to proceed to next camp or not.

After carefully reviewing our experience from the practice simulation, we had decided to start up based on our best result of performance measures. However, even though we had had different result of it, we had mostly received negative massage regarding payment for employees and customer satisfaction, so we focused on finding solutions to prevent them from happening again. therefore we decided to provide better payment than local average. The reason why is we found that when we provide better payment to our staff, our customers’ satisfaction has increased. Additionally, referring the local report helped us to receive awards such as Best Staff, Best Service, Best

We used the project process guidelines to play the simulation. Although, there were some limitations by simulation that stopped us from making real decisions but we tried our best to make our decision as close to real situation as possible. In individual rounds we learn how to allocate resources and how to manage our budget and plan ahead. In team simulation we started the pre-play simulation with hiring resources. Based on our experience from individual rounds and the fear to losing highly skilled resources we hired costly and almost all of the resources, knowing that we may increase our unallocated resource expenses. We also hired 3 resources for the marketing job, the reason was that we had so many marketing tasks that we though one or

The Everest simulation was designed by the Harvard Business School as a group-based online activity to help participants experience group dynamics and organizational challenges in the context of climbing Mount Everest. The participants will be arranged into groups of five or more and are assigned to various roles such as leader, physician, marathoner, environmentalist, journalist and observer. The simulation requires the team to undertake two attempts and earn points for personal and group objectives. In addition, it allows participants to grasp the value of leadership and teamwork, as the participants are required to communicate and make decisions to surpass conflicts that are encountered during the simulations. The first attempt resulted in confusion and no coordination as there has been lack of the leader’s direction and participation. As a result, the team achieves a score of 76 percent for the group objective. Afterward, the second attempt proved that the team are more cohesive and prepared as the score for group objectives increase to 93 percent. Yet, even though the team attained high scores in both simulation, there are several issues that emerge during the attempts due to decision-making bias and leadership styles. Therefore, this report will explore the experience from the simulation by examining issues during the attempts, critically analyzing the issues with framework and theories and providing personal-reflection for future references.

The important part of the simulation assignment is what you have learned from it. As such you will be required to reflect on the decisions you made and the outcomes.

Personally, the simulation has benefitted my further knowledge on what goes into making decisions and what ultimately makes it into the State of the Union. After being a part of the International/ Humanitarian Aid Council, I have learned to consider how the world operates and how the U.S. decides what states are in dire need of aid. On our council, we dealt with truly tragic situations it was interesting to learn the process of writing a memo in a semi-official outline and to get a hands-on experience to see what kind of policies the International/ Humanitarian Aid makes decisions on. The people on my council truly made the simulation much easier to do as we all collaborated and