Project Management Leadership: Building Creative Teams, 2nd Edition

Appendix

Lost At Sea

Learning Outcomes

After reading this appendix you should be able to:

• Understand the benefit of team decisions.

Your yacht is sinking after hitting a whale in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. You only have time to salvage fifteen items of gear. Your task is to rank these items according to their importance to your survival, starting with 1 (the most important) to 15 (the least important). You may assume the number of survivors is the same as the number in your team. Before the yacht sank you were able to send a Mayday message but you were not sure of your position.

Exercise 1: Using the survival gear list in Table A.1, determine your personal ranking.

Table A.1: Survival Gear Ranking Chart for Exercises 1 and 2

Copyright unknown.

Error points are the absolute difference between your ranking and the experts’ ranking (disregard plus or minus signs).

Exercise 2: Determine the team’s ranking.

This is an exercise in team decision making. Your team is to employ the team consensus method in reaching its decision. This means that the prediction for each of the fifteen survival items must be agreed upon by each team member before it becomes a part of the team decision. Consensus is difficult to reach, therefore, not every ranking will meet with everyone’s complete approval. As a team, try to make each ranking one with which all team members can at least agree. Here ...