THREE MONKS NO WATER

There is an 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. There is a film based on this proverb which tells how people behave in teams and how can we make the team work efficiently. Click to watch the video. There are three ways in which the monks carry the water. The film depicts the comparisons of the different attitudes of the monks when staying alone, staying with one other monk, and staying with two other monks.

A young monk lives a simple life in a temple on top of a hill. He has a daily task of hauling two buckets of water up the hill. He does it by using bringing two buckets of water on a bamboo stick balanced on his shoulder. When the second monk joins the first monk stops doing the job completely. But then the two monks decide to share the job by bringing one bucket of water using bamboo stick after initial arguments over the position of bucket on the bamboo stick. Then the third monk comes. Initially the two monks make the third monk bring the water. But he is so tired that he himself consumes all the water. Now nobody is ready to get the water. There is no water in the temple and the temple catches fire.

This crisis brings the three monks together. They co-operate with each other and extinguish the fire. One monk goes down the hill fills the bucket with water. Other monk pulls the bucket up using a pulley and the third one near the temple extinguishes the fire. This could have happened earlier but they were thinking about themselves initially and not about the organisation as a whole (here the temple). The emergency made the monk forget the individual goals and work together as a team.

Innovation is the key

From first way to second way the number of bucket have come down. Initially one monk was bringing two buckets but in second case two monks were bringing one bucket. But here the productivity is not decreased if we take the human fatigue into consideration. If we only consider through materialistic point of view the productivity has come down but the monks are not machines so must take human effort into consideration.

Out of  Box Thinking

Now if we look at third case we can see that it is the most productive way of doing the work. In the third case all the three monks have different predefined and clear roles. Their roles are different but interdependent and everybody is equally responsible for the job. The job and responsibilities are equally distributed so that nobody feels cheated. There is a facility of instant feedback. Thus by using simple management principles the job is simplified. Usually most of the complex problems have the simplest solutions. It is upto us to look at the problems differently and think out of box and innovate to reach to the solution. This way the work becomes fun and the productivity is improved significantly and this in turn helps the organisation become efficient and grow by leaps and bounds.

Productivity in each case can be compared as follows.

	Method I	Method II	Method III
Members	One Monk	Two Monks	Three Monks
Input  - Effort by monks  ( Units in Jouls)  ( Esti..)	100 Jouls    by One person	50 Jouls by two persons together	Insignificant effort by three monks together
Output - Water	2 buckets	One bucket	Many buckets of water is fetched
Productivity Measure:            ( Input / Output)	100 J / 2 = 50 J per bucket of water	50 J / 2 = 25 J per bucket of water	Insignificant effort per baucket of water
Nature of Member Roles	Independent	Somewhat  Interdependent	Very much Interdependent