Less Is More, Simple Is Best

Couple of days back, I put a group of young leaders to a teamwork challenge I made up with a few young adult leaders. This was to prepare them for the upcoming youth camp leadership challenges. They were given forty minutes and a sum of money to buy materials to build a vessel which should float, balance and hold as many pebbles as possible. Till today I'm still suprised by the results. As usual, I learnt something extra myself which I didn't expect from that teamwork exercise.

The night before the challenge, I tested just a couple of significant materials without fancy stuffs (took me less than a minute!), and my vessel could hold at least five pebbles before sinking. With forty minutes and a whole lotsa stuffs and adhesive tapes, only one group (out of four) during the workshop outperformed my test vessel with six pebbles! One of them could hold only two!

Only one team spent part of its resources on offensive and the other three spent everything on defenses. I told my co-facilitators after the workshop that it was a wrong strategy. Only very few resources were actually needed for building, and the rest should've been spent on offensive pebbles to sink other competing vessels.


I made a mental note to myself yesterday: LESS is always MORE. A simple, streamlined vessel will always do better than a fancy, complicated vessel. Just because there are many members in a team, does not mean you need to do a lot and spend excessively, especially on defenses. Many times, you've to look outward, and the old saying "Attack is the best defense" is still true.