No. 30, November-December 2024. In a decision-making seminar for NGO managers in a Central American country, a colleague introduced an exercise or "pre-simulation" among the cases. It involved solving a problem for the survivors of an emergency landing in the desert of the southwestern U.S. They could only remove 15 objects (such as a compass) from the aircraft before it burst into flames. The exercise is called Desert Survival (hereafter, SD) and is a "pre-simulation" because there is only one decision moment, while a simulation contains a sequence of decisions with feedback loops between them.
The task of SD is to define the priority of the 15 objects, first individually and then in groups of 6-10 participants. Unlike the cases, SD has only one solution, developed by a subject matter expert. At the end of the exercise, his or her solution is revealed and compared to the individual and group lists, to learn whether the group achieves a closer approximation to the expert's correct solution than the average of the group members-known as the "team advantage."
Among the 6 NGO steering groups, only two groups achieved a slight advantage over the individual solutions. In discussing the results, they said that the expert was wrong. What we observed is that the group discussions were dominated by those managers with stronger opinions and voices, and whose solutions were further away from those of the expert.
From that experience, I decided to add SD to my teaching repertoire, but with a parallel reading (technical note) on teamwork and a dramatization of the expert's presentation to make it convincing. Between September 1981 and July 2017 I used SD with 233 groups in nine Latin American countries, from Mexico to Argentina. The data and observations contain learnings on individual and group decision making.
The group that came closest to the expert's solution was composed of financial executives of Mavesa, a large Venezuelan food company, in January 1991, with a difference of 34 (meaning that it was a little more than 2 for each of the 15 objects). The average number of members of that group was 56, giving the team an advantage of 22.
In contrast, a group from the Honduran Ministry of Natural Resources managed to move 15 points away from the individual averages at the end of 1981, the highest negative figure since that time. But another group from that same ministry (which no longer exists) had a team advantage of 17 points, among the highest of all and tied with the Executive Committee of CATIE, an international organization based in Costa Rica.
Why these differences? Based on my observations of these groups over some 36 years, I can point to several reasons, both for the groups that move toward as well as those that move away from the expert's solution.
But first, I must say something about the expert: he is Alonso Pond, former Director of the Desert Branch of the Air University Information Center, Maxwell Air Force Base, with knowledge of all the world's deserts (except the Sahara) and author of several books on the subject. The exercise is based on 2,000 actual cases.
Let's start with the groups that were furthest away from Mr. Pond's solution. In all the cases I observed, they paid little attention to the data in the exercise, but in addition there were groups with distinct characteristics; the "consensual", the "followers" and the "anxious".
Consensuals began by examining each member's solutions and assembled a group solution based on the majority opinions: if a magnetic compass was rated 6.5 on average among the 15 items and a pocketknife 7.2, the compass was chosen with higher priority than the pocketknife. This method ensured that the group score could not be better than the average of the individual scores.
In the groups of followers, one of the members had lived or knew of another survival experience and immediately assumed the leadership of the group. I remember in one group there was a mountaineer who had been lost in the Ecuadorian Andes and was saved when he found a small village after walking for almost three days. He convinced the other members of the group that a solution in the Andes of South America could be applied to the situation in a desert in the southwestern United States-even though the two situations were radically different.
Anxious groups never considered the option of staying under the burned-out airframe of the aircraft waiting for rescue, even though the flight plan had been filed prior to takeoff and there was full visibility throughout the area. These groups fell into the "activity trap," which happens to many of us when we are waiting for someone else at a certain location in a shopping mall-and we go out to look for them just before they arrive (although it happens less now that we are all on cell phones).
Some groups, such as Mavesa's financial executives, took another approach and began by examining the evidence. In December 2006, a group from the 24th MAEX XXIV graduating class of INCAE, meeting in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, approached the expert's list with a score of 26, the best of the 233 groups I observed. All six members of the group had individual scores between 46 and 76, with an average of 58, so the "team advantage" was 58-26=32. Most surprisingly, the group score was 20 points better than the best individual score (46). How did they achieve this?
"We started out voting," one group member told me. "But we abandoned that approach, because we realized it depended on whether we leave or stay. There were different opinions, and we were tied 3 and 3."
"How did you resolve the debate between leaving and staying?" I asked.
"We started to analyze: what is our goal? To survive. And for this, we have to be visible; we had to be noticed. We had no way to locate ourselves, and we didn't know where we were. We debated strongly, some of us were quickly convinced; Marlon was the last to be convinced..."
"And after making the decision?"
"We start with what is most important, like the parachute to make signals and what we discard as less important, like salt, which creates thirst..."
So the conversation continued, and I was impressed by both the rational skills used by the group - understanding the situation, identifying the objective, evaluating the consequences of different alternatives - as well as the interpersonal skills: active listening, non-judgment, contributing ideas, and disagreeing in a non-threatening way.
This pre-simulation of survival in the desert is not a case in the strict definition of the term, since it contains the "correct" (expert's) solution, but it does have learnings: it shows that you can use the case method without using a case. But the opposite is also true: a case can be used without using the case method.
