Three Monks

Watch this animated short movie and try to figure out yourself what management lessons can we learn from it.

So, how was the movie and its peculiar music?
Three Monks (Chinese: 三个和尚, San ge he shang) is a Chinese animated feature film produced by the Shanghai Animation Film Studio. After the cultural revolution and the fall of the political Gang of Four in 1976, the film was one of the first animations created as part of the rebirth period. It is also referred to as The Three Buddhist Priests.
The film is based on the 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." The film does not contain any dialogues, allowing it to be watched by any culture, and a different music instrument was used to signify each monk.
Now, before we talk about management lessons lets talk about some general learnings.

• Courtesy followed by animosity.

This will happen in real life as well, if you try to take undue advantage of something or someone, at one point it will surely backfire.

• An incident, no matter how bad it is, leaves you with a good lesson.

Fire in the monastery did a similar thing in this short. It made the monks realize what they are capable of achieving together as a team.

• The smallest of things might lead to the biggest of disasters.

The rat in this case.
Now, back to the subject :p , the management lessons:

Scenario 1

In case of a single monk, he is able to fetch 2 buckets of water using the principle of a fulcrum to good effect.

Now, in this case, the monk knows that he has to do the job and he puts in his dedicated effort. A good example of Craftsmanship, we talked about in the previous blogs.

Scenario 2

In this case, none of them wants to work alone and expects the other to put in equal effort.
You see such things happening in corporations as well. Do you remember any colleague who worked and had no problem with you not contributing to it?

They together share the load of a single bucket and though the no. of buckets per person has decreased compared to the earlier example but the effort put in by the two has decreased even further after they use a scale to determine the center.

No. of buckets per person is one fourth but the effort is even lesser, one fifth or something.
You will have to do the exercise to find out if the effort is actually lower :p
One more thing to learn here is that two incompatible persons can lower each other's productivity like the tall and the short monk were struggling to adjust with each other.

LET's take tennis for instance, a top seeded singles player might not be able to deliver the same in doubles. Or a doubles player might perform exceptionally with one player but might not be equally effective with someone else.
So, we make teams in which the members compliment each other and allow the members to deliver their maximum. NADAL and FEDERER, or MURRAY and DJOKOVIC one of the best in the business when it comes to singles but can they make the best doubles pair?

Scenario 3

In this case, the 3rd monk comes in the picture and its chaos in the monastery. It was a complete absence of co-ordination. But then once the fire broke out, they started putting in their full effort and ultimately innovated a new way of doing the same task(pulley system). 
You see how innovation can bring maximum results in minimum effort and time.
Another thing to notice is how they chose particular individuals for specific tasks based on their strengths and doing the same thing time and again brought DEXTERITY in their job and resulted in maximum efficiency. 

To sum up

Scenario	One	Two	Three
Effort	10 joules	2+2 joules	½+½+½ joules
Output	2 buckets	1 bucket	1 bucket
Efficiency	20%	25%	66%

* the figures used are only indicative.

Academic learnings :

1. Division of work: Proper division of work improves performance as there is no conflict and there is clear demarcation of jobs to be done by each employee.
2. Innovation: Any job can be simplified even further with continuous innovation and monitoring of the performance.
3. Least effort and Process improvement: The companies should consistently strive for process improvement to find out the option with the least effort, there is always a scope of betterment.
4. Scaling: In businesses, we need scaling many a times to keep up with the ever-increasing demand and scaling is not simply increasing the output of the previous process, it requires process change sometimes as well.
5. Mutual understanding and consent: The manager needs to ensure that the employees share a cordial relation to maximize their efficiency and minimize the chances of conflict.

Remember, there are numerous lessons that can be learnt from the most ordinary events in life, all we need is an intent and the right perspective.
Do still remember the music, i certainly do.
Auf wiedersehen!