Submitted By- Pankaj Dhiman

One-minute Paper #3
1. What were the major points, lessons, concepts, etc. in the class?
The class majorly focussed on desert simulation exercises for me and my team.
The task involved surviving together in a desert simulation exercise with limited
resources under extreme circumstances. The major lessons learned included
the importance of teamwork, resource management, adaptability to difficult
situations, problem-solving skills, leadership skills, and effective decision-
making skills.
2. What was the most useful or meaningful thing you learned or insight
gained during this session? Why? How can you apply this insight?
The most meaningful thing I learned from the entire exercise was how effective
communication can be the key to solving difficult problems in dire situations.
Effective communication can differentiate between life and death in such
survival conditions.
In this particular case, one effective question that we had to answer within the
team was whether to stay at the same place or keep moving to find a nearby
civilization. This question was the most important step in deciding how our
resources will be prioritized in rankings from 1 to 15. During the class
discussion later on, it came that how many teams just decided to keep moving
without actually asking each individual what their thoughts were. My team and
I made sure that we asked each other about their strategies for survival, which
meant that we were able to decide who wanted to stay and who wanted to
move. Then we were able to come to a consensus on how staying was a better
choice. Thus we were able to perform better than most of the other teams in
class and were able to potentially survive the situation.
This insight of effective communication within the team is highly applicable in
professional life and personal relationships. By asking the right questions at the
right time, you increase the success rate of overcoming professional challenges.
This exercise just reinforced once again for me how communication is the key
to solving problems in a team, and how miscommunication can lead to
situations that can be challenging for everyone in a team.
3. What, if anything, was the muddiest point in this session? (In other words,
was anything not clear to you?)
Submitted By- Pankaj Dhiman

The muddiest point for me was ranking the different items in the desert
simulation exercise according to their importance. Things became extremely
difficult when team members differed from each other in opinions about the
relative importance of an item. Thus it became very difficult to rank the items
and often, we had to make a compromise without coming to an actual
consensus on the rankings. The result was that no one in the team was fully
satisfied with the rankings of the available resources in the desert simulation
exercise.
4. What question(s), if any, remain uppermost in your mind
One major question that remained unanswered in my mind was how being in
the actual situation can change your rational thinking process in such
situations. The exercise was just a simulation of extremely dire circumstances
of survival, where a team and person cannot be just thinking rationally as we
were able to. This means that simulating such exercises gives a false indication
of teamwork in such circumstances. Real teamwork and coordination can only
be judged in actual real dire situations.