Strategic Engagement - Session 11

I found the prisoner's dilemma exercise we did in class today very interesting. It was interesting because while I've certainly read about scenarios like this many times, I don't think I'd ever actually attempted to act one out.

It was frustrating to have a complete understanding of how the game works and know what you all could come out ahead if only you cooperated, but that there is simply no way to know what the other teams will do. The other thing I found interesting was playing the game with multiple teams and seeing how much that affected the odds. Typically, when you read about the prisoner's dilemma it is with just two people, and even then it is hard to reach a desirable outcome. With multiple teams, it becomes really difficult. I thought that this was a good proxy for the real world, since the more players you have the more difficult it is to achieve collaboration, especially because it is hard to predict how many people will act.

My group was the first group to break everyone's trust, by getting everyone to agree to choose Y and then choosing X instead. We did this because we interpreted the game's rules to mean earn as much money as you can, meaning our team. What is particularly interesting is that we then went back to choosing Y in the final round; and I'm not quite sure why we did it. Going into the final round I thought we should choose X for sure, since we would be better off that way with every scenario except every other team also choosing X which seemed very unlikely. So why did we choose Y? And more importantly why was I one of the people to advocate for choosing Y?

I think in the end we choose Y because we felt bad for deceiving everyone the first time around, and felt like the rest of the class was quite mad at us. The fact that emotions can prevent you from acting completely rationally in a little classroom game I think really says a lot about situations of strategic engagement and negotiation in the real world. If our emotions affected us and caused us to act unpredictably in this setting, it is clear that emotions can easily affect people and organizations in the real world. While you can always hope that people will act rationally, and make decisions based on their best interests, you should be careful never to assume you know how they will act!

Stakeholders - Session 10

Shortly after our session on strategic assessment of stakeholders I encountered a situation where the stakeholder strategizer tool could be used in my work at MCV.

Malawi Children's Village (MCV) is now in negotiations with its retiring executive director over leasing the land that he owns. In a recent conference call for MCV, a board member proposed the idea, that since the negotiations were difficult, MCV should simply relocate down the road, and reinvent the core village based component of the organization as a new organization. I disagreed with this idea, primarily because I think this proposed idea was in need of a careful stakeholder analysis. It is clear that moving and reinventing the organization could be beneficial for the board of the organization, since they could potentially find cheaper rent, and have a clean break with the retiring executive director, ensuring that he no longer has any involvement with the organization. Before such an option could be explored however, I think a stakeholder analysis would be essential.

There are several groups which would have the potential power to either make an MCV move a success or a failure. One group would be the Village Volunteers that currently monitor the orphans. If these volunteers were not willing to continue with a reinvented organization, the strategy would be a failure. Their commitment would have to be ensured before such a strategy was attempted. While it is difficult to know whether or not they would be interested in continuing their support, one major cause for concern is that there is no clearly identifiable benefit to them in the move/reinvention of the program.

Another stakeholder that would need to be addressed would be the local community and clients served by the program. The families and orphans currently served by the organization have likely gotten used to visiting the clinic and schools at the current central campus. More importantly they are proud of the success the organization has had in the community. If part of the organization were to split off and leave the central campus, there is no guarantee that the local community would still support the program and have faith in its services. Once again, it is difficult to see what gain the local community would see in the relocation/reinvention of the core MCV program.

Since I don't see a clear benefit for either of these important stakeholder groups, and I think that both have enough power to derail the strategy, I would not support going forward with the idea. If the idea were to go forward, I would insist that a detailed stakeholder analysis be done, so that we could identify clear incentives for these stakeholder groups (and others) to ensure that they support the strategy and would work to ensure its success.

Alignment of Values - Session 9

I found the values exercise we did in class to be very interesting. When we were first asked to select our most important values after simply rating all of the values as high, low or medium, I wound up with one set of values. Many of my most important values then changed after we were asked to give each value a score based on our answering of the specific questions about how having more or less of each value would affect our happiness.

I think that this personal experience is important to keep in mind when getting feedback from individuals in the future - whether this feedback is on values or anything else. Having guided questions which force you to think about an item or decision and weigh the pros and cons before answering seems crucial to generating more reliable feedback. This seems like it would be an especially good activity to do with employees or board members on a retreat before revising the mission statement, vision statement, or core values for an organization. I think, in the same way that the guided questions helped me refine my own most important values, the entire exercise may help individuals to refine how they feel about their work at an organization, and the values they think are essential for that organization to have. Learning what values drive each individual, and aligning these values with the organization to the greatest extent possible clearly enables employees to work better together towards a common mission. I think that the exercise can also be helpful, in that it reminds us all of the differences people have when it comes to which values are more important. This can help people work better together, since it reminds us there may be a valid reason for a colleague's differing opinion. Rather than just dismissing a colleague's opinion as ill informed, people can understand that a colleague's actions may be driven by a different set of values.