The Monks

"It's easy to come up with new ideas; the hard part is letting go of what worked for you two years ago, but will soon be out of date."

— Roger von Oech

You must be wondering as to why is the title monks for a blog on Organization management. You'll get the answers to the same by the time you reach the end of the blog. Below is the video of 3 monks on which this blog is based.

As can be seen in the above video the main problem faced by them was water. Someone had to go down the mountain to fetch water and none were ready to do it. So the team work required was missing. Again, we are back to team work, I started the blogging with Tower building and till now team work seems to be the crux of every blog I've written so far, looks like team work is the crux of organizational management as well and nothing can be accomplished without it.
Let's have a look at the method employed by the monks to fetch the water up to the monastery.

1. One monk carries 2 buckets of water at a time and takes it to the monastery.
2. Two monks share the load of a single bucket of water.
3. The use of pulley system to fetch the water in which all 3 monks are involved.

The comparison of all the above mentioned techniques is shown in the below table.

	Method 1	Method 2	Method 3
Method 1 Description:One monk carries 2 buckets of water at a time and takes it to the monastery.	−	Method 1 is more efficient as more work can be done in the same amount of time since each monk would be carrying two buckets of water each. So from an organizations point of view this is very productive.	Mthod 3 is the best method because it is a mix of both method 1 and 2 and the output os better than both the methods. Only one monk has to go down the hill to fill the water while the other monk operates the pulley and the third transports the water from the pulley to the storing tank. This way lesser energy is consumed to get the buckets of water and the work gets equally divided among all the monks.
Method 2: Description:Two monks share the load of a single bucket of water.	Method 2 is better than method 1 because here load sharing happens and neither of the monks feels that he has to do more work than the other. This is the principle we had looked at in the human tower example as well.	−	Mthod 3 is the best method because it is a mix of both method 1 and 2 and the output os better than both the methods. Only one monk has to go down the hill to fill the water while the other monk operates the pulley and the third transports the water from the pulley to the storing tank. This way lesser energy is consumed to get the buckets of water and the work gets equally divided among all the monks.
Method 3: The use of pulley system to fetch the water in which all 3 monks are involved.	Mthod 3 is the best method because it is a mix of both method 1 and 2 and the output os better than both the methods. Only one monk has to go down the hill to fill the water while the other monk operates the pulley and the third transports the water from the pulley to the storing tank. This way lesser energy is consumed to get the buckets of water and the work gets equally divided among all the monks.	Mthod 3 is the best method because it is a mix of both method 1 and 2 and the output os better than both the methods. Only one monk has to go down the hill to fill the water while the other monk operates the pulley and the third transports the water from the pulley to the storing tank. This way lesser energy is consumed to get the buckets of water and the work gets equally divided among all the monks.	−

As can be seen from the above table method 3 is the best. But the method 3 didn't happen immediately, there was a transition from method 1 to 2 and then 3 i.e. the innovation was continuous and not a drastic one. The same thing has to be done in an organisation as well, innovation should be a continuous process else the organization will come to a standstill and will not grow any further. We can see this in the video as well when two monks try to lift the bucket filled with water the bucket keeps sliding over to one side or the other increasing the load on that monk, then they take a scale and tie the bucket firmly in the center to distribute the weight equally. This is continuous innovation while the pulley system is drastic innovation as that can be used throughout the society i.e. despite the fact that it helped solve the water problem for monks the innovation can be used in a lot of other places throughout the world. In organizational terms we can term Toyota's Just In Time delivery model as a drastic innovation as it can be used in all manufacturing fields and is not limited to just the automotive sector and the learning method employed by Khan Academy.

What is required from us as managers is that we carry on with these continuous innovations till one of them transforms into a drastic innovation.