Three Monks: Antique Animation from China teaching Productivity

DR. Mandi was trying to teach management by one  of the most unorthodox way by showing us a animated Chinese movie. It turned out to be a huge success. Three Monks, a quite famous animated short made in 1980 by the celebrated director, A Da is based on the proverb that posits: "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."

I am narrating the video briefly. There is a monastery located on the top of a hill .The day to day requirement of water has to be satisfied from  only water source  at the bottom of the hill. To collect water one needs to get it from the bottom of the hill in buckets with a stick. Initially the situation was that a monk descends the mountain everyday to fill up the water. Soon a second monks joins him. They both decide to share the work after a initial fight. But the second monk is tall. So there is unequal load sharing between the two monks. So they again they start fighting.

Pragmatic Thinking

They was a gross misunderstanding between the monks. First the small monk comes out with a idea and measures the stick with his palm. But the tall monk refuses and starts measuring with his palms. This leads to the unequal division of the Stick. So again there is disagreement because of the subjective measurement. So both monks start thinking again. Immediatley a idea strikes the smaller monks. He decides to measure it with a objective. Thus both the monks come to agreement and resume their work. Its all bout creative thinking. But for solving such a complex problems one needs only simple solution. So as DR.Mandi says it all about power of simplicity.

Collective approach:

Then the third monk comes. Each monk thinks that other will do the daily chores. But none does the work. They said praying in the monastery. Suddenly a mouse lit fire to the monastery. Realising the need the monks overcome the initial difference and came together as team .They extinguished the fire by fetching water from the river. Thus there was clear coordination between the monks. Thus they survived the disaster. This was an eye-opener for all the three monks.

Breakthrough innovation or out of the box innovation:

Thus because of the Coordination they came up with a out of the box idea. They installed a pulley at the top of the hill to fetch water. Each person had their respective role in this. One has to fetch water from river to pulley. The next monk has to pull the pulley and the third monk has to take the water from pulley to monastery. This was break through innovation for their problems. Here there is no need for any special skill. Everyone was satisfied with their work. The effort needed for per bucket was drastically brought down.

Here with I present a simple analysis of the three methods mentioned above across various performance variables.

Variables	Method 1	Method 2	Method 3
No of monks	1	2	3
Information flow	None	Slow	Fast
Skill	High	Moderate	Low
Satisfaction	Low	Moderate	High
Dependency	Low	medium	High
Effort	High	Moderate	Low
Effciency or productivity	Low	Moderate	High

Thus Dr. Mandi has made us realise the importance of scientific solution in an organisation.We are very grateful to Dr.Mandi for his Unique teaching styles.