How We Outstrategized 50 Teams at Stanford
At the beginning of my time in Stanford GSB’s LEAD program we kicked off everything with an uber competitive virtual obstacle course through Stanford’s VirBELA campus. Hundreds of brilliant entrants from around the world were grouped into just over 50 teams, and teammates took turns being blindfolded (virtually) as their teammates verbally directed them through a maze. Along the way there were rewards to pick up, and penalties to avoid, which both affected the final score, all while trying to complete the course as quickly as possible. Teams were allowed to complete the maze up to four times, keeping only their best score. The grand prize was doing a virtual victory dance in the VirBELA auditorium during the medals ceremony, and of course, bragging rights!
So how did our team of five (team name: Laser Focus) manage to get the highest score out of over 50 teams made up of some of the world’s most brilliant people?
Culture + Strategy
With over 50 teams that competed, there’s less than a 2% likelihood that our team was collectively the most brilliant. I think it’s easier to attribute our team’s success as a combination of team culture and strategy. As late business management guru Peter Drucker said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” but I’ve seen magical stuff happen when good strategy meets great team culture.
There were ZERO egos on our team—no one felt the need to prove to anyone else how smart they were or to jockey for power. In fact, it’s strange to realize now that we didn’t even officially designate anyone as group leader. Everyone on the team was just super kind and really open to what others had to bring to the conversation. In later semesters, when we were all moved to different groups, we’d sometimes group message our old thread expressing how much we missed Team Laser Focus… the culture was just… special.
One thing we all seemed to have in common is that we had all experienced times where we felt a little overlooked because we weren’t often the dominant voice in the room. And yet, when you put five of us together, there was an incredible multiplication effect. Maybe we had tapped into a little bit of that teamwork quality The Beatles were speaking about when they claimed that there was no soloist, but rather they each were always trying to play backup to everyone else in the group.
We probably started the first round of competition the same way as many other teams—just going through and yelling out “left,” “right,” “stop,” and “go.” When we got to the end of our first round our score seemed quite bad, though we had no idea what the other teams were scoring. We tried again a second time, after we had gotten our bearings, and had a similarly bad score.
On the third time I had kind of an out-of-the-box idea, and because the team culture was so open to new ideas, I quickly brought it forward.
“What if this time we just flat out ignore all of the rewards and penalties?” I suggested to the team.
It had occurred to me that we spent a great deal of time trying to direct the blindfolded teammate to the rewards, and to avoid the penalties, and that perhaps the penalty of the ticking clock in doing so was simply not worth it.
“What if we just try to get through as quickly as possible, and just live with whatever rewards or penalties we cross along the way?” I said.
“Ohhh… like maybe the rewards and penalties are just a distraction,” someone else replied.
So, we gave it a shot, and our new score was 10X better than either of the first two rounds. In fact, we were so pleased with the score that we didn’t even bother to go a fourth time. We figured we had done well, but knew our chances of winning were small—surely other teams had figured out the same strategy as us.
When all the students got together during the next live session for the medals ceremony, we were shocked to find that not only had we won the competition, but that no other team had even come close to our score. We must’ve been the only team that figured out that the rewards and penalties were just a distraction (which is a different lesson in and of itself).
It’s very possible that we just got lucky by happening upon the right strategy, but I don’t believe it could’ve happened without great team culture. When everyone feels safe to be vulnerable, we can put our full brain power towards strategizing and solving problems, rather than on self-protection and preservation.