Julia’s Jug Relay

"How are we going to get 120 gallons of water from the van down to our basement"? That is the question my daughter Julia asked her three younger siblings, the youngest of which is just seven. Our distiller broke, so our only option is to buy distilled bottled water to fill the solar batteries which power our home. This picture and 10-second video clip show what Julia and the kids came up with. The impossible happened. The task was done in less than 20 minutes and without any arguing.

Julia has always had the unique ability to get people to cooperate. The book "Six Simple Rules - How to Manage Complexity Without Getting Complicated" describes people like Julia. The second of their rules is to "Reinforce Integrators." An integrator is an individual that fosters cooperation and ensures the organization can satisfy multiple performance requirements without layers of structure and rules."

Watching the kids work in harmony, pushing each other to work faster, reminded me of an example from the book. The authors describe the 2003 World Championship 4X100 meter Relay Race. The US team, which had the fastest individual runners, lost to the French, who simply demonstrated higher levels of cooperation. "When all the people involved in a task cooperate, their individual efforts combine instead of being simply additive… the energy of one runner's arm in passing the baton makes the difference in the speed of the next runner's legs." Finding and rewarding integrators who can ignite this type of cooperation is an essential skill for today's leaders. Unfortunately, our best integrator leaves for college next month.