Exercise：Make Urgent Decision

Instructions

This exercise presents a decision-making

challenge to student teams in the classroom.
Students will first make decisions individually,
and then collaboratively in teams. At the
beginning of the exercise, please read the
whole information on the exercise carefully.

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 Situation

Since departing from port your ship has had an

uneventful journey except for a malfunction of
the radar. When night falls, however, a fog
settles in, drastically decreasing visibility. By
time a ship is seen coming from the opposite
direction it is too late to avoid a collision. You
must instantly decide what to do next to deal
with this emergency. Please rank the urgency of
executing the following eleven actions
appropriately: Mark 1 for the action that you
will take first and 11 for the action that you will
take last and sort out the rest accordingly.

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 Scoring Table

A B C D E
Actions Your Team’s Expert’s │A-C│ │B-C│
Ranking Ranking Ranking
Order the crewmen to lower the
lifeboats

Check the electric generator to

see if it is still working

Check the map for nearby sea

areas

Direct the doctor on board to

prepare the medical articles

Check the accident status with

the staff located at the collision
part of the ship
Notify all on board of the
emergency situation

Direct all of the lifeboats to

prepare signal flare

Close the gate for the damaged

area of the ship

Lower the lifeboats for rescuing

the passengers of the other ship

Get ready to take out the portable

radio

Send out the SOS signal to

nearby ships

Calculate your personal score (D) and the team score (E)
Total

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 Performance
Team number:

______Team score

______Average value of personal scores of the team

members

______Minimum value of personal scores of the team

members

______Number of persons with personal score lower

than the team score

Better Use of Information (the number of persons):

S1_____ S2______ S3_____ S4_____

Convergence Process (the number of persons):

S1_____ S2______ S3_____ S4_____

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 Questions

1. How did your team go about making decisions? How

did you come up with that approach?

2. What were the main challenges that your team faced in

the decision-making process? What did you do when
people disagreed? What made it so difficult?

3. What could have been done to improve the team

process?

4. What lessons have you learned from the exercise?

5. From your experience with this exercise and with

other teams that you’ve been on, what enables, and
what gets in the way, of making good team decisions?

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