7.1 Throw the driver under the bus

Teams/groups should be resilient to changes in personnel, but in practice students often rely on the particular skills of a small number of key individuals.

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This bundle requires students to reflect explicitly on who can do what, by disturbing (or temporarily destroying) the natural or established allocation of duties.

The way it works is to set a project that requires different skills to be deployed, and at a crucial moment, remove from the group an individual with a particular set of skills. (For example, set a programming task then remove the good programmers). This determines whether someone other than the driver can keep the bus moving along the road. Once the person has been removed, ask the rest of the group to modify some of the person's work. Keep the key person occupied on some other activity. The task set while the person is removed needs to be small enough to be completed in the time available (e.g. hour, or half day). This can also be extended to several groups.

It works better if the activity requires (and the group possesses) a diverse mixture of skills ? for example, on a highly inter-disciplinary course. For reasons of economy (and surprise) it is better, where this is applied to a number of groups, they are in some form of synchrony ? for example if all the groups are conducting the same work to the same schedule. It also works better if you have a good understanding of the dynamics of each group.

A variation is to swap students with the same key skill between groups.

It doesn't work unless you monitor how the groups tackle the problem: some may subcontract the task, others may complete it effortlessly using records that the key person left behind, and some groups may fabricate the results. Monitoring is important because you need to explain to students what has happened, and get them to reflect on it.

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So: ensure that groups recognise the value (and use of) process documentation, by making them rely on it.