Blog
Diseconomies of Scale Activities - revisited
13th October 2012
If you saw my 'Diseconomies of Scale Activities' post on the 25th of September, I thought you might like to see the drawings made by my students for the 'Dog and Bone' activity.
The activity attempts to show how the larger the chain of command within an organisation the more difficult it may be to communicate effectively (and thus illustrating a potential diseconomy of scale). As well as re-posting the original activity below, you can see the scanned images of my students' responses in the 'Dog and Bone Show'. The 8 selected students were asked to leave the classroom and were not told anything about the activity in advance. Then, one at a time, they were called back in - the first student was asked to memorise and then draw the original 'Dog and Bone' illustration of the file below and the subsequent students were asked to memorise and draw the previous student's drawing. After the event (and having shown the whole class the outcome of the drawings) we went through why the message had been so poorly relayed - with the students coming up with suggestions like the poor drawing skills of one of the contributors (a poor manager in the chain of command) the relatively complex nature of the original drawing (highlighting the problem with driving a strategic approach within an organisation) and other 'noise' elements within the activity such as individual interpretation (illustrating a similar problem with interpretation of directions and commands given within an organisation).