Water.. Water.. everywhere... and not a drop to Drink

Three Monks is a Chinese animated short, released in 1980 and directed by A Da. It is one of the most famous and beloved of Shanghai Animation Film Studio's productions, and has won awards at film festivals throughout the world.

 

The film is based on the ancient Chinese proverb "One monk will shoulder two buckets of water; two monks will share the load, but add a third and no one will want to fetch water."

 

The film can be broadly divided into three parts depicting the human behavior and its effect on performance. The movie initially starts with a monk living in a monastery, who is further accompanied by two more monks who join him to live at the monastery.

 

THREE MONKS

Part 1

The first part of the movie showed that there is a monk who lives in a monastery on the top of a hill. He has to come down to fetch water from the river and he is living happily. Then a second monk comes and starts living with the first monk. The problem starts when they go to fetch water. They are unable to decide how to divide the work amongst them as no one wanted to do any extra work.

 

They arrive at a solution by carrying a bucket together by placing it on a stick that is resting on their shoulder. As compared to the earlier scenario, when one monk was bringing two buckets of water by balancing them on a stick resting on his shoulder, now they end up bringing one bucket together.

 

Part 2

Now as the video proceeds, a third monk comes to the monastery. The coming of the third monk creates a conflict about further division of work. Since they are not able to resolve this conflict no one goes and the monastery is without water. One day fire breaks in the monastery and the three monks with their combined efforts put it out.

 

The human behavior of coming together to work for a common objective in case of a disaster is depicted here. The monks put aside the conflict and work together as a team to mitigate the damage to their monastery.

Part 3

This part showed the monks coming together as a group and devising a technique for drawing water which will require less effort and better coordination among the three people. The pulley system being used by monks is comparable to the assembly line we have in manufacturing units. The division of labor leads to more efficient and well defined process and hence higher productivity can be achieved.
 

Learning

The story of the three monks tells us about the basic human nature and the necessity of having a well defined process underlining the division of labor. The need to innovate and improvise over the existing methods for the good of the team is depicted in the movie. It depicts the importance of performance over the personal motives in a team or an organization. The way in which three monks come together to work towards a common objective by innovating and creating a process depicts the importance of team work and ownership of responsibility.