Leadership Seminar

On May 1st, year 11 student leaders had the opportunity to participate in one of yLead’s Leadership programs. At the beginning of the program, we were set a challenge: to see how many small balls we could fit inside 5 large laundry baskets in 3 minutes. The only rules were that we had to throw the balls underarm from a 5m distance, and that we could utilize any resources inside the baskets. For each ball we dropped inside the basket, we scored 5 points. We were allowed 4 attempts, and could debrief between each attempt and set goals for ourselves. On the first attempt, we managed to score 1,230, but were dismayed to discover that a previous school had managed to score 2.5 million in the same amount of time. Racking our brains, we began to think out of the box. If we squashed the baskets inside each other, the value of scoring in one basket would essentially be multiplied by 5 to the power of 5, essentially scoring 3125 points per ball. We also found a large cloth inside one of the laundry baskets, which we used to ‘slide’ the balls into the baskets, ensuring little room for error. After our four attempts, we managed to score a massive 6.8 billion points- breaking all records which any of the participating yLead schools had set! Through this activity, we learnt the importance of thinking outside the box and questioning all structures and conventions in place in order to achieve a higher success rate, as well as the importance of setting goals and debriefing after attempting anything. These are all valuable lessons which we will hopefully be able to apply to leadership portfolios in the future. Thanks to yLead for an amazing day, and Ms. Howe for organising the event.

Olivia.