If the world was going to end tomorrow and you needed to get out of dodge, who would you take with you and why? My fourth grade teacher had us play this game a few times. She’d write a list of possible candidates on the board, and to really make us think, tell us that our life boats could only hold five people. We’d break into teams to discuss our options. Should we bring the doctor or the farmer? Would we rather have someone who could cook and sew, or someone who could build a house?

I didn’t think about it at the time, but at its core, this was a logic puzzle that distilled each person’s value down to one thing: the skills that they possess. When you’re thinking about building your “dream team” for surviving the zombie apocalypse in Class3, or if you’re debating what skills you think you’d need to survive, it’s easy to base your choices on similar logic.

You can try to picture a “dream team” of fellow survivors with the training and experience necessary to cover all your needs for weapons, food, water, clothing and shelter. That sounds good, but people are more than just a collection of skills.

When you really dig into it, you’ll see that this approach is missing one very crucial thing — the human element.

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