Action in curious times!

We're in confusing times, making choices have never been more taxing, as a result, more often than not, we find ourselves attaching the cart before the horse. Humans have never quite known the future when I say this I discount the audacious claims that the astrologers make. We have, however, mastered the art of basing our predictions of the future on a combination of historical performance and present prevailing conditions. Even when the output of our models does not meet the realm of reality with a degree of accuracy enough to make us proud. We take comfort in the consistency of the present. We have a natural talent for neutralizing things, at least in our imaginative and somewhat delusional minds and that makes for a tranquil compromise between the actual and the desired.

COVID-19 has shattered that peace brutally and perhaps also irreversibly. Not only is our current condition unpredictably unstable but our faith in the history of human triumph has also been shaken curtly, by it. To cope with the tragedy, depending on the mental make-up, some of us are doing the wise thing of picking up books that have a detailed account of human response to comparable tragedies in the past. There are also those who prefer inferior in quality but a quicker way of gaining some insight, however superficial it might be - Google searches/Youtube and whatnot. Everybody is looking to find inspiration for a workable solution to the grand mess. Information overdose is not helping the situation, either. Let's take a moment to analyze the visuals that surround us today: What are we consuming these days?

1) Stories on the growing number of infected.

2) Mounting deaths.

3) Painful tales of human tragedies.

4) Unprecedented economic damage.

5) Wage cuts.

6) Loss of livelihood.

7) A slew of bankruptcy petitions.

8) Shortcomings of the government.

9 ) The apathy of society, particularly the rich and the privileged who even at this tragic time has not stopped their vulgar and foolish show of wealth.

These are indeed disturbing developments and none of them are either fictitious or rooted in propaganda to paddle a frightening narrative forward. Death and every other form of destruction are indeed common in 2020.

"So long as we're alive we will have to hustle", I'd like for you to read this devoid of any motivational undertone, I don't like passionate exuberance. I'd like you to evaluate it as hard cold truth; an undeniable fact. In the last article, I argued for us to make peace with the Virus and in this one, I'm trying to, extend that argument further in a more functional way. I offered "questioning everything as the SOP" for creating co-existence with the cruel Corona Virus.

We will have to re-imagine every facet of our life and then reorganize our ways around the new design to survive first and then someday, hope to prosper, again. How should we begin, what should be the sequence of events and where should we stop. Are important questions and conventional wisdom of human existence tells us to adopt. Disclaimer, you may not agree with one or all of these and it is ok to approach it differently: let me reiterate “NOBODY HAS THE BLUEPRINT". But guess what we do know the common mistakes that we humans have made, let us begin by committing to not repeating them. Let's talk about the 4 most common errors committed through the course of industrial history.

1) Not asking the right question: If you do not ask the answer is always going to be a NO. Asking the right question is vital because responses are almost always as good as the question. A psychological thought experiment was conducted at Harvard to verify the impact of question on response. In the test, a visual of a car crash was shown to three different sets of people, each was asked the same question but framed differently.

Set 1 - What might be the speed of the cars at the time of contact?

Set 2 - What might be the speed of the car at the time of the collision?

Set 3 - Guess the speed of the car when they smashed into each other, BOOM.

This is how the respondents reacted.

Set 1 - Recorded lowest average speed, in response.

Set 2 - Almost everyone in this group guessed the speed to be higher than Set1. The difference was about 30%.

Set 3- Guessed the highest speed, it was twice as much as the speed that Set 2 had guessed.

You can try this experiment too.

Do you understand the power of the question? When you do ask, make sure that you ask the tough questions and do not mix emotions with your quest. Remember your customers do not pay for how you feel about your business but how they feel. Your emotion must take a back seat. A good question Inspires curiosity, creativity, and deep thinking.

2) Putting tact before strategy: We often pick up our "to do" lists and label them as a strategy. The list populated by most basic and commonsensical items, pristinely presented as 'end all be all' response to a situation. The suggested actions have been commonly found to have no root in data or any other kind of qualitative research. People relegate strategy to mere things to do because it makes them feel good, in-charge, and especially because it comes at little cognitive investment. From lack of intellect to absence of awareness/ experience/ exposure to emotional imbalances like fear/anxiety to plain laziness causes one to fall in the trap. The idea is to not stigmatized those who may have got it wrong but to gently steer them to the realization of shortcomings of their approach. To subtly guide them to what may be a more comprehensive thought exercise. If your response to the plan is not answering the below, it is not a strategy yet, you have got work to do.

a) Does it tell you how your identity is going to change?

b) Does it give you a sense of your revised organizational/unit/ goal, objective, and value-based goal?

c) Does it provide for a framework to asses your current offerings?

e) Does it provide the new outline of business as a whole and not ways of doing it?

e) Does it cover existential threats?

3) Putting off tough decisions for the future: We do not enjoy taking tough decisions, so much so that we procrastinate, sometimes even indefinitely. Like closing our eyes does not make the world a dark place it only darkens our vision of it, not attending to a tough situation does not make it go away. You're better off facing up to it. There is no escape from it. The more you delay the costlier the delay will become. Correcting cost is painful, saying no does not come without heartaches but you gotta do what you gotta do. So get on with it.

4) Resistance to change: This one is lethal and omnipresent, there is not one atom in the universe that can deny its love of inertia; all of us are suffering from it. But not all of us suffer from it in all areas, as long as you do not wish to change your personal life and its settings - it is ok. But if your choices impact others or your organization you have no right to hold ‘change’ hostage. The harsh truth is that if you do not change the market won’t halt its transformation for you to alter your resolve. The world has witnessed mammoths like BlackBerry, Kodak, Nokia, and numerous others that resisted change more than they could afford as a result of being market leaders they became inconsequential, in no time. You have a clear choice in front of you; Would you rather accept to change or let progressive movement in the market force you out of the scene. Considering to change is not when the change actually comes into effect. It is a continuous journey, as a leader you’ll need to support it in an unabated fashion, keep removing bottlenecks, keep encouraging and facilitating change for the larger good. The buck for change stops at you, in simple matters like choosing humble Namaste/ Adab ‘hand-wave of Hi’ over handshake or also in complex affairs like steering the organization out of the COVID19 mess.

Darwinian survival of the fittest is also about the elimination of the weak. Who would you rather be, the strongest or the one that got eliminated?

Optimism without action is daydreaming.

Pessimism without action is fear-mongering.

Realism without action is promoting ‘status-quo’

Pick whichever ideology suits your temperament and appetite but in the end, to remain relevant, you’ll need to ACT.

Until we meet again : Stay well, stay safe!

Linking the first article in this series here: you may wanna check.

Title: CO-EXISTING WITH COVID19!

URL: http://www.lavkush.co.in/2020/05/co-existing-with-the-covid19/

Co-existing with COVID19!



 

कारवाँ गुज़र गया, गुबार देखते रहे (Gopaldas, ’Neeraj’)

Yes the Virus is here, yes it is highly contagious and yes it is deadly!

So what do we do?

Fight, Freeze, or Flee?

I’m afraid to inform you ‘Fleeing’ is not an option. You gotta either confront the virus or hibernate into oblivion, perhaps for as long as you can count.

Q #1 - For how long should we let a microscopic pathogen dictate terms of our lives, determine the size of our aspiration, and deteriorate our collective determination? 

Q #2 - Why can’t we treat #COVID19 as one of the many other life-threatening challenges that we have come to live with? 

Q #3- Why should we submissively surrender?

(Before we go any further; I must mention in no uncertain terms that at NO time, should we ignore the warning or the guidelines issued by the competent Government authorities, pertaining but not limited to containment or treatment of the infected. Precaution, for now, is the cure, be smart, and comply.)

These questions are not coming from a place of ignorance or bravado. I am not an epidemiologist, or a virologist/immunologist or a healthcare professional with expertise in infectious disease, nor have I run or supervised public health response in a pandemic, ever. I’m one of you, the ordinary thinking citizen, who is learning a little about the virulence of our heartless invader from the newspaper, medical journal, research papers, and conversation with experts - every day! I am someone who decided to self-quarantine, in the last week of Feb this year (word of thanks and appreciation for my current employer who allowed me to do so, happily). So not in the line of fire just yet, but I do see, how lives of billions around the world are being altered, some more irreversibly then the others. The impact of the pandemic is ringing in all areas of our existence. Our enemy is using one of our key strengths and differentiators from other species: ‘Social connect’ against us, in plain sight. 

But, before we dive deep into to sludge of despair, allow me the liberty of bringing a few thoughts into your attention.

Q #1- Are we not better prepared to deal with anything of this magnitude now than any time in the entire history of humankind?

Q #2- Is it not a huge positive that we have tools like the ‘internet and the computer’ to run our lives despite restrictions that the virus harshly may impose on us?

Q #3- Isn’t medical science at its most advanced stage now than in the past?

Answer to all of the above is a resounding “YES” and therefore I say; if at all one of our fellow human beings could NOT have avoided eating BAT for dinner, then there wouldn’t have been a better time to do so than now. And, let me also put it out for your consumption that we are not required to be televangelical about the situation. False hope or needless motivation is not something that I’m trying to put forward here. I’m trying to place in our collective attention an alternative question to invite thoughts.

So, think of it as a grand brainstorming that I intend to do with all my regular and returning 10K readers.

(Pardon me for my inability to answer all of your emails but on this one, I’ll try to get to every one of your emails. When you write to me please have #Ask in your subject line, it will help me sort the questions)

Let’s wargame: What if the virus was to stay and never extinct? What if COVID19 turns out to be another cancer that humans do not know how to cure? (yes, pathology of both the ailments are different, but consider the only eventuality of both the conditions for this argument sake, thanks)

It is undeniably a scary proposition but as they say in the IAS academy (The Lal Bahadur Shastri National academy of Administration) when you are hit by a disaster plan for the worse, the absolute disastrous consequence that it can graduate to, and then solve for it. The idea is that size of the difficulty should always remain smaller than the spread of your preparation. And, so we are going by this ghastly hypothesis of the virus becoming a co-habitant of our planet. Let’s put time aside to think about the challenge exhaustively, from top to the bottom. The complete spectrum: from social, economic, psychological, national, cultural, religious, political to also those relating to foreign relations and domestic law and order. Please do not be superficial in your thought experiment or give in to the temptation of being narrow or being aggressively focused on self-interest, you’ve got to think deeply about it. All forecasters and economists are bringing in models that can send anyone in dizzy, let alone, those who survive on incremental gains from the capital (either of wealth or time and skill) that they employ to earn sustenance. No point denying that it is an unprecedented event and also a rare one, in which we find a great deal of convergence of views from noted thought leaders.

Now, let’s turn to the knowledge pool of history to find a few large scale disasters that humans have had to endure undesirably? Let’s say 

1. The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918.

2. The great economic depression of 1930.

3. The global meltdown of 2008. 

4. Throw in the mix, the likes of HIV, Ebola, MERS, and previous SARS outbreaks, too.

Why do I pick public health emergencies and economic crisis for study? Well, because it makes for a good headline to say that we are choosing ‘life over livelihood’ but the harsh reality of our times is that without steady economic activities sustaining the cost of life is nearly impossible.

Pause at this stage, because studying these events will take you about 10 days, that is if you dedicate 3-5 hours to it every day. When you’re done with it come back and continue with the rest of the article.

Here is how the cast looked like in all of these.

• Upon developing an understanding of the crisis, estimations were made.

• Fear of losing the ‘regular’ loomed large.

• The new normal emerged. 

• The old ways got forgotten and the new normal became the norm, the usual.

This virus is not whipping the human race from the face of this planet, that only an asteroid will do, whenever it does. So let us jump to step 3 because 1 and 2 have been completed in the last 5 months or so since we discovered the unwanted guest, the Corona Virus.

Finding the ‘new normal’

As sub-step 1, let’s accept the virus and respect it for what it is. 

Scientists around the world are working round the clock to understand the vulnerabilities of the virus and ways in which we can attempt to neutralize it. Till they succeed we know that ‘social distancing’ is the way to go, along with other protective and precautionary measures like the triple-layer face mask and sanitization, etc, you get the idea. Would it have not been worse if we knew no way around it? We know now that as long as we do not come in direct contact with the pestilence we are good to go. So with that intel can we not reimagine our world? Yes, we can! Yes, it is not going to be an easy assignment because we have been building infrastructure optimized for efficiencies and space and this new arrangement is in fierce conflict with both of it.

But, there is a way around it. 

There is no easy answer but it must be found anyway, because it matters!

Imagine if we were to spread the demand and supply to fit the linear scale of time accommodating the social distancing norm? Simply put, if you spread what you used to produce in 9 hours to 24 - you’d end up achieving previous levels of output without exposing yourself to irresponsible risks, of course at the cost of efficiency but is it not better than having zero output, or an output reduced greatly by the imposition of social distancing norms?

Let me give you a service scenario from the contact center industry.

Precondition

• Imagine you had 100,000 customers to support in a 24*7 support window, but the bulk of your support requests came between 7 AM to 8 PM. 

• You had a workforce of 30 people to support the load of the requests.

Pre COVID19

• On the known inflow distribution you plot available staff hours. It was simple and straight forward, the physical infra was also built for it.

COVID19 Challenge

• You’re required to maintain a certain distance between two people and are also required to avoid the clustering of humans in any setup. So what do you do? 

Approach

You can now schedule not just your support agents but also customers to maintain the same level of support. That is spread the customers evenly across the 24 hours too.

A. Divide your customer base into three categories, preferably the elderly in the first 8-hour block of the day, others in the other two. 

• Educate customers about the rationals of this distribution and make them aware of their slots.

   B. Divide your workforce in three-shift, so in a space built to support 30 (actually you only build for 80% of the strength), distributed in the bunches, each of size 10 agents are accommodated. Social distancing is honored.

All three sets of customers will get equal support and the service provider also gets to fit the staff within the same infra without compromising on the need for social distancing.

Ok, before you jump rightfully to claim that all industries and setups are not linear. For example in the food industry, support volumes follow eating cycles and can not be staggered evenly throughout the day. And I agree with you. The broader point that I’m trying to argue here is that we will need to ‘think’ of newer ways of dealing with the situation within the space that restrictions leave for us and yet create what we must, without letting the virus either kill us or our economic progress.

On the other side of the same example: 

For all things administrative and managerial, there is a need for us to understand that, if we invest our energies on replicating ‘old practices’ as is in the new set up; we will fail miserably. This challenge should force us to question everything that we did earlier to figure out if they must be continued in the future too and must they be done, what is a newer way of doing it. Perhaps, a digital way of executing it must be explored.

Business Travel is a classic example: People used to practically live inside suitcases, is it not? Ask them, are they traveling now, and why not? The answer is ‘because they simply can’t they do not’. And that is the very principle that needs to be applied religiously and homogeneously. What will be a better time to adopt technology? All of us have been paying for the hardware, network, and tools for a long time. It is time we start using them too as our sole way of conducting our affairs, both personal and professional.

Let me give you the SOP: “Question everything that you do”

Imagine a scenario, where your job requires you to keep a track of telephonic conversation between two sets of people. 

Question:

1. Why should the conversation be telephonic? 

2. Can it not be moved to a digital medium? Zoom or any other platform that facilitates internet based exchange? 

3. Can you not tie the conversation to an inexpensive dialler?

Of course, you can. One way or the other.

This ultra-simple scenario may not do justice to the complexity of your situation; but remember I’m not trying to solve your specific issue, here, but simply and solely trying to orient you to question your ways of conducting yourself. Because all answers will emerge from it like they always have in the past.

Let us not permit the virus to decimate our creative thinking and problem-solving ability, we have a fertile brain that is perfectly capable of devising the solution. Let’s give it a chance. Lest you forget, we have evolved into our present form from a single cell organism, in the last 4.3 billion years. There is always a way out, as long as you’re determined to find one. 

Digital transformation is no longer, the one more thing that leaders and organizations used to do to gain superiority over their competition, it is now a necessity, a question of survival - so get on with it.

I refuse to remain afraid of the virus and I implore you to shun fear too. 

Let’s rebuilt our lives again, together.

I’ve published various articles in the past expressing my views on digital transformation: you may want to check them, on the website. Linking two of them here, which I find most relevant. 

Title : TRANSFORM DIGITALLY, NOW!

URL : http://www.lavkush.co.in/2018/11/transform-digitally-now/

Title : BEFORE INNOVATION .

URL : http://www.lavkush.co.in/2018/09/before-innovation/

To end this I’d like to leave you with a song that Late Mega Star Rajesh Khanna danced to on the silver screen when in the background it was being sung by the immortal Kishore Da.

मौत आनी है

आएगी एक दिन

जान जानी है

जाएगी एक दिन

ऐसी बातों से क्या घबराना

यहाँ कल क्या हो किसने जाना

Until we meet again!