Decide like Mahatma!

Defining a decision is easy, let's take the task of putting what is a good decision in a frame and how are they made, shall we?

What separates a good decision from a bad one? Is it the richness of the information that is considered while taking the call? Or the ability to see the future more clearly? Or the purity of intention? Or the morality being on the side of the decision? Outcome sure is the ultimate yardstick with which all decisions must be measured and then the tone of the outcome should then be picked to name the decision one way or the other. But when we have the outcome in front of us, with it, we also often have the benefit of hindsight, which we may, not have when we're in the moment in which decision was being made. And this awareness makes a big difference. Like it is rather naive and one thing for Modi who carries a Mont Blanc pen and yet call himself poor to criticize the policies of Nehru to say that he wasn't as great as Congress makes him out to be but not quite the same thing, leading a nation when it was born and was grappling with a literacy rate of 17% and a life expectancy of 27yrs with over 90% of its population under the poverty line; leading a society which was burning in the communal hatred and lawlessness was being personified on the border like nobodies business. What Modi and his supporters forget that admits all that visionary Nehru not only led the foundation of creating an India that considers education paramount, germinated the seeds of healthcare, made institutions that hold our democracy together a reality: Let's not forget he was a first time PM, with no experience of his own or someone in the country to learn from. He led on principles of plurality, social justice, and inclusiveness and thus we grew into a country what we are today, which allows for a chai walla to grow into a PM.

I pull the Nehru argument to underline the importance of siding with principles when precedents are unclear. Well, most of us are inconsequential and do not even come close to the magnanimity of the job that Nehru did then with a supreme degree of sincerity and what Modi does currently with all his ability, intention & hard-work. Both are great men, part of that 0.5% of humanity; this article is about the balance us, the ordinary people who have a day job, set of finite responsibilities and limited aspirations from lives. The goal is a good indicator of the decision too, someone who wants to make Mars a tourist destination will quite possibly take different kind of decisions than someone who has to worry about how to get more visitors on their website or increase footfall in a certain retail unit of their organization.

Some decisions are more important than the others; to give you a stat, roughly about 73% of the decisions that an average person makes every day is for things that do not matter, not in the least bit. Let me give you a few examples; which suit to wear, what tie, what to eat for the breakfast, which route to take to work, where to order lunch from, which elevator to take, to smile at this person or say hello; these are small decisions and things as silly as these take over 70% of our cognitive bandwidth; yes, our ability to take decision is limited. One of the reasons why many successful people bring defaults in their life is to conserve their cognitive bandwidth for more meaningful things so that they take better decisions at things that matter. Let me give you a few examples, reason why Mark Zuckerberg took the habit of wearing the same combination of cloth every day from Steve jobs is to limit the number of daily decisions that one is required to make.  People argue and harshly criticize Apple products, call their ecosystem a walled garden and yet they are most popular and arguably the most successful brand of all times; because they offer minimal and streamlined experience. No matter which iPhone or Mac you choose, in their default mode they all look and feel the same, there is no other kind of iPhone experience that exists, there is just one kind, and because it is just one, people find it simpler and so it becomes popular to the point of becoming happy loyal cult. On the other side of the wall, there is variety, richness of features, price classes a hell lot to choose from, so much so that there is clutter. A Samsung phone, is feature rich, cheaper, and perhaps better looking too, yet doesn't sell very many, reason, within the line of Samsung phones, there are so many variations that it gets confusing. As a result, despite Apple making fewer kinds of products every year, they sell more. They have been doing it for over two decades now. Lesson: Simplicity shines!

We can, therefore, say to make a better decision we should:

Declutter – Look at only those things that matter (preferably in the long run).

Simplify – Decide to make things simple, what is understood easily is followed better.

You can use the above two in a situation that you control but there are also going to be setups that you do not own completely, like situations where your interests overlap with others or are in conflict, an environment that demands you to open yourself up to the complexity of the world. You must have a tool kit for that too. The thing that we said about hindsight earlier in this article must be usefully reiterated here. You will not always know for sure, there will also be situations where you are pressed against time limiting your ability to spend time on learning intricate details, the information at your disposal itself could be wrong, you may have your own strong opinions and biases for or against a certain matter. The unknown and the unclear will dwarf your courage, one argument is to say let's take the risk and see and another is to say, why rock stable steady boat? Both viewpoints have merit. Ours is a huge world, one in which both academic success like Dr. Tharoor and semi-literate like Mayawati get to taste success and gain prominence. College dropouts like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs & Mark Zuckerberg create magic just as successfully as people like Neil Degrasse Tyson, George Smith, William Nordhaus, Raghu Ram Rajan who not only did brilliantly in their schools and colleges but also went to become popular educators and inventors. You have to decide what works for you!

When dealing with the unknown, the unpleasant and the unclear: data and gut, will be of little use. Let me give you an example, not too long ago in history, our nation was reeling under the brutal, most inhuman and immoral rule of the British empire. 200 years of extortion, degradation, depredation, loot, and plundering had left the country, weak, ill, demotivated and decapitated of strength. Everyone knew that driving British out was the solution not many knew which of the various methods known to mankind should be applied and in what precise force. The problem was not just knowing how, but getting mass support for it, so that the oppressor is forced to notice and then pays heed. The challenge was of finding a method that required resources which could be fed with the scarce reserves that Indians had then, communicating it to the masses effectively and then winning them over to the idea for life; so that the movement gets critical mass and then keeps on growing steadily as time progressed. A huge amount of respect for everyone who tried their own methods .. irrespective of the success that they met with. That is when our country got the gift of Gandhi, the son of the soil had returned completing his education from the very west he was about to take on most ferociously and having tasted failure in his career as a barrister in South Africa. He like everyone else knew what the problem was but did not for sure knew the way out. Of course, contemporary events unfolding in the rest of the world did come handy and Bapu used them smartly to sharpen his attack. But then when he started, he was looking into the unknown which was unclear and scary.

In our own lives we often face situations which are excruciatingly difficult, mind-numbingly taxing, shitlessly scary and dangerously deafening: none of us are freedom fighters, our causes are also not as meaningful or historic but in the small personal world that we live in sometimes things do get intense, harsh and complicated; there we could use lessons from the principle that Mahatma applied to pick up his weapons; He choose truth and non-violence, as all of us know. What happened thereafter is a pleasant history.

Father of our nation, decided to act in accordance with his value systems, principles that he held dear to fight the mighty challenge and came out victorious. He had the skill, he could have chosen to remain in the confine of the comfort that his western education and the degree in the bar gave him. He could have led a luxurious life with grandeurs of wealth and safety. But he elected, instead to, remain half nacked for the second half of his life, got beaten, jailed, humiliated and even mocked but because he was sincere, consistent, truthful and honest he pursued what he thought was right and emerged as a winner.

If he picked the simpler path he would have lived longer and better life remaining: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi but he wasn't meant for the ordinary; he live the tough life, made uncomfortable moves, which many wise men then called foolish choices but in the process, he became Bapu, the Mahatma, father of a nation as glorious as ours. He earned a place in the history of mankind forever.

We can, therefore, say to make better decisions in strange unknown circumstances, we could look at.

Principle and Values – Hold your principles and your values dear and remain consistent with it.

Tough is cool – Should situation get nasty do not shy away from taking the tough call.

With that I shall end this, you have a lovely Sunday, ahead!

Goodbye, Fear!

Fear is a primal human instinct, it has helped us survive the grey and grave threats of the cave life and generally caused our race to conceive and build secure places, plains, and things. We’ve come a long way though, the need to be watchful for constant threat is no longer a reality of modern life, a large part of civilization lives in responsibly put together safe surroundings. The evolutionary burden of finding fear and focusing on it, however, remains in our systems etched. As a result of which we crave for challenges and when threats do not actually exist, we invent them: loosely defining it for the sake of this article, and saying that psychological basis of over speeding, overeating, obsessive pursuit of various things can be in the crude form found in these instances. 

Like us humans and our ways of life, our understanding and relationship with fear has also undergone change, not calling it evolutionary as I continue to maintain that fear is one such part of our being which will go extinct or should get eliminated right at the cusp of the progressive change over, right on that point where the old changes into the new irreversibly and forever. So, humans learn to live without fear. Ohh, who am I kidding, let’s just accept that it is not going to happen, but we can certainly work towards making fearless existent, as we move along? For a moment let’s get wishful and re-imagine our lives without fear – think for a moment, experiments will become the way of life, people would hesitate lesser in trying out newer ways of doing old things? Is that imaginary plot liberating? Well, if that felt like scary, uncertain, unstable and in the borderline of being insane; well it is that primal instinct doing its job, put it aside and imagine again. Does it feel better? Let me move ahead with the assumption that it did. 

Physical and environmental threats and resulting fears have now got replaced with societal, professional, economical and even emotional fears. That is to say that we no longer fear about getting eaten by a lion but worry about missing a deadline, not succeeding at a project, not amassing enough wealth to support our ever-growing needs & desires, losing a friend, breaking up from what once felt like real relationship etc. How do we deal with this reality, we can find common ground in the fact that a scared mind is less likely to be home to thriving ideas. Unstable worried homes do not host pleasurable dinners when you are not in control, you do not create things that can take charge of situations, better, intuitively or make way for positive release if nothing else. 

Fact is, we all have fears and we all need to overcome them, at some point in our lives. One theory in the study of fear is that if you own something more than average people you know that your fear of losing it is more prominent in permanent ways. Fear can send you on an overdrive, make you reductionist of some sort too. These are cases when you avoid sharing your gifts and your goods with others naturally. You feel like protecting what you have tightly and passionately at all times, so much so, that in the place of growing what you own, you place most of your efforts towards protecting it from others to avoid the imminent possibility of losing it, not sure if it helps to secure it, but it certainly takes your attention off the need to nurture what you have and in absence of that what you possess grows weak to the point that it fails to retain the same size and stature, it degenerates and then de-grows to a point, where we see our worst fears materialize conclusively: loss of the prized.

I have my set of fears too, like any other regular person. Do I deal with them? well, I do not know but what I do know is that I try to organize my thoughts and beliefs in a manner that least possible attention is rendered to the dark side: the trepidation. Does it work as designed 100% of the times, well, I have to be honest with you, it does not, sometimes it falls flat on its face dragging me further away from my plan. But expeditions are necessary, you will need to undertake them to fortify your plans. Apprehension immobilizes constructive thoughts and submitting to it can leave you paralyzed. Is ignorance the key to the solution? Nope, ignoring doesn’t help .. it is a dumb idea. 

Freeze, flee or fight are three most common reaction to fear (Don’t agree with me, ask Robin Sharma, he says so in his recent book “The 5AM club); I dare you to choose the last one; You got to take it head-on. It can mean different things to different people. You are afraid of dark place .. try wrestling with a dark room in your home. Water puts you off the grid, try taking a swimming lesson. The idea of Public speaking leaves you all sweaty walk into a bar with an open mic, say what you have to and slip into the oblivion. These are simpler issues to deal with. What is slightly more complex and therefore interesting is creating fear free teams, workgroups & organizations. Before we go any further, let me say this is a fear-free organization doesn’t mean a place where accountability is not fashionable. It also not in any way is to be read as a group that is a target, aim or direction devoid. It is also not an absolute liberal hippy group which is never restrained: None of these.

Business leaders often make the mistake of believing that if they let it go easy, do not install a sense of fear among people who work for them, their workforce will become uncaring, unproductive and perhaps slow, derailing and delaying their ambitious growth plans. Some also hold that their group will become a depiction of the three situations that we have just stated. In fact, many believe fear is an effective tool for exercising control. “If you do not do this or achieve that: I will fire you”, you know that school of management? Let me say it is not completely useless a technique .. people do respond to these fears positively in the near term, the problem is that progressively, its impact keeps going down. In the sense that people develop resistance, you yell .. and then you yell harder and then you will need a mic and then a powerful loudspeaker or an amplifier etc. to express how concerned you are: this model with all its benefits is not a sustainable one. Exercised in long terms is largely ineffective as people no longer get moved by it as much as they did the first couple of times they were subjected to it.

There is no denying the fact that, there is a scarcity of aptly skilled people on top of it if you were to look at skillful and sincere people in large numbers, you are really in for a treasure hunt. Let’s just agree that there aren’t so many radially available and therefore business leaders are forced to rely on creating an atmosphere of fear to get lazy, insincere, semiskilled and unambitious people to move. And at some level, I empathize with them. You gotta admit that one person has put all his hard earned money and all his ‘time’, the time that he/she is never going to get back in building something that he/she is trying to put forward & when they see people play around .. picking fear comes naturally and it is not always a bad tool to choose it can be damaging if one chooses it more often than not.

In an organizational set up: constant anxiety cause these common behaviors

1)   Wild spread coverup 

2)   An unending stream of lies 

3)   Mistrust and politicking  

4)   The high rate of attrition 

5)   The difficulty of hiring fresh talent.

We can all agree that these can never do any good.

So what is that we should then do? We certainly can’t let the place run unregulated. It will be stupid to let the unproductive continue unchecked. What is not working must be brought to an end and it is ok if the end is unemotional. What is however not essential that it will all get done in an environment of dread, worry, horror and phobia. You can be nice and decisive at the same time. It is not an either-or situation, for things to work in an organization it will require to be both at all times. In the process of being nice, you essentially will have to work towards creating a culture of transparency, a workplace that thrives on information and data and not perception and opinions. One that values and respects the need to maintain civility in all exchanges, written, verbal and even non-verbal without ceasing to be objective & descriptive, when needed.   

Ditching fear will enable you to reap the benefits of positive psychology. Behavioral studies conducted in last two decades have all proven the fact that a happy mind is more creative, more focused, more responsible, more attentive and more WORKING then a mind cluttered with doubt, one that works overtime to avoid unpleasant situations. The behavior of the business leader or the organization should at no time be prohibitive. One simple test for that is. 

Do your people come on their own to honestly explain to you that they have faulted, that they failed, that they are responsible? Or for fixing accountability do you have to push people across the corner? If pushing is that you find yourself doing then .. you have work to do. But if people come up on their own to admit; congratulations, you’ve created not just a happy and responsible organization but also a productive one.. because no time is now required to be wasted in fixing accountability and finding the responsible, the one at fault and you can quickly pick whatever went wrong and make progress from there.

The fear free atmosphere is GOLD!

And as far as productivity is concerns that is straight forward.

1)   Give data validated meaningful targets to people 

a.   Give them time to study, research and come back with different views

b.   Hear them out 

c.    Get buy-in for the target 

2)   Review performance 

a.   Periodically

b.   Objectively 

c.    Data-driven 

3)   Call non-conformance out

a.   Define tolerance 

                                               i.     How many chances should you give?

4)   Take process driven action   

a.   Date driven 

b.   Free of bias

c.    Heartless, if that is what is needed.

With that, I end this first article of Jan 2019. I hope and pray that all fears in your life evaporate when you put the conscious effort to create resolves & results in your life.

Until next time, bye-bye!