There are broadly two schools of thought on this. For many people, the instinctive response is that good decisions are those that lead to good results. If I chose to switch jobs, and the second job turned out to be great, it was a good decision; on the other hand, if I was worse off after switching, then my decision wasn’t a good one. Indeed, the way we refer to decisions in casual conversations almost exclusively focuses on the results (Smart move, Wise choice and so on..)

On the other hand, others (usually on reflection) come up with this response – good decisions are those where the decision maker followed an appropriate process for arriving at the decision. That the manner in which the decision was made– the right data / information, the right considerations and appropriate logic – was correct. It was the right call to have taken at that point, even if things didn’t work out later.

Let’s say I need to get to a meeting at the other end of the town. I know that there are two ways to get there – one by using the main arterial road, which is slightly longer but where traffic moves faster; the other by smaller roads through suburbs, which is shorter but likely to be more congested. My history of prior experiences tells me that the arterial route is likely to be 10% faster. I consider all relevant factors (time of day, any recent construction activity or other such impediments I am aware of) and decide to take the arterial route. Turns out that there was a major hold-up due to some unforeseen reason, and I reach later than I would have if I had chosen the other route.

How good was my decision? Is it good because I followed the right process or bad because the results were bad?

(I know what my normal reaction would be – I’d be kicking and cursing myself, especially if I were running late for the meeting. It takes an unusually stoic temperament to remain detached and objective in this situation)

Ideally of course, we’d like to have both. If we follow a thorough process and arrive at a decision that also turns out well, nothing like it. The problem is we often get one or the other. Sometimes we get great results, with not-so-great processes due to a fortuitous turn of events. Other times, we do all the right things to no avail.

Our innate tendency is to evaluate based on outcomes. How often do we see this in say, cricket matches. The fielding side gets a couple of early wickets, the middle order batsmen dig in and are threatening to forge a partnership that could be match defining. The fielding captain brings in a part time bowler (to give his main bowlers a bit of a break, or just to break things up, or whatever..) for a couple of overs. Or perhaps he changes the field settings. And what do you know, the part-timer gets a wicket, or the batsman offers a catch straight to the fielder in the new position. “Brilliant captaincy!” say the commentators, and we agree. Of course, if the part-timer were to get clobbered, or if the catch were to go to the old position, we’d equally rail at the deficiencies of the chap wearing the captain’s arm-band. I’d like to see one of the expert commentators evaluate the decision at the time it was made, rather than post-facto. In fact, some columnists make match predictions in various sports, and their hit-rates are no better than yours and mine would be. This doesn’t stop them from carrying critical pieces simultaneously, which contain several post-match assessments of the ‘woulda,,shoulda…coulda…’ variety. But then this is perhaps only to be expected – true foresight is as rare as hindsight is universal.  

On the balance, my view is that the process is more important than outcomes. For one thing, we can only fully control our actions – we can’t fully control outcomes. There are always going to be variables that come into play (call it Fate if you will) which we have no control over. Secondly, only a good process guarantees repeatability of overall consistently good results, as opposed to a one-off success. A blindfolded chimpanzee throwing darts at stocks could perhaps outperform an average fund manager using all the available information, models and decision making tools; but I’d lay odds on the fund manager doing better in the long run. (This example of course, takes me into highly unfamiliar territory – so I’ll caveat it by saying that this assumes that both the stock market and fund managers have some method in their apparent madness)

This also places in focus the importance of building in learning mechanisms into a process. A process that remains static and doesn’t learn from its history of wins / losses, is little better than trusting to blind luck. The next time I decide on the road route, I need to factor in the latest experience, attach a suitable weightage, not get over-influenced by the recency of the good / bad result and so on.

But if process is all that matters, doesn’t this lead to the risk of people abdicating accountability, claiming that all outcomes are determined by Fate? We do know result-oriented people, who ‘do whatever it takes’ and stretch themselves to achieve seemingly impossible tasks, when it appears that the odds are against them. We also know people who operate purely in ‘execution mode’, doing what the Standard Operating Procedure demands and nothing more, and ‘explaining away’ outcomes. Will everyone not end up like the latter, following this school of thought?

This is a tough one, to be honest. As a practicing manager I tend to follow the ‘Measure Outcomes, rather than Activities’ approach. My reasoning is that measuring outcomes allowed personnel to grow – figure out solutions themselves, rather than be spoon-fed; take ownership, responsibility and accountability for their work areas. Isn’t this at odds with my tilt towards process over results? Can a commitment to measuring outcomes as a performance yardstick ever be compatible with a belief that outcomes are never fully controllable and that the process matters more?

I think both can co-exist (though you could get schizophrenic at times!). When affixing responsibility and setting down performance yardsticks, you must emphasise outcomes and accountability for results to drive the stretch. However, you must make it clear that these are not to be achieved at the expense of the ‘right means’. In a sense, you are self-imposing additional hard constraints, and making the problem more difficult that it would be if you relaxed one or the other. Basically, no short-cuts. It is surprising how often human ingenuity manages to work things out even with the hard process constraints, once people recognize that the boundary lines are inviolable. Finally, when evaluating performance, you have to factor in the specific circumstances – including the variables that actually were in control, events that could not have been foreseen and the efforts that were actually put in, before concluding on whether or not the right decisions were taken and whether or not performance was actually good. This requires maturity, balance and detachment.

“May God grant me the power to change the things I can, the ability to accept the things I can’t and the wisdom to know the difference.”

But I just don’t get F1. Oh, I can understand the excitement of F1 – many of us love cars, the faster the better. A friend who’s a major F1 fan and actually attended the Singapore GP last year told me that watching on TV doesn’t give you any sense of how powerful these cars are – she said that the sound of the engines revving on the grid was unreal. Fair enough, I guess that’s true for most sports – TV is a poor substitute for the real thing, and I am willing to accept that the loss in transit is very high in an event like F1.

No, my inability to see F1 as a sport is purely to do with its underlying logic. Excitement and entertainment alone don’t make for a sport, otherwise rock concerts would be sports. You need a physical-mental contest of some sort, involving people. OK – so F1 does have a contest, but what exactly is it a contest of? In every other sport, the contest involved is an individual’s (or team’s) skills against another, within agreed rules and boundaries. When Federer plays Nadal, its two men on a tennis court armed with only a racket and their skills. You can throw in physical conditioning, courage, presence of mind and all those other attributes in as well, but they’re still part of the package that constitutes the individual.

In F1 though, you have a contest with two variables – the drivers and their cars.  Is it a contest to determine the fastest driver? Then why are they driving different cars? Is it a contest to determine the best car? Then have the same drivers test-drive all the cars, and just measure the average lap times. Can the same contest with both variables combined determine both, or either? Nope. F1 with its drivers championship and its manufacturers championship running in parallel just seems plain illogical.

So you have the spectacle of past ‘World Champions’ finishing at the back of the pack in subsequent years, merely because they changed their cars. Doesn’t inspire much confidence in the whole ‘World Champion’ tag. Champion of what? Finishing first with the fastest car around?

To see how ludicrous the logic is, let me take you back to your school days. Imagine you’ve got a bicycle (say bicycle A). A new kid on the block turns up with a different bicycle that looks a bit better (bicycle B). He challenges you to a series of races. You race each other 10 times – he wins say 6 and you manage to win 4. After going through complicated points calculations that converts timings etc. to points, your pals, the race referees announce the following – a) Your rival is the ‘Champion’ and b) His bike is better. Would anyone accept either of the results? Of course not. What an impartial observer would want to do is to get you both to swap bikes and run another 10 races, and then use the combined results.

The larger point here is the influence of technology on sports. Most sports use some equipment (I would be hard pressed to find one that doesn’t use any – even athletes have shoes; perhaps chess might be one example). There are two questions here – a) How much are the differences in performance capabilities of alternate technologies and b) How much does the technology matter in the sport?

Some sports have rigidly controlled the incursion of technology – golf, I believe has standardized the materials from which clubs are made, while cricket periodically examines new bat materials, but has historically allowed limited change. In other sports, the changes have been more rapid and more dramatic – tennis rackets have changed from wood to metal to graphite composites, the strings have undergone their own changes.

Regardless of the rate of change, the common element in all these sports is that there is (by and large) a free market in choice of equipment. If player A wins over player B, primarily because he uses better performing equipment, there is nothing stopping player B from switching at the earliest. So while equipment from individual manufacturers may have marginal difference, the free market evens things out fairly rapidly.

When a sport allows an ‘unequal contest’, the results are quite bizarre – the recent swimming world championships being the perfect example – with over 10 world records being smashed in one afternoon, and races between swimmers using different swim suits throwing up relative unknowns as winners. However, this situation is likely to be very temporary – the swimming federation outlawed the new materials from next year, and if they hadn’t you would have found every swimmer switching to the new suits immediately.

Formula 1, by contrast, is hardly a free market. For the period of the year, which is the basis of the competition, the driver is wedded to his machine, for good or for bad. Sure, a driver can switch teams for the next year, but this is hardly analogous to a player in a different sport just walking into a store and picking up a different brand, which he can use whenever he wishes.

The second point is in terms of the relative contribution of different technologies to the end result. In most team sports, technology plays less of a role. You could have a new design football, or have one team wear better performance shoes, but one could argue that individual skills, team dynamics and tactics would count for a lot more. In individual sports, the impact could be more but if a free market is assumed, the differences are so marginal that I don’t see it making a big difference. In Formula 1, there is a difference, there is no free market and a marginal difference makes all the difference between winning and finishing at the bottom of the pack.   

F1 is a spectacle, a marketing and branding success story. It makes for compelling viewing, has a loyal fan base, which has expanded across geographies. Is it a sport, though?

Obviously, there is an immediate private advantage in trying to beat a queue (say cutting in at the front with some ‘urgent’ excuse, or merely muscling your way in). What’s the downside if you attempt this? Worst case someone will force you to back up and join at the end, which is where you would have been anyway. If you have a sufficiently thick skin, you should always try to beat a queue – even if in 20% of the cases, you manage to get ahead, you are better off, and in the remaining 80% you are no worse off than before.

Queues are therefore inherently unstable, delicate mechanisms. Given a slight push in the wrong direction, a well functioning queue can quickly degenerate into chaos. For queues to sustain, two critical control mechanisms are required – a) a mechanism to prevent people from wanting to beat the system and b) a mechanism to restore order / prevent people attempting to jump the queue from gaining private benefits.

The most overt control is policing - queues with security personnel enforcing order usually have no trouble sustaining. The presence of enforcers acts both as a deterrent and as a damage-control mechanism. Self-regulating queues are more interesting – how does a queue sustain itself, when there is no one to police it?

Public disapproval can act as a reasonable deterrent. Many people may be unwilling to risk the glares / comments from people standing in line to realize their gains. Here is where the general civic demeanour makes a huge difference– in some cities / situations, queue-jumpers get quickly yelled at by the people in line, whereas in others they don’t.

But does this mean that people ‘follow the rules’ only when they know that they are likely to be penalized if they transgress? Is it a foolish pipe dream to imagine that people are capable of self-regulation, even when they know there is no chance of getting caught or penalty for offences? Take a simple example – you are driving in a small town at midnight, nobody’s around and the signal turns red. There is no traffic on any of the roads, no likelihood of any cops around. Do you stop? Two millenniums back, Plato asked this same question with an analogy – “If a man had a magic ring which made him invisible, in effect allowing him to do anything he wanted with no risk of getting caught, would he continue remaining moral?”

There is another strong internally-driven (as opposed to externally enforced) motive for following system rules.  This is the realization that behavior that results in short-term private advantage inevitably results in long-term chaos. If you jump a queue, you have to accept that everyone will, and there will eventually be no queues at all. Therefore, it is in your own private long term interest not to jump queues.

Now this line of reasoning can (and does) lead to ‘gift-giving’ behavior. Basic etiquette, courtesy and ethical conduct are founded on a group of people having realized at some point that gift-giving is best for all in the long run.

However, this presupposes two deep-rooted and related conditions.  The first is our sense of identity - our notion of who we are and who we believe belong to us, who we define are a part of us. The second is a matter of trust, or lack thereof – what we believe we can trust others to do or not do.

In any optimization, the ideal is to weigh and balance several interlinked variables and constraints to get a globally optimum outcome, rejecting the many locally optimal, or sub-optimal solutions that abound. . However, before one even begins looking for solutions, optimal or not, one first has to define what the globe or the system is, for which one is seeking to find the best result. If one defines the entity, not as the whole but as a part, one gets the solution that is right merely for that part.

A sense of identity that is purely private / individual is anathema to the concept of ‘gift-giving’. The notion of giving freely, giving way is founded on two expected outcomes – that by foregoing something in the immediate, short term, we make the system better off, and that in consequence, we ourselves would be better off, assuming everyone does likewise. These outcomes crucially depend on the two issues I mentioned. The desire to make the system better off, even if it is only to gain ourselves in consequence, presupposes that we think about something more than just our individual selves. The expectation that everyone will do likewise is founded on the principle of trust.

Conventionally, people attribute freedom from want as a cause of gift-giving behavior. Where scarcity mentality prevails, it is believed that people will be far less likely to give freely in the short-term. Therefore, the conclusion goes – developed countries are more likely to have self-sustaining systems, and people who are higher up on the economic ladder are less likely to indulge in rule-breaking.  Certainly there is some truth in this, but it isn’t the entire truth. There are plenty of counter examples:  Relatively well-off Indians scramble for the exit door with no sense of decorum when an aircraft lands; groups of well-heeled tourists scramble in front of museum entry points; corporate excesses across the world demonstrate that high income levels are no guarantee of ethical behaviour.

Also, we shouldn’t under-emphasise the importance of sheer habit and upbringing. Societies that work hard to inculcate basic civic discipline and belief in systems in their children have a better chance of sustaining their rule-based institutions.

Looking at Indians in general, we are confronted with twin challenges:

On the one hand, our multi-faceted heterogeneity poses a huge barrier to our sense of a larger identity beyond our immediate self / family. Given the number of variables along which one could split an average Indian city-street (language, religion, caste, socio-economic status and so on), it is unsurprising that people hardly regard ‘belonging to the same street’ as a basis for defining their identity. The only places where I’ve seen un-policed queues work in India are inside corporate organizations (where the organization seems to provide a strong basis for identity), in Bombay (where the heightened sense of civic discipline is amongst the first things that strikes the first-time visitor from other cities in India, and is among the few redeeming features of living in that infrastructure-starved city) and in family weddings, where people have no problem giving right of way to their guests and to the elderly. Take out Bombay, and you can almost guarantee that when a group of strangers is involved, lawlessness will prevail.

On the other hand, far from emphasizing law-abidance and respect for systems as values in kids, I increasingly see people regard law-breaking as something positive. With eyes firmly fixed on ‘getting ahead’ in a competitive economic and social environment as the all-encompassing goal, families treat rule-bending and ‘do whatever it takes’ behavior in children as ‘street-smarts’. The child that stands in line, studies hard and doesn’t cheat is a nerd with no initiative / enterprise. The child who uses every trick in the book (and then some) to get ahead is encouraged to treat these exploits almost as badges of honor. Increasingly, the philosophy at work seems to be "The only sin is getting caught". 

We need to look beyond GDP per capita as the ultimate indicator of development as a society. Perhaps we should look at our queues, at the way we drive in traffic and the values we pass on to our children as better indicators of how civilized we are, and how far we still have to go.

As a management consultant, I’d seen plenty. Consultants are probably second only to lawyers on the unpopularity stakes, if the number of ‘did you hear the one about the consultant…’ jokes is anything to go by. We used to laugh those off as one of the things that go with the job. Nevertheless, the unavoidable fact was that there were plenty initiatives which consultants were involved in, on which good money had been spent, which were far from successful in terms of business results.

When I moved on from consulting into a corporate position, I found that corporates can do a great job of launching-new-initiatives-with-desperately-poor-results all by themselves. When an internally launched initiative would fail spectacularly, the matter would be quietly buried, and the think-tanks would work on the next wonder idea.

Now, the unfortunate part is that the core idea that people were trying to implement would often be a really good one, both in consultant facilitated initiatives and in internally driven ones. The fault almost always wasn’t in the idea itself, but in the manner in which it was being implemented. The most common reasons why great ideas don’t necessarily translate into great results on the ground are as follows:

Inadequate planning 

A good idea by itself is not adequate. Sometimes, people who come up with the idea get so enamored by the ‘wow’ factor that they rush headlong to stick it in, without appropriate review / feedback / critique. For an idea to develop into a workable solution, it needs to be stress-tested and refined based on identification of potential issues.

One company wanted to reduce its travel costs by moving from a setup where every manager picked his own preferred airline to one where everyone would fly one of two designated airlines. Now as an idea, it was not a bad one – the reality was that because the volumes were split, the company lost out on volume based discounts it could avail by pooling its total travel requirement. However, before a policy change was announced, someone should have looked at potential issues impacting implementation – how would people react, did the selected airlines provide adequate network coverage and flight schedule flexibility, would the savings be offset by cancellations and so on. Unfortunately, this was not done, and within a month of the policy change, the company was forced to revert to the earlier system due to issues which cropped up. When this happens, people tend to believe the idea is fundamentally bad – throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Proper planning involves a lot of detailing – the devil lies in the details, always. This includes identifying resources that would be required (personnel, funds etc.), getting appropriate sign-offs from concerned departments and preparing back-up / contingency measures. The sooner a project stops being a ‘separate initiative’ and ties in with routine financial reporting, the better, at least as far as funding requirements and benefits assessments are concerned.  

At one organization, an internal team had completed a diagnostic assessment, identified several new initiatives, prepared detailed plans and were ready to roll. They’d forgotten to get their resource requirements approved by Finance, though. Oops. While they were busy with their planning, the organization had separately approved the next year’s corporate budget. Where were those funds going to come from now?

Absence of buy-in / consensus

The most successful initiatives are those where everyone impacted believes they have been part of the process. Ideas shouldn’t remain brewing within a closed set of people for too long. If the wider organization believes that an initiative is imposed upon them, their natural resistance to change of any type will be strengthened.

Somewhere between the origin of an idea and its execution, the idea has to be shared – exposed, if you will. Organisations (and individuals) sometimes hesitate to do this – fearing adverse reaction, not wanting to share the credit, or out of plain indifference.

Obtaining buy-in should not be seen merely as a process to be ‘tick-marked’ or as an unavoidable burden to be carried. The buy-in process can be hugely value adding, because it ties in neatly with the first concern – adequate detailing / planning and anticipation of issues. When you air out the idea, you will get adverse reaction, but that provides you an opportunity to improve / refine the original idea by taking care of the specific concern raised. At the same time, because a wider set of people have been involved, their support for the eventual initiative can be assured.  

No ownership

An initiative needs an owner – someone who’ll take responsibility for making it happen. Any implementation involves countering barriers to change, keeping people motivated and at times escalating issues / kicking people on their backsides – all of these require effort and attention from an owner who associates personally with the success of the initiative,

When ownership is loosely defined or is shared, chances are that the execution will suffer from lack of direction at some point. It is preferable that ownership is voluntarily taken up, rather than assigned to individuals, though this may not be always possible. If initiatives are assigned, then adequate care must be taken to ensure that the group that planned / thought through the initiatives takes the owner on board and adequately transfers knowledge, including the relevant details. Finally, the owner of a major initiative must be adequately empowered – a lightweight, with all the goodwill in the world, may not be good enough.

I have seen organizations include initiative success on the KRAs of senior ‘initiative leads’, believing that this is good enough to motivate these owners to take on the project success as a serious goal for their performance year. Initiatives-on-KRAs are surely necessary, but may not be sufficient, though. The problem is that senior leads often have multiple KRAs, and may decide early on to cover what they consider their ‘must-do’ KRAs at the expense of the lesser ones, reasoning that if they have to slip up, they’d rather slip on a non-critical KRA. So, just as Finance approval is critical to a project ensuring its access to funds, the active involvement of Top Management / HR is critical to ensuring that leads treat their project related KRAs seriously, in addition to their line responsibilities. 

Improper staffing

Where is the implementation team staffed from? Typically from line departments / functions who depute operating personnel for the duration of the project initiative, either full-time or on a part-time basis. When the call goes out for nominating personnel, line department heads shy away from deputing good / capable personnel – anyone who’s good would usually be handling some serious responsibility and the department reasons that it cannot do without them. Thus, projects are all too often staffed by whoever can be spared (personnel who are often available for a good reason), rather than whoever is best positioned to execute their responsibilities on the project. Likewise, within departments, line personnel often see project postings as career limiting moves, and refrain from volunteering for such assignments.

The best project teams I have seen are at those organizations which have clearly defined career plans in place for their employees. At one such organization, people on the project team saw the assignment as a logical progression, picking up skills and capabilities which they could put to use on subsequent roles. They were clearly informed in advance that their performance on the project would be treated at par with their peers’ regular line performance, so they never felt threatened. 

Loss of focus

Sometimes a project can fall by the wayside for no reason other than sheer boredom. When an idea is fresh and a project is launched, there is plenty of excitement. People are energized, posters put up, newsletter articles written, initial reviews well attended and so on. Six months into the project, that sense of excitement is reduced, and the initiative has to compete for attention with all the new ideas that have come up subsequently. A CXO at one client once told me that every time his CEO went abroad to attend an event / conference, he would remain in a state of apprehension – invariably his CEO would pick up the latest management fad while chatting with his fellow business class travelers on the flight back home, and insist that they implement it in their organization! For complex initiatives that have lengthy implementation timeframes, building in mechanisms to sustain organizational interest is as essential a part of good planning/detailing as any of the other, more obvious project workstreams.  

Change in conditions

Lastly, conditions can and do change between the time an idea was originated and the time it eventually got executed. Changes in the overall economic and specific market climate, changes in organizational priorities, government regulation, senior personnel and so on can all result in a once-good idea being no longer relevant or effective. Execution teams have to periodically re-affirm that the initiative they are implementing in the organization continues to remain current. 

Looking at all the factors which can throw a spanner in the works, it’s a wonder initiatives succeed at all. A proper appreciation of these ‘watchouts’ helps you in two ways:

a)You could build in processes and mechanisms to address each of the issues upfront, rather than discover each hurdle as you go along.

b)You tend to be somewhat circumspect about the next wonder idea / initiative you hear. This doesn’t mean you become negative or excessively skeptical, it simply means you guard against ‘irrational exuberance’. Of course, a potential downside is that you may end up being the naysayer in a room full of excited go-getters!

Amongst all these influences though, one stands out for me – and that is the influence exerted by a person’s initial employment circumstances – the first manager, the first company / industry and the nature of the first role (perhaps not literally first, but say in the initial 1-2 years). Young, bright minds, fresh out of college are highly susceptible to their professional world-view being shaped by those initial experiences. A ‘kiddo’ who sees a work culture that emphasizes inclusiveness, trust and mutual respect will tend to view a professional corporate career very differently from one who starts off in a polar opposite environment. Over time, each will undergo varied experiences – for sure, the first one will encounter the proverbial lousy boss, and equally the second one may move to a better work environment - but the first experience imprint remains and gets internalized more.

I count myself exceedingly fortunate that on my first project, I worked under two outstanding managers. Even to this day, I can trace back my most essential beliefs and attitudes to the learnings I picked up working with them and watching them at work.

From Prithvi, I learnt that quality is first and foremost an attitude. On one memorable night, this chap went through an entire 150 slide deck for the next day’s steering committee meeting, carefully checking for typos, alignment, exact phrasing, re-sequencing slides and so on…Mind you, this was after our partner had gone through the entire deck and approved it. Frankly, from an outside-in viewpoint, he didn’t need to spend those three hours- nobody would have noticed perhaps, if two slide objects were a few pixels out of alignment. We used to drive back to our guest house in the same vehicle, so initially I was a bit irritated – but as I watched I was fascinated by his inner drive for perfection. His point was – ‘if you prepare a document, it’s got your name on it. And you should stop when you are internally satisfied with what you’ve produced’.

The other manager, Prem in his laconic, somewhat cynical style expressed the same thought ‘Quality means 100%. Anything less is only an explanation.” (He actually said ‘excuse’!)

Prem was a funny old bird. He would rarely give you any straight answers. Instead he would give you big complex pieces of work, way beyond your experience and capabilities, and expect you to use your brains. If you got horribly stuck, or were going off in a totally wrong direction, he would set you right, but never by giving you the answers. He would ask you questions, which forced you to think it through. In the end, you’d get it right and in consequence your confidence / belief / ability to handle greater responsibilities would be much higher than if he had simply spelled out what was required to be done and asked you to merely execute it.

“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime" – Confucius
 

Now, teaching people how to fish is easier said than done. So many difficulties come in the way:

Firstly, you should want to develop your team. The rationale is fairly clear – the more your team steps up and takes on bigger responsibilities (typically yours), the more you free yourself up to take on higher order challenges. Unfortunately, too many managers see young bright minds as potential threats to their own position. ‘Forcing yourself to become redundant’ presupposes a high degree of internal security about your own performance and position.

The corporate environment you are working in is another huge factor. Highly political cultures which emphasise hierarchy and discourage risk-taking behavior make it near impossible for the best intentioned managers to develop / groom their team members.

Next, not all personnel respond well to the ‘throw in the pool and let them figure it out’ treatment. Some personnel are better geared for a structured, organized initiation. This approach works best when the concerned employee is bright, has some degree of self-confidence and has the right attitude towards challenges.

Lastly, the manager concerned has to be prepared for a short-term hit, either in terms of quality or in terms of deadlines. If you have an immediate deadline to meet (which you almost always do), and if you know exactly what needs to be done (which is some of the time), it takes a lot of will power not to tell your struggling junior how to go about it. If you don’t know what exactly needs to be done and have to figure it out, it is even more difficult to let go.

In a sense, in the short-term you have to let go of your ‘Quality is 100%’ quest for perfectionism, for longer term gains. I have personally never been able to do this to my satisfaction.

And thank you, Prithvi and Prem.

The Ancient Greeks had a separate field of study for this art – the art of Rhetoric – which deals with how we can use language to persuade others. The reference to language is important, because in the end, language forms the primary means by which we try to convince others.

Aristotle specified three sources of persuasion in his treatise ‘On Rhetoric’, and they still remain highly relevant today:

Ethos – stands for ethics, integrity, honesty, transparency – and has everything to do with the character of the person attempting to influence. Given the same argument for accepting something, we are much more likely to be influenced if they come from someone who is credible in our eyes – either because of his or her moral standing or expertise on the subject. Conversely, all the logic and correctness of a piece of reasoning or advice counts for nothing, if we fundamentally do not trust the speaker or attribute bias or vested interests.

Pathos – appeals to the audience’s emotions. This can be understood in two ways- At one level, it is a play on our heartstrings. Evocative language, drama, tone, pitch and modulation, use of vivid similes / metaphors/stories / humor to drive home a point – all of these bring in Pathos into an argument. These are especially powerful in oratory, where a skilled public speaker can heighten the emotional response of an audience to a point where the words and logic don’t matter anymore. In contrast, a perfectly credible speaker using sound logic, but with no pathos in the delivery can lose an audience in no time (think of a brilliant but boring college Prof, for instance).

However, Pathos runs much deeper than mere embellishment. Pathos is the etymological origin of our words Sympathy & Empathy. In this sense, Pathos implies concern, care – a connect with the audience. When the listener believes that the speaker demonstrates genuine care (for the interests & well-being of the people he is trying to influence), the listener is much more likely to get influenced.

Logos – stands for logic, rationale and reasoning. If the buy-in you are seeking is built on strong logical foundations and appears rational and reasonable to the listener, you are more likely to succeed.

I believe there is also a clear hierarchy / sequence in the use and relevance of the three sources. Ethos is foundational – almost a hygiene factor. Fundamentally, if you are convinced that your boss is a ‘bad-un’, or if your peer will knife you behind your back, you are going to discount everything they are going to say and do. Loss of trust and credibility is fatal – to all relationships.

Pathos comes next, especially in its second (and to my understanding deeper) sense. Your project leader may be credible and capable, and may be fairly principled. But if you believe that he or she really doesn’t have your best interests in mind (at heart?), just doesn’t care, is essentially self-seeking, then his / her influence on you is going to remain limited.  

Logos comes last. With our rational / scientific training and our ‘professionalism at work’ ethic, we seem to prize logic above all. However, think of it this way – when your close friend or relative (say your grandfather) asks you to do something which appears illogical to you, you may comply, purely out of respect for the pathos in the relationship; but when someone who you believe doesn’t care about you asks you do something that is perfectly logical, you feel an inner resistance. Any compliance will be grudging, at best.

So the next time you are trying to convince a group of people, and you feel the resistance – check the pathos element (we shouldn’t have trouble with the Ethos and the Logos parts.)

I have personally seen this at work when as consultants, we tried to influence change in organizations. We were extremely sound on logic, but the clients / projects where we had the greatest success were those where we managed to overcome the Credibility gap and the Care / Concern gap. And we could never do this on our own as consultants; it always required strong involvement from a credible and concerned client senior management to pull it off.

Lastly, the sources of influence have a strong connect with the concept of leadership. After all, a leader is one who has followers. You could reflect on the really good leaders you have come across and try to understand the combination of all three sources of influence they used. Of course, there are plenty of examples of leaders who misguide audiences into following them (think politicians, think dictators who use the emotion of fear, think media / advertising and so on). Plato, Aristotle’s teacher wrote another treatise on ‘Good’ and ‘Bad’ Rhetoric. But that’s another story…

I’ll tell you what I do. I absolutely bust my gut on the first day, i.e. today. As soon as I realize I am in an overload situation (which we all of course try to avoid getting into, but they still happen from time to time), I set myself an insane internal target for ‘getting over the hump’. My reasoning is fairly simple and consists of two basic points:

a)The chances are that I am going to have to kick into overdrive, perhaps put in a ‘night-out’ at least one night out of the next three. Why not do it today and coast later, rather than live with the tension throughout?

b) Each day that passes when you are not back into your comfort zone, your stress levels increase. If the backlog is not clear by Monday afternoon, you have a double whammy – you still have loads of work to do, and you are now close to panic – which increases the chance of errors.

I apply the same rule to longer projects – stuff on which there may not be an immediate crunch situation. The first phase of the project is where you really need to burn rubber. Once you have covered a lot of ground early, established your equation with your clients or your senior management, things become a lot easier. In the early phases of a new assignment, there is a lot of uncertainty and anxiety floating around – no-one knows exactly what to expect, how the assignment will work out etc. If you can put in those extra hours in this most difficult phase and do more than is expected, everyone settles down and lets you manage the show subsequently.

Very rarely, I sometimes go reverse – put my head down, put some effort to get all the small bits out of the way, so that I am only left with the big, bad piece. This approach clears the clutter – but carries with it the risk that you may be left short at the end on the most important deliverable. I guess you could take this approach if you are reasonably confident about what you need to do on the biggie. If it is only a question of hours and effort, you could always put those hours in later. But if it is not just hours, but complex thinking that needs to go in, where you are uncertain about whether it will all work out, then I’d say tackle it first while you are fresh.

In a way it’s like chasing a target in one-day cricket. Pick your slog overs – the first 10 or the last 10.

There are notable exceptions to this rule, which need explanation. On the one hand, there are countries such as Australia and some of the African countries, who punch far above their economic weights. In the case of Australia, this has been attributed to the premium that their society places on sporting excellence, as a means of countering their geographical isolation from the rest of the world. While the theme of racial superiority in sport is distasteful, arguably there is some element of context and circumstance that helps explain the success of Kenyan and Ethiopian long distance runners. In similar vein, the dexterity and guile of Asian badminton and table-tennis players pitted against the power and stamina of the Europeans represents to some degree style differences that originate in differing native sources of strength.

At the other end, India offers perhaps the most compelling example of a country whose economic strength far exceeds its sporting achievements. Over the last decade and a half, we have taken significant steps towards becoming globally competitive and integrated in the world economy; however, we continue to be non-entities in sporting terms. Sepia toned pictures of past hockey glory and a few individual medals in the last 3-4 Olympics are all that we have to celebrate. This underachievement is most stark when juxtaposed with that of China, whose progress in sport has run parallel with their economic growth, culminating in their topping the tally at Beijing 2008.

Two watch-outs while pursuing this line of reasoning - firstly, while economic progress and sporting achievement are clearly correlated, this does not imply a direct causality. There are enough counter examples on both sides to suggest that merely throwing resources does not necessarily make for improved results. Take the British Lawn Tennis Association for instance – they have always been amongst the richest tennis bodies, due to the profits that Wimbledon generates, but have nothing to show in terms of results (Spain has over 15 ATP players in the top 100, the British have just one – Andy Murray, who anyway trained in Spain!). Serbia, last year had 3 young players in the top 5 (Ivanovic, Jankovic and Djokovic), who apparently learnt the game on swimming pools converted to tennis courts. In cricket, India’s economic muscle has not yet translated into dominant performance on the field. In football, England again provides the prime example – lots of money, but no major results at the World Cup.

The second question mark is on whether we should take absolute size of the economy or GDP per capita into consideration. Certainly, GDP per capita provides a better indication of the relative level of development, and India’s achievements are more in line with its ranking based on GDP per capita (even adjusted for PPP). On the other hand, absolute size also matters – the sheer amount of resources that can be generated is as much determined by size as by the per-person earnings.

Our quadrennial breast-beating has, over the years, thrown up many familiar arguments –the lack of a sporting ethos, poor infrastructure and resources, corruption and lack of accountability in sports officialdom, insufficient economic incentives to pursue a serious sporting career and the country’s overwhelming obsession with cricket amongst others. Though, this last at least is surely a case of circular reasoning – if we obsess about cricket, it is because we have some standing in the game through our performance, and if performance is the route to gaining popularity, one can’t make popularity a necessary condition for performance.

One trend that particularly interests me is that while we rank reasonably high in the overall standings at sub-global events like the Commonwealth Games and the Asian Games, we are somehow not able to translate this into success at the global scale. We run countries like Canada pretty close at the Commonwealth Games, but the gap in the Olympics medals table between India and Canada is huge. Countries like Iran, Jamaica, Indonesia and Thailand lie below us at these smaller events and turn the tables comfortably at the Olympics. The evidence suggests that these other countries have gained by specialization and focus. In effect, what they are good at, they are close to world class.

The parallel with the development of our economic outlook is fascinating – our entire economic ethos was founded on the need to be self-sufficient. Participation in world trade and the necessity of achieving world class standards to attain export competitiveness were philosophies that we didn’t subscribe to for decades. That thinking, appropriate in its context and times, led to a complex, integrated and somewhat insular domestic economy, with markets full of goods and services that were wholly Indian but hardly world-beating.

We have gradually come to realize that economic strength and self-sufficiency are not necessarily synonymous. Global trade allows us the freedom to build world-class competencies in a few areas, and leverage the same to buy everything else that we need. Can we respond to this realization in sports, as we have done however unwillingly, in economics? It may be worthwhile examining whether we could do better in sports at the global level, by focusing our resources on a few disciplines, where we genuinely believe we can make the cut. Do we really want to expend our energies training and sending swimmers who get lapped multiple times?

All this, of course, presupposes that we want to garner sporting glory in its showcase event. The Olympian spirit - ‘The important thing is to take part.. etc.’ while being an admirable sentiment has too often been used as a fig leaf to cover up for the fact that we are nowhere near winning, and don’t have a clue about how to get there. Don’t let anyone kid you otherwise. George Orwell famously said, ‘Serious sport is war minus the shooting’, and we must not merely participate in war. 

My elder son, Aditya had just turned four (he’s seven, now) and was going to nursery when this happened. Each day, he would carry a lunch-box in his bag, which would have a sandwich, a paratha or a couple of dosas.  Essentially food that Adi knew was ‘healthy’, as opposed to chips, chocolates or wafers which were unfortunately classed under ‘junk’. About a month into the year, we had our first PTA meeting, where the teacher told us we had a problem. All the other kids would get mouthwatering junk food in their lunch boxes, which temptation was beyond Adi’s capacities of resistance. And Adi being Adi, bless his dear heart, would take on all comers for the contents of their lunchboxes.

The teacher sympathized with us, and said, yes she knew we were doing the right thing by packing only healthy food, but she couldn’t prevent other parents from sending chocolates and chips, though they had sent out memos to this effect. Could we please counsel Adi and advise him to show some restraint?

We thought this over and reached an equitable solution. We bought him a two-compartment lunch box – the larger section would contain his usual healthy food, and the smaller one would have one small ‘junk’ item. I had a stern chat with Adi which went as follows, “We’re sending you a goody in your lunchbox now, but the condition is that you must finish your healthy food before you eat the junk. If you come back with your healthy food unfinished, we will stop sending you junk’

He thought this over for a couple of minutes. Then he asked, “Papa, if I finish my junk food and don’t finish my healthy food, you will stop sending me junk food, right?”. I said, “That’s right”. He went on, still thinking this over, “What if I finish my healthy food, and bring back my junk food intact, will you stop sending me healthy food then?”

I did a double-take and checked again if he had understood what he was asking. Turned out he was dead serious – he had thought it through!  

Anyway, I quickly put a stop to that line of reasoning. I simply asked him what he thought was the likelihood that he would bring back his chocolate unfinished through a whole day in school – his reply was a sad “Not much chance…”

I was a proud father that day!

a. Linda is a bank teller.

b. Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.Mentally, pick one of the above.

Then read on – I’ll come back to Linda in a bit.

Business Management has essentially evolved through the application of the scientific method to organizational endeavour. In a field such as inventory optimisation, the link is fairly obvious as are the results; in others such as organizational behavior, the jury is still out on how far scientific models of human behavior work.

As decision makers, as problem solvers, as formers of opinions and judgments, one of our key aspirations is to be objective. By seeking to be objective, I am really saying “This viewpoint, or this solution to this situation, is not my viewpoint, or my solution. It’s not about me, the subject. It’s not about my personal beliefs, preferences and prejudices. This viewpoint or solution has been determined purely by the nature of the object, the situation. I just happen to be the problem solver – if any other individual seeks a rational solution, he / she should arrive at the same viewpoint as I have.” Objectivity is axiomatic of the scientific method – all modern scientific development assumes it, and hallows it.

Can we ever be really objective? Till I stumbled onto Behavioural Economics, I used to consider myself fairly rational – professionalism demanded that I keep my personal biases out of the picture, and I did – at least, I thought I did. Behavioural Economics is hardly new – it has been around for over 30 years - yet popular awareness of discoveries in this field and their implications is quite low. Therefore, having made this disquieting find, I want to spread the misery.

I want to step back, first to c. 400 B.C. Plato and Aristotle debated about the nature of human beings, and I am pretty sure a parallel debate exists in Indian and Chinese philosophical speculations as well. Was man was essentially a rational animal (homo sapiens), who first and foremost was equipped with reasoning - the ability to abstract, model, pattern recognize and perform calculations in his brain, who by the way also happened to have emotions and passions?. Or was man primarily driven by passions, who just happened to have a rational faculty which he sometimes used? In a nutshell, were we beings with a head, who happened to have a heart, or was it the other way around?

Skipping forward a couple of millennia, we come to classical economics. All classical economics carries an essential assumption about the nature of human beings – that when it comes to economic decisions, we are essentially rational decision makers. The law of supply and demand has individual utility maximization as its foundation, and individuals maximize utility as per a cold, scientific calculation. We look at a situation, figure out the choices, constraints, pros and cons and arrive at a decision that maximizes utility. Of course, being diverse individuals, we could all do the calculation and arrive at different choices reflecting our different preferences (as for example if you and I are given the same free voucher to shop at a department store, we have the same max constraint and the same options to choose, but we will choose differently), but the essential nature of the way we make those choices is assumed to be rational calculation of costs and benefits.

This comfortable world-view, of human beings as flesh-and-blood calculating machines, started getting shaken in the latter half of the last century. The cognitive psychologist, Herbert Simon coined the terms ‘Bounded Rationality’ and ‘Satisficing” to describe a limited calculation mode of decision making.  Various decisions that we make were hardly ‘total-optimisations’. When you search for a parking spot for your car in a mall, you do not identify all possible options and calculate which one is the ‘best-solution’ after evaluating all preference parameters, such as nearness to the exit, amount of shade and clearance from adjacent parked cars. Instead, you find the first satisfactory option that suffices, a solution that is ‘good enough’ even if it not the ‘optimal solution’. Essentially, you are still rational, but rational within bounds. There are limits to the alternatives that your mind considers, the extent of calculation that it does before it makes its choice.

In the mid 1970s, Daniel Kahnemann and Amos Tversky published a seminal paper that went still further. Survey respondents made choices that were not rational or even ‘bounded rational’, but plain irrational. The anomalies they demonstrated have been successfully replicated by hundreds of behavioural scientists across different types of groups (including hard headed scientists, economists and finance professionals), across cultures and countries. This author can confirm the same, having personally administered similar questionnaires over hundreds of workshop participants.

Essentially, Kahnemann and Tversky demonstrated that our minds use short-cuts, rules of thumb – what are formally called heuristics. These are inherent in the way our minds function, and are effort-saving devices. The mind is spared the bother of evaluating each instance ab-initio and arriving at an optimal decision action. For instance, if I see a stranger walk up to me, smile and offer his hand, my hand reaches out, in a reflex action.  Somewhere, my past actions and experiences are codified in my mind as a heuristic of the type “when an unknown person looks friendly and puts his hand out, offer your hand”. Once this heuristic is embedded, the rational process is short-circuited – the response to a stimulus is automatic. Now, the reason why these heuristics are useful is that they work, most of the time. Unfortunately there are plenty of situations where our minds apply heuristics which are inappropriate for the situation.

The domain of Behavioural Economics has grown into a full fledged academic discipline over the last 30 years. A large number of behavioural biases, have been documented, including biases such as Anchoring (the tendency to be influenced by some initial information that may have no bearing on the situation), Framing (The choices we make are influenced by how the alternatives are presented to us), Confirming Evidence Bias (We accept confirming evidence more readily than evidence that goes against our initial view) and many others.

Returning to Linda, if you chose option b (Linda is a bank teller and active in the feminist movement), you were a victim of the Representativeness Heuristic. We judge things by how they appear rather than how statistically likely they are. There will always be more people who work in banks, than there are who work in banks AND are active in the feminist movement. From a description of Linda, our minds jump to the word feminist – in the process the rational evaluation of the choices gets short-circuited. Linda a quite a hallowed example by the way – she appeared first in Kahneman and Tversky’s 1976 research paper.

The point behind these biases is that we are unaware that they exist, encoded in our minds. While we believe ourselves to be rational and objective and think ourselves free from the more crude prejudices (eg. I support this decision because it is proposed by someone I like), we are still prone to the influence of these subtler biases. This doesn’t mean that we lose faith in our efforts to be objective and rational, because these heuristics work at the margin – in many everyday situations, the standard heuristic works, and works well. We just need to be alert about loss of objectivity and about the subtle influences within our minds, and guard against their danger.

Lastly, in a previous article, I wrote about the value that people and perspectives bring to the table. Another source of value is elimination of bias – when subjected to other people’s scrutiny, any inherent biases in individuals should cancel out, and hopefully result in greater objectivity.

This article is in response to this line of thought. The author of the Life of Pi (Yann Martel) suggested an outline of this fascinating analogy in an interview many years back and it stuck in my mind. Subsequently it seems to have vanished from the public domain (Googling yields no results). Based on my visit to the Serengeti in 2005, I have taken the liberty of embellishing the original with my limited additional knowledge of the behavior of antelopes. So here goes…

Imagine a deer (say a Thomson’s gazelle) in the grassland. As far as his eye can see, the land is flat; the plains endless, interrupted only now and then by a line of short, stunted bushes, or the occasional baobab. He grazes contentedly, though always with his ears cocked up and his nose on high alert, ready to respond to the slightest hint of danger. Now, there are lots of predators on the same grassland – lion, cheetah, leopards and hyena. How does the deer survive? With the exception of the cheetah, the deer can outrun them all, over a reasonable distance, given his low body weight. However, all these predators are capable of powerful bursts of acceleration which make them faster over a short sprint.

The deer’s survival mechanism is a very simple one. At any point, the deer maintains a ‘circle of safety’ with respect to any predator. Imagine the deer at the center of the circle. His signal reception mechanisms (power of hearing, ability to detect predator scents and strange vibrations in the ground) have over millennium been synchronized with the safe radius. His signal reception limits equate with the minimum distance he needs to maintain to outrun a predator. If a lion moves into this circle, the deer is able to pick up the signal, process it (checking if it is a harmless or a dangerous signal), recognize the danger and take corresponding action. The usual response would be to move away by a similar distance, so as to maintain the safe distance. Any closer, and the lion would get him because of his short-sprint advantage.

(As an aside, lions counter this by hunting in pairs or threes, usually one lying hidden in the bush, while the others approach from the opposite end to nudge the deer in the direction of the one lying in wait. The reverse counter is provided by deer staying in herds – their effective radius increases, and they seek safety in numbers – statistically their chances of individual survival go up, though the lions would always get one or two, each time)

Now imagine this deer suddenly has access to modern communication technology. Say someone clamps a pair of headphones or RF antennae on the deer, so that now, magically the deer can pick up signals at twice the original radius. Theoretically, this should be good for the deer, because there might have been some instances when a deer’s signal detection radius proved limiting – say there was an unusually fast lion just outside the original circle. Now the deer should be able to react at much greater distances. What do you think will happen?

What will most likely happen is that the deer would go nuts. Earlier, the deer would ignore all signals outside the circle, good or bad. Now the deer would go this way and that, as he responds to each movement of a predator outside the original circle, even if most of these movements pose no incremental danger to the deer. He would probably fall down out of sheer exhaustion. Not a moment’s peace left. Unless of course, the reception technology was combined with additional information processing capability – i.e. the deer also had double the brain he does.

The point is this – as humans, there are physical limits to the amount of signals / information we can deal with, without going nuts. The explosion in the last two decades is seriously worrying – on an average day, we watch TV, read news, check FB multiple times, get Twitter feeds, get SMSs, respond to so many calls, get mails in office and thanks to Blackberry everywhere. Our reactions are not dissimilar to the hypothetical deer.

Imagine you and your friend agreed to catch a movie at the theater just 10 years back, when there were no cellphones. Presumably you would have agreed to meet outside the ticketing office, say 15 minutes before the start. If one of you got delayed, the other would have a coffee, watch the crowd, look at the posters or queue up to get tickets. Basically, wait patiently. And you know what, 9 out of 10 your friend would turn up in time for both of you to catch the show. Worst case, you’d be a few minutes late.  

Contrast with the situation today – how many communication flows would happen within those 15 minutes – “I’m running a bit late / stuck in traffic / where the #$%% are you…” and so on.

For all our endeavors, there has to be a period of planning and a period of execution. While the need for course corrections during execution is self-evident, it is also highly desirable that we have a frozen planning period – i.e. a period where we will continue executing the original plan, despite new information. All corrections should be made beyond this period, which will in most cases correspond with a safe-holding zone, where we recognize, process / interpret and decide corrective measures. We shouldn’t be in a purely reactive mode and throw the planning / holding periods out, just because our reaction abilities have advanced manifold. The same applies to the need for original structure in communication – we can leave it to back-and-forthing, but the long run costs will be significant.

I’m no Luddite, though I am a relatively late adopter of new technologies. There has been much that is good achieved in the last two decades, and there’s no going backwards. However, I see signs of deer fatigue around me all the time – increased stress, reduced attention spans, loss of patience, inability to hear out a complex argument and so on. Any suggestions on dealing with this are welcome.

There will always be a gap between what you think is realistically possible, given time and resource constraints, and what your customers expect. This gap can be because:

a)     Your estimate of ‘reasonable productivity’ is too low. You haven’t taken into account productivity that is possible if you were ‘to stretch’.

b)     Your customer is in fairyland. He or she has no conception of what is realistic, with all the stretch and goodwill in the world thrown in.

In most situations, the gap usually has both elements. Most people when asked to come up with a realistic estimate will always give a number that has an in-built safety margin thrown in. If a piece of work should ideally take 2 weeks, people will quote 3 weeks. If 100 units of sales are achievable in a month, they will start resisting at 60.  Cost estimates will be 50% higher for starters. It’s an automatic defense mechanism that the school of hard knocks has taught all of us.  On the other hand, as customers the defense mechanism works in the reverse direction.

Naturally, you cannot let this expectation mismatch remain unresolved. The question is, how should you go about aligning expectations and reality? Well, there are two ways, and I am going to argue in favour of one of them as a preferred option.

Managing Expectations is where you engage with your customer and rationally explain why certain expectations are unrealistic and cannot be met despite your best efforts. This also involves recognizing where it may be possible to commit to more, once you realize it may be feasible. There is a give and take process on both sides, which results in a mutually acceptable outcome. Obviously, it will not be easy – getting a customer to settle for less never is. It involves moving away from an ‘Us vs Them’ mentality towards a joint problem solving approach. This approach pre-supposes transparency, and willingness to take the risk that once you open up your effort estimate basis to your client, that openness will not get abused.

The fine art of Expectation Management, on the other hand, is a black-box approach. ‘Always under-commit and over-deliver’ is its motto. Here the person or organization committing time and effort justifies and internalizes the defense mechanism. Even if the service provider internally thinks that what is asked is possible, he tries to bargain for less (output) or more (fees). If it eventually turns out that the actual performance is marginally better than that agreed then the service provider feels that he has done a good job, because he has ‘over-delivered’.  

Why do I discourage people from adopting the latter approach? After all, it is pretty prevalent - so what’s wrong with it?

There are two fears that this approach tries to counter – a) the fear that if you in-build stretch into your realistic assessment, you are left with no room for maneuver in case things go wrong and b) the fear that a customer will always, like Oliver Twist,  expect just a bit more. Both these fears express the same outlook and attitude towards client relationships - that customers and service providers essentially have adversarial positions. Clients ‘win’ at the expense of service providers and vice-versa.

This attitude is great if one-off transactions with your customers are all you are aiming for – a typical ‘here and now’ sales mindset. But look at what happens when you view the interaction as a relationship, comprising multiple cycles. Say you managed to under-commit and over-deliver the first time. What happens in the next cycle? Do you really think your client wouldn’t have done her math, or would be unaware of the actual extent of slack in your execution the first time? Second time round, you may up your numbers and shout yourself hoarse, but she will always believe that you still have some reserve up your sleeve!

The thing with buffers is that they become transparent over cycles. You can either have that transparency upfront, or start with a black-box which becomes transparent over time. The difference between the two is the degree of trust and the quality of the relationship.

In an open, transparent, trust-based relationship, both the fears are mitigated. When your workings and assumptions are shared with your client, and things outside your control go wrong, you can reasonably expect some slack from your client, in the form of deadline extensions, agreed additional fees or agreed reduced work completion criteria. As for the second fear, once you have jointly worked out the maximum that is possible, your client has no basis for asking for more.

For the hard-headed realists, I do not believe I am advocating an impractical, idealistic approach. Our defense mechanisms exist because we have been hurt in the past, by trusting too much. Obviously, there are customers who will not hesitate in extracting as much as they can, and if you ‘reveal all’, you are likely to lose out. You may be better off asking yourself whether you want to retain those client and customer relationships.

So identify your ‘good clients’ and manage their expectations – be open and transparent with them. Recognise your ‘bad clients’ and be transactional, but honestly evaluate whether your business gains from those clients are worth the effort (including the effort of second-guessing and operational brinkmanship). Over the long run, try and substitute a few good, long term relationships for a large number of smaller transactional clients.

Note: You may have some leeway in client selection, but you rarely get to shuffle your bosses. If your boss is a ‘bad-un’, you may just have to grin and bear it for a while, unfortunately!

The point behind a to-do list is not that everything in it gets done – they very rarely do. A to-do list merely allows you to become organized in thinking through everything you need to do at one go, allocating time and effort and deciding priorities after seeing all your tasks in one place. Pending items on a to-do list get carried forward, of course and eventually get done.

Many of us work on multiple to-do lists in parallel, which mirror the different planning horizons we work on simultaneously. For instance, I typically have a daily list, a weekly or a fortnightly list and a less-granular-more-hazy one for the month. I see a quarterly or a monthly plan as nothing more than a to-do list for the month. These lists dovetail into one other – a key initiative on your annual plan (annual to-do list) should ideally result in broken down work-streams in your quarterly / monthly lists, and into specific tasks on one of your daily lists. The review, re-plan and update process is based on the horizon – I look at my daily list several times during the day, but review my monthly plan roughly once every week (typically at the start / end of the week).

Now, the same concept can be applied to your lifetime. For years, I have had a simple Excel spreadsheet where I have listed down all the things I want to do in my life. This includes places to travel to, languages to learn, books to read, hobbies to develop and pursue, initiatives I want to take, habits I want to develop / get rid off and so on. Mind Matters, for instance, first appeared on my lifetime list about 4 years before it was actually created, under the more hazy guise of “Want to start and run a business successfully by myself’.

Just as with other to-do lists, everything you put in it may not get done – and unfortunately, you may not be able to carry forward undone items into your next life, or into the afterlife. However, the value of creating a lifetime to-do list remains the same – just by creating one you get to look at all your wishes at one go, and thereby increase the chance that they may get done. Your review frequency could be once a year and your lifetime goals can neatly dovetail into your New Year Resolutions.

For most of us, that dull ritual of filling out the fields and columns and lines of space to record our “Progress Made’ and “Anticipated Risks’ was a weekly chore – something to be borne, with patience and forbearance, much like the humidity in Bombay. You could rail at it, but it remained unmoved, and it never went away.

Status reports, like other formal Project Management mechanisms exist for a reason though, and it is a good one. Like with any other tool or mechanism, its success depends a lot on how it is used – there are ways by which a Status Report can really add value, without sucking up huge amounts of time and effort. So for all those of you who are currently condemned to going through the ritual week in and week out, here’s the underlying theory. My hope is that if you understand, you will tolerate better, and perhaps may actually derive more value from existing mechanisms, for yourselves and for your projects.

Imagine you are managing a small project for a client at a single location. (It could be any type of project – you may be doing a piece of research for a client, you could be an interior designer carrying out a renovation of a house, or you may be implementing an IT application for a small business). Your team is co-located at the client site and you are in daily touch with your team members, your own company leadership and your clients.

In your project plan / schedule, your list of activities includes all your project work-streams. Your house renovation work, for instance, might have activities grouped under various heads – civil, electrical, wood-work, plumbing etc. In addition to these ‘client-facing’ activities, there is an additional activity – ‘Project Management’. This covers all the small tasks you do to keep the project running on schedule –actually making the schedule itself, updating the schedule, getting updates from your team and external contractors, responding to unplanned leave requests, alerting the client on any issues and deviations, escalating issues to your leadership, involving the client and your organization in finding solutions to specific issues, billing the client and getting payment.

In a small co-located project as above, you may rightfully treat these tasks as ‘routine’ – often not worthy of inclusion in your overall activity list on the Project Schedule. The updates are instantaneous, the resolutions are often of the ‘walk across and sort out face-to-face’ type, and your directives to the team are immediately known across the team. The Project Management tasks are all there, but they are not of a scale and complexity to warrant formal Project Management Mechanisms. You don’t need a formal weekly Status Report – what would your electrical engineer put in it anyway, that you haven’t found out through your daily interactions?

Now imagine a vastly more complex project, spanning multiple locations, with a larger team, several levels of authority and a much greater number of stakeholders – client and internal. For a project of this type, Project- Management-by-walking-across will be disastrous. The close visibility and instantaneous transmission of project course corrections are simply non-existent. There will be lots of cross talk and one-to-one correspondence, which are invisible to the Project Manager. Local issues could threaten to impact activities at other locations, and the Project Manager cannot be omnipresent. Therefore, in such a project, right from the planning stage Project Management tasks are treated as a separate work-stream, as important if not more than any of the individual ‘client-facing’ work-streams. The Program Management or Project Management office, if one exists, is often the fodder for much speculation in project teams executing activities on the line – ‘What do they actually do?’ goes the whisper. The reality is that without the PMO, the project can hardly run in a co-ordinated manner.

What formal Project Management Mechanisms actually do on such projects, is to introduce a steady rhythm of periodic, standard processes into project activities. Ground rules are laid, weekly deadlines established, escalation mechanisms set-up, course corrections documented and procedures for handling scope-change requests created. This rhythm ensures that all the phone lines across different locations are not jangling all the time – work units and locations are given a period of relative calm to actually execute the work, while issues are parked for resolution at an appropriate time, in an appropriate manner. For me personally, the realization dawned rather late that while I used to crib about the hour / two hours spent every week on the Status Reports, it was those “lost two hours’ that actually allowed me to function at all the rest of the week.

The danger to guard against is overkill. The rigour and degree of complexity of the Project Management mechanisms needs to be matched (in fact driven) by the complexity of the project. Too simple / informal a mechanism on a complex project results in chaos and lack of co-ordination; equally too complex a mechanism on a simple projects results in loss of productive time and high levels of resentment. You don’t want to spend all your time doing nothing but reporting on the nothing you’re doing. I’ve been on a project where the manager insisted on a formal daily update, though we met at least twice a day. That project didn’t go too well, I’m afraid.

There are a few other best practices on Status Reports (since I began with them) that I can share:

·         As a rule, keep them simple: For most projects, a simple 1 pager should suffice. This can cover “Planned Activities’, ‘Activities Completed’, ‘Work-in-Progress’ and ‘Issues / Concerns’.

·         Decide an appropriate frequency: Weekly updates should suffice for a majority of projects.

·         Coach your team: On what goes in, and what should be kept out of a Status Report. Ideally, Status Reports act as Early Warning Systems – they provide advance notice of what might be a small concern now, but could escalate into something big, if left unresolved. Also, if there is a real crisis, you don’t want your team member waiting to put it into a Status Report – you want him / her to pick up the phone now.

·         Ensure you read and react to what’s written on a Status Report: Not responding to something that is flagged as a concern on a report is the surest, fastest way to get your team to start thinking that this is a meaningless admin task.

Lastly, formal mechanisms exist for another reason apart from project complexity, and that’s for documenting evidence or leaving a physical trail, just in case there are future battles to be fought, within or without. This reason ensures that even in your simple single location project, you end up having formal periodic documentation of some sort, though the project scope and complexity alone may not warrant it. Again unavoidable, like the weather.

The first task of a writer is to structure the piece of communication. Structure involves the following elements: a) A clear statement of the central core message and b) The presentation of ideas in a logically grouped and coherent manner that ‘backs-up’ or supports the central message. A pyramid of ideas with the central message on top and the support points below is the appropriate structure for all communication.

Once the structure is derived, the writer has choices in terms of how he/she presents the structure to the reader. This involves decisions on a) the path to take through the pyramid (whether top-down with the main message first, or bottom-up with the main message at the end), b) the sequence in which ideas are presented and c) which elements of detail need to be kept in, and which ones can be left out, without losing impact.

The central message of this article, for instance, is why a clear structure is critical to good writing, and why it is the writer’s responsibility to ensure that the structure is evident. In terms of sequence, I have chosen to state it right at the top (see the heading), as well as in the middle after a preamble (right here).

Why Structure Matters?

To understand this, look at it from a reader’s viewpoint. As readers, our minimum expectations from a piece of writing are:

·         Ease of understanding: None of us has time. We’d like to get the point (and support points), as quickly as possible and with minimum of effort on our side.

·         Clarity / Lack of ambiguity: We want to be reassured that the message as we understand it, is the same as the writer intended, and the same that anyone reading would understand. We don’t want to be put in a position where there are differences in understanding across people, writer and readers.
 

The Onus is on the Writer

For a message to be derived from a mass of writing, someone has to perform the task of structuring. An unstructured piece doesn’t mean the piece doesn’t get structured. It only means that the responsibility of structuring the piece has been transferred from the writer to readers. This creates adverse consequences for readers:

·         Ease of understanding: Impacted significantly, as now readers bear the burden of sorting out the mass of thoughts pouring out of the writer’s mind to figure out the main message. Further, passages without a structure tend to be longer – they ramble, because the writer has not consciously applied his / her mind to what is essential, and what is not. The longer the passage, the more the effort required.

·         Clarity / Lack of ambiguity: Naturally, if different readers are going to structure it on their own, they may not necessarily arrive at the same structure. Each reader will take away what he / she thinks was the central point in the mass of points. In effect, they will be second guessing what the writer intended.

Therefore if a writer wants to deliver a clear message that no two people will interpret differently, and if the writer wants readers to ‘get it’ with least effort, the writer has to bear the responsibility for structuring.

Finally, other ‘good writing’ characteristics such as style, beauty and imagery in language and selection of the most appropriate words / phrases are actually optional add-ons. Nice if we can have it, but not essential. A piece of writing, well structured but perhaps not very refined or polished in usage of the English language is still acceptable – the basic point and argument will be understood by readers; but the converse is not true. A poorly structured piece with great language remains a poor piece of writing – rather like a lavishly made Bollywood film, all style and no storyline.

Hard going, isn’t it? We usually have different mental images or constructs of the break down (or presentation slide). For instance, you may visualize sales broken down by geography, while your colleague may visualize a break-up by product category.  Both of you are equally convinced that your view is the right one. If a resolution is sought through rational discussion, inevitably there is give and take. Both approaches may be correct; neither may be clearly superior. And what emerges from this consensus, is a right, royal mess. In fact, any of the individual views unopposed may actually be better than the group consensus one.

Does this mean business problem solving should ideally be an undemocratic procedure?

The answer is not an absolute ‘No’, but a qualified ‘Not Entirely’.

The classic Issue-Based Problem Solving process involves the following six basic steps:

Problem Definition > Problem Structuring > Solution Generation > Solution Evaluation & Choice > Preparing for Implementation > Implementation

Some of the steps are iterative / loopy (eg. Steps 2 and 3, and Steps 4,5 & 6).

There are parts of the process where perspectives provided by a larger group are absolutely vital. Equally, there are parts where the group destroys value, and where a single, capable problem solver should be trusted to ‘go it alone’.  

Where (and How) People Help

A)    In Problem Definition (Step 1): Perspectives are hugely important right at the beginning, when the problem solver has to decide which problem really needs solving for. A common error is to bypass the first step. The first problem definition that comes to mind or the most obvious pain point is sought to be resolved. If attrition is high, a solution is sought for “How to reduce attrition”. There could be other ways of looking at this situation – some may be broader definitions (“How to improve organization culture, or employee satisfaction), some may be narrower (“How to minimize the impact of attrition”), some could be tangential (“How can we recruit people whose values best match our organizational DNA?”).

At this stage, pass the hat around. Get in as many perspectives as possible. You never know who’s going to come up with a view that you may not have thought of, but once you hear it, you realize its value. And sitting alone in your room or cubicle, trying to think up different angles of approach is a very poor substitute for just talking to people.

B)    In Solution Generation (Step 3): You are hardly likely to come up with all the nice creative ideas yourself. Someone may actually come up with an idea that forces you to re-look at your structuring of the problem (this is where the process gets loopy!). The important thing here is to provide people a frameset for idea generation. If you get people into a room and brainstorm on a vague, generic problem statement (How do we reduce attrition), you are quite likely to get the same old tired ideas. Brainstorming is much more effective when you give people a tighter box to think in (“Can we come up with 5 ideas for identifying people who are likely to leave, in advance”). Out of the box, is really not looking at the sky above, but looking inside a different box, drawn outside. The more these boxes, the more the ideas.

C)    In Choosing between Alternative Solutions (Step 4): An individual can figure out the pros and cons, and impact on various parameters of each solution option, but an appropriate assessment of risk, understanding of nuances and anticipation of potential obstacles ahead requires a larger group. In the end the final selection may be by an individual or by the group as a whole, but the value lies in the debate that precedes the selection.

D)    In Preparing a Solution for Implementation (Step 5):  This requires refinement of the orginal idea. Resist the temptation to treat an idea in its raw form as a finished product. Treat your first solution plan as a draft instead, and get reactions. You do not need to take all viewpoints at face value – what you are looking for is the germ of truth that lies behind the critique.  Does someone believe this plan will not work because it conflicts with other priorities of people down the line? Well, how can you refine you plan to address that issue? And so on. 

Where You Should Fly Solo

In Problem Structuring (Step 2), multiple voices in creating the initial structure erode value and can more importantly erode faith in the value of collaboration. The structure breaks down the problem, links together all the drivers and elements, guides the lines of analysis / ‘work-streams’ and directs efforts based on impact / materiality. Here, one reasonably capable problem solver beats a group hands down, because a consistency of vision and a unity of conception across the entire problem space are important. The give and take in a consensus process destroys this unity.

A group can still help in refining an initial structure drawn up by one person, in some cases even completely changing the initial structure. Even in such a case, I find that having taken the effort to do it one way, people are surprisingly open to a rational suggestion that changes the viewpoint. The group too refrains from frivolous suggestions when they see the conception as a whole. If the initial structuring is good, most people usually can see ‘which part of the structure’ addresses their individual viewpoint. But not when people are collectively applying their minds for the first time.

Going back to the presentation you were putting together jointly – it is much better if you or your colleague individually takes a first shot at the PPT. The other team member can always add value after the first draft is ready.

Therefore, democracy in problem solving - certainly, but not entirely.