Some Wise Ones to Reflect Upon !!!

"The real magic of discovery lies not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."                                                                                                                                                   - Marcel Proust

No wonder we have heard of things like reimagine as a powerful concept in the recent past.   Gareth Morgan talks about Imaginzation.  Wear a different lens and you will see the problem differently.  Isn't this what is taught in most leading B’Schools.

"Anger Is One Letter Away from Danger" 

                                                              -  Elanor Roosevelt 

And so said First Lady Elanor Roosevelt of United States.  Yes it is true that controlling your anger makes life much more simpler, much more calmer and a lot more easier.   Most big fights and misunderstanding are out of snappy thinking, getting angry and reacting.  No wonder they say “The sent arrow, the spoken word and the transmitted email can’t just come back, so think before you send, speak or Click”.   Never respond to mails when angry.

Few more to reflect on as we near the end of one more beautiful year.  Soon we’ll bid good bye to 2014 and usher another year of fine things to come.

"Success is not final, failure is not fatal; it is the courage to continue that  counts.                                                                                                                                         - Winston Churchill

"The way to get started is to stop talking and begin doing" 

                                                                              - Walt Disney Inc.

"Kites Rise Highest Against the Wind, Not With It"  

                                                              - Winston Churchill

"A Man is But the Product of His Thoughts.  What he Thinks, He Becomes."                                                                                                                                                    -  Mahatma Gandhi

“Grinding a sword for ten years, but the blade is yet to be tried.”

                                                                            - Jia Dao , Chinese Poet (779 -843 A.D)

"Discovery consists of seeing what everyone has seen and thinking what nobody has thought. "                                                                                                                                                     - Anon

ARISE, AWAKE DON"T BE A BOILED FROG !!!

When change stares you in the face what do you do?   Depending on how you see change there can be two things that happen. You act on it or you let it go by.   To understand the implications better let us consider the boiled frog experiment.  Whether this was actually an experiment conducted in a laboratory or someone's kitchen should not be the point of debate. The issue is understanding change and how this is handled.  

In the boiled frog experiment you put a frog into boiling water and it reacts and jumps out instantly.  It survives.  However you put the frog into a vessel with cool water and slowly start heating the same the frog eventually dies.   The frog does not realize the change in temperature and snugly sits in the warming waters and eventually can't react and dies. 

In the same way it is important for us to understand the changes happening and know how they would affect us in the long run.  Else a day would come when it might leave you like the boiled frog.  Not understanding the deterioration of a condition and waiting without action is something we have seen often either in our lives or in the lives of people we know. 

In our personal lives it can be things like a vice which we could tackle saying "one more time" .... just "one more time" and then its done. By the time you want it "no more times" it is too late.   Similarly in professional life we keep procrastinating and pile up work or leave an issue unattended...day after day enjoying the comfort of warm waters.  We can end up like the BF.

How does one overcome and realize something is deteriorating.  There is no other option but to keep tab.  Which means focus on what you think is going on.  When you focus you are able to tune in to your situation and understand it better.  Read my blog on Focus:  What Gets Focus Gets Attention; What Gets Attention Gets Done.  So if you focus on the problem you have and try to understand you may do the right thing to address the same and give a miss to being the next boiled frog. 

The Barriers and Obstacles Lie Within !!!

One day a wise man from a distant land came to the Court of a Great Emperor of the East and proclaimed that he wanted to challenge the learned men of the kingdom by testing how intelligent they were. The emperor readily agreed and invited some of his courtiers and ministers to face the challenge. The wise man kept a pot covered by a cloth and asked the courtiers and ministers to tell him what it contained. Every one was dumb founded and kept starting silently at each other. There was complete silence. The emperor went blank with anxiety.

Then the kings clever minister came forward, he opened the cloth, looked inside the pot and then said there was nothing in the pot. It was empty indeed. 

"But you opened it." said the wise man. 

"You did not tell us that it can't be opened" shot back the clever minister.

The wise man was cornered. He quietly left.

Learning: There are many interesting lessons which come out from this simple story that we can relate to our world of work. While I discuss couple of them here... readers are welcome to add their comments and interpretations.

Often the limitations, boundaries, barriers are all in our minds. We as human beings set the limits and most often those that never existed in the first place.

Very often just because someone thought it so... it became the accepted norm. Common sense might suggest this is not so but we don't stop by to question. Is this familiar in our organizations?

In hind sight the message may seem simple but one needs to break out of the patterned thinking in order to have more creative solutions and approaches to the problems we face.

We also learn that there are others around us who can be more intelligent than we are. Those that outsmart you.... those you never expected to. So it does no harm to accept and acknowledge them for what they bring. When was the last time we acknowledge someone for how they think... of course without pretentions or without being hypocrite like.

I have covered just one dimension of how this story can be interpreted and the message about how the locus of how we respond to any situation is driven from within.

Will be interesting to see other interpretations and dimensions arising from this story.

Right One for the Right Job !!! Simple Story to Illustrate Competencies

Competencies differentiate the average from the superior.  In a key sense they are distinguishing.  Given endless time and endless means everything under the sun can be called a competency but you need to be realistic and  practical.   Read this story that I often used to clarify the concept.

There lived a lumberjack near the bank of the river. The river had thick woods with tall trees on one side and the lumberjack would cut trees (the tall variety) and float them across the river to the other side where it would then be transported for further processing.  

When he cut the trees the lumberjack had to know how tall the tree was before he began to cut it down.  To measure the height he often relied on a squirrel.  Each time he wanted to measure the height of the tree he would tie a string to the tail of the squirrel and up it went to the tree top.   With the length of the string pulled up he estimated the height of the tree.  Every thing was going well and his squirrel had perfected the art of climbing trees and getting the lumberjack the estimate of height.

Soon the lumberjacks demand for trees went up and the squirrel was not able to complete the task for the day.  

A friend gifted the lumberjack a turtle and so he struck up an idea.  He started training the turtle to climb the trees, and the turtle would climb up few feet and slip down and try again and so on till finally it learnt how to climb the tree.    Lo the lumberjack started using both the squirrel and turtle to measure the heights of trees.  He managed his business for a few months like this.  He assessed his squirrel was the ace  performer and the turtle the struggling one. 

One summer the river started drying up and many parts got shallow and logs would get stuck if the river bed was too shallow so now he needed to assess the depth of the water before he could fell the log into the water at any spot.   He now had to chose between the ace and struggling one to measure the depth of water, he remembered the ace performer.... but alas the choice was obvious.

The squirrel could do nothing but stare at the water lest it drowned.   But the turtle went in ... Bingo.... and  came back with the depth being measured by the length of the string it pulled down to the bed of the river.   

Now the lumber jack understood each one's worth.  The squirrel was best when it came to climbing trees,  the turtle was best in the water.    No amount of training would make the squirrel faster at measuring the depth of the water.

So the lesson we learn is that there is a right person for the right job.  This is what competency is all about.  You can spend hours and hours and finally the turtle will be able to accomplish what the squirrel did or vice versa, but the cost and effort of doing it would be different. The question is how do you do it best,  most optimally both effectively as well as efficiently.   That is what we call as distinguishing.

The squirrel's competency is in climbing and the turtles competency is in swimming.  Both can do each others' job but swimming cannot be a competency for the squirrel nor can climbing trees be the competency for a turtle.   

So next time you think of competency remember first principle, get the right person for the job.   That's the starting point.  Competencies are defined in context.... what may be a competency in one context is not so in another.....  There are many other facets of a competency that we'll explore in the months to come.

The Magic Number in Our Lives !!!

Now think aloud what comes to your mind when you read each these numbers?


13



9/11



100


168?

Now that you've thought Go Down !!!


































When it came to 13 people thought of bad luck,  a dark omen or even good luck or good tidings etc.  Did you?



When it came to 9/11 a close 90% would remember the twin tower destruction of 2001


When it comes to 100 most folks either think of a century (cricket, India) or some think about a perfect score in an exam...or the police emergency no



168?  Hard Luck !!!  In case you didn't get It...


It is the number of hours in a week. That's the amount of time we have at our disposal to balance our work, personal lives,  interests,  health and wellness etc.   Most people had no clue on the quantum of time in a week at your disposal and that it seems is the most important factor to plan your time... is the total time available and..... If you did not know how many hours you had at hand how do we plan out.

Now it is easy to understand why so many people crib about  running out of time... not finding the right amount of time and attributing the problem outside of ourselves.

Here's a link to  my earlier blog post  explaining  importance of focus and how things get done   So bring Focus on 168 !!!

Have a Good Day !!! Remember your time available and that's important for time management.

A SIMPLE PERSPECTIVE ON WHY CHANGE IS DIFFICULT

Wondered why it is difficult to change. Asking WHY is the key? Many times in organizations and even in our personal lives some behaviour, some style of working, or some way of making decisions comes across as so very sticky because it was a manifestation of success at some time in our experiences. 

We accumulate a lot of wisdom based on successes we derive in one space or context and then superimpose that in other spaces and maybe even literally in everything that we do. Edgar Schein the culture expert speaks of culture as a residue of success.

Let us go back to an old story of the monkeys in a cage with bananas hanging at the center. Each time a monkey climbed to pluck the banana's a strong jet of water was sprayed on the monkey and the monkey fell down from the ladder when trying to reach the bunch of bananas. Every attempt by any monkey was met with the same fate. Over a few such experiences, the monkeys collectively learned that it was not right to pick the bananas and a cause-effect relationship was etched in their mind. Go for Bananas and Get Knocked down. Soon, one of the monkeys is removed from the cage and replaced with a new monkey. The water jet is also removed. As soon as the new monkey sees the bananas and climbs to reach the bunch the other monkeys quickly pull him down. This happens as a pattern and after a few unsuccessful attempts that new monkey too gives up and does not try to get the bananas after learning the cause and effect. One by one all the original monkeys are replaced by new monkeys and the socialization process continues now it does not matter that all original monkeys are not in the cage the pattern of behaviour continues and no monkey can get the bananas.  None of the new monkeys actually experienced the cause and effect but they learned the shared ways of avoiding the bunch of bananas and it became an unquestionable action to be followed, and none would question such an action. 

This is how a practice gets established based on past experiences and cause and effect relationships helped us learn to do things a certain way and then slowly forget to question it. If we need to change we have to use a different frame or lens. What we viewed in the context of the early days when the monkeys and the jet of water were present was no longer relevant once the jet was removed. However, this did not happen and the behavior was sustained. So unless the behavior is analyzed and viewed in the context of the new situations the behavior won't change. This applies to our work as well as our personal lives. It is important to check the assumptions, clarify the current understanding, and then decide. What worked in one context may not be relevant at all in a different context. One of the ways to change something for good or better is to understand WHAT and follow up with WHY that is happening. When we understand the "WHY" then the root cause of the action or behavior can be understood and then necessary change may manifest.  Understanding the WHY addresses one of the aspects of driving change. Other ways of driving change will depend on specific reasons the change is difficult and will address a couple more in later posts. Cheers !!!    

READ OTHER POSTS HERE

Focus Attention & Goal Attainment

FAULTY THINKING LIES AT THE ROOT OF MOST PROBLEMS

Learning Analytics & Metrics

I spoke to about a dozen Learning & Development Leaders  on what kind of metrics they track.... Most common among the responses I got included

Course completion %ages

Exit scores obtained

Completion rate on courses offered

Person Learning days

Competency Base Line

Learning Capacity 

Trainer Effectiveness Scores

Wonder if any of this can ever be used to give us an understanding of how well the learning and development efforts are helping the organizations.   All of these people who responded came from about ten or so different well known organizations and were participating at a 3 day National HR conference.

To understand whether training is making sense as an investment we need to understand what impact the training can create.   It can either help improve your service level,  it can improve efficiency or help you deliver better / higher productivity levels.   It can also help you get into a new service if it is something new that you are trying to acquire as a capability.  The need is not for totally new metrics but putting them in a way that makes sense to the business leaders who are ultimate customers of your learning and development offerings.

So our first challenge would be to understand what we measure and how much of it.  What will create a view of whether I am doing good, improving,  becoming better or simply regressing back as I spend more and more of my money on learning and development.  Remember the 70-20-10 rule,  70% of learning comes from experience,  20% from feedback and collaboration at work or in a given situation, and only 10% learning comes from formal training programs or learning. Instead of giving prescription of what metrics to use, I will illustrate some approaches that will give a direction of how you look for the metrics that will be most relevant to your context and then you can customize, stretch,  modify and use the one most relevant.

When you rattle metrics like PLD or Trainer Effectiveness scores per se it does not excite the business leader.   What would be more relevant would be if you are able to give a story through your metric.  For e.g.  Of the total 10 PLD's we have achieved this year,  6 were through Web Based Access and only 4 through Instructor led.   The effectiveness was not undermined by replacing the instructor led but gave more space and time and satisfaction scores were in line.  The trend over past 3 years shows we had 9 on 10 days through instructor led training three years back.

Or instead of telling the business leader that you created 40 hours of digital content for 3 courses you can give inputs say:  of 3 most popular courses put together we had 72 hours of learning and 40 hours of that has now been digitized and people come over the the class room well prepared and learning is more effective. 

The other aspect of learning is the shift to MOOC driven learning via platforms like Coursera.  These learning efforts also contribute in a big way to your development efforts and capability building. Integrating this into the learning metrics of the organization is something L&D and HR Managers should think of.  A simple way is how to capture the learning effort through your learning system by configuring the same in the LMS and then feeding the certifications manually to start with.  Technically advanced user organizations can think of linking through integration of the portals like Coursera with their LMS through some scripting and meta data.

Finally shift from incidental training to capability building is the way L&D evolved on a maturity scale over the past 2 decades.  Metrics to capture impact via results is something that organizations should focus more on alignment with business.  How is the availability of On demand learning keeping pace with the needs of a mobile work force, of new networked organizations.