Learning too much from the past?

Decision making is a very important aspect in all spheres of our life; be it business, academics, profession, personal life etc. Given the nature of Indian society, our decisions naturally get altered based on our surroundings, upbringing and more importantly our past experience.

I read the below article in my favorite news paper The Hindu Businessline, which succinctly describes all these factors which we consider in the decision making process. The crux of the article is, while it is good to have rich experience in framing a decision, it is equally important to focus on the process. Time, people and situations change. We must learn from the past and alter the process based on the current environment. I always believe, in any life game, the rules or the processes which added value to you or to the society a few years ago might not necessarily add value now. Therefore, it is necessary to learn our lessons hard and correct ourself.

Since, I keep a lot of interest in politics, I hope Modiji our PM reads this article and understands that whatever worked in past might not necessarily work in future.

Here's the article from the hindu businessline.

What worked in the past may not work in the future unless we focus on the process.

We rely on the weight of experience to make judgments and decisions. We interpret the past – what we’ve seen and what we’ve been told – to chart a course for the future, secure in the wisdom of our insights. After all, didn’t our ability to make sense of what we’ve been through get us where we are now? It’s reasonable that we go back to the same well to make new decisions.

It could also be a mistake.

Experience seems like a reliable guide, yet sometimes it fools us instead of making us wiser.

The problem is that we view the past through numerous filters that distort our perceptions. As a result, our interpretations of experience are biased, and the judgments and decisions we base on those interpretations can be misguided.

If our goal is to improve decision-making, we can use our knowledge of those filters to understand just what our experience has to teach us and learn how to overcome our biases.

We focus on what we can see

In the business environment, the outcomes of decisions are highly visible, readily available for us to observe and judge. But the details of the decision process, which we can control far more than the result, typically don’t catch our attention. If the aim is to learn from experience – mistakes as well as successes – acknowledging that process is crucial.

Circle of advisers

Honest feedback – an unbiased, undistorted assessment of one’s experience – is essential for improving decisions. Yet decision makers are often surrounded by individuals who have incentives to feed them censored and self-serving information – and these people are not necessarily a crowd of yes-men.

Overvaluing experience

We can’t place all the blame for our distorted view of the world on the environment and our inner circle. Some of the blame lies with us. We tend to search for and use evidence that confirms our beliefs and hypotheses, and we gloss over or ignore information that contradicts them – an exercise of selectively building and interpreting experience known as the confirmation bias.

How not to be fooled

The following techniques can uncover the real lessons experience offers and help you base decisions on a clearer view of the world.

Sample failure: Failures and the processes that lead to them are doomed to stay in the dark unless special occasions are created to bring them to light. To identify what could be done better in the future, companies can also conduct decision post-mortems to analyse underlying processes.

Don’t miss near misses: Another oft-ignored event is the near miss – a failure that’s disguised as a success, but only because there are generally no dire consequences.

Pursue prevention: Recognising a potential problem requires a different approach than solving an actual problem. One strategy is to harness employees’ collective talents by allowing people to raise concerns about the firm’s operations. Disagree: As Peter Drucker wrote, “The first rule in decision making is that one does not make a decision unless there is disagreement.” To devise healthy strategies, executives need to hear many perspectives.

Disconfirm: Rather than finding clues that corroborate your hunch – all too easy in an information-rich world – start by asking yourself how you could know you were, in fact, wrong.

Source:  Experience is not always wisdom

For those who don’t like Mondays; how does ‘everyday Friday’ sound?

I came across this article on economic times blog. I think its worth reading once:

The most difficult task for any boss or organization is to ensure employees look excited about coming to work on a Monday morning. An HR head from a multinational firm once told me how he gauges the engagement levels of employees by their mood on the morning of the first day of the week. That gives him a sense of whether he needs to dig deeper into any issue that may be bothering them or grasp any matter that may require the organization’s immediate attention. If the mood is good on a Monday morning, then there’s nothing to worry about.

What is it about Monday mornings that makes it a little less exciting than Fridays? A funny video that has been doing the rounds on WhatsApp brings out the employees’ state of mind quite clearly. It first shows a sprightly penguin jumping around in gaiety on a Friday, and then the scene cuts to a Monday morning that features a lazy seal trying to drag itself uphill.

But jokes apart, unlike most beginnings – a new venture, New Year, a new house, a new journey, a new job or may be a new posting – why is the beginning of the week considered to be a little less motivating for some? Is there something missing at the place of work that employees love Fridays more than Mondays?

Beginnings, otherwise, are usually exciting. There is an element of surprise at the start of one’s journey. There are expectations in anticipation of forthcoming events. The adrenaline levels are high, which translate into better productivity levels. But these beginnings are not a weekly affair. They don’t make an appearance as often as a Monday does. In an employee’s mind, the week can appear like a mountain on a Monday that has to be crossed to get to Friday.

What if there was no sense of a mountain and the workplace recreated an atmosphere of “Everyday Friday” even on a Monday? (This requires a rider: It does not mean employees can wind up early, not plan for the next day and not come to work the following day, like on a Friday!) But the ambience can be made more Fridayish. It only requires a little extra effort on the part of the organization and the leaders therein. May be the first meeting on a Monday could be set in an unconventional place – it could be a garden or a cafe nearby.

This would ensure two things. One, it would perk up employees and two, to everyone’s surprise, it may even have a positive effect on creativity and productivity levels of employees who would then certainly look forward to coming to work on a Monday.

For powerpoint presentation meetings, other fun things could be considered. Based on feedback from employees (their involvement is important) on how Mondays could be made more exciting, the organization can come up with a different plan.

A Towers Watson Global Benefits Attitudes survey shows how levels of workplace disengagement significantly increase when employees experience high levels of stress. According to the research, of those employees who claimed to be experiencing high stress levels, over half (57%) also reported that they were disengaged. In contrast, only one in ten (10%) employees claiming low stress levels said they were disengaged and half of this group claimed to be highly engaged.

The report talks about how companies need to take more responsibility towards employees’ wellbeing and happiness. This would only go a long way to ensure higher productivity levels at the workplace.

As a rule, organizations could make Mondays a `stressfree’ day; let people warm up to the week, just like the motor of a car requires a little bit of revving after a few days of immobility before it gets rolling on the road. Let employees gradually gear up to the week. On a higher gear, even a car cannot take a steep climb. If employees have lower stress levels at the start of the week, they would be well conditioned to deliver better results during the week.

Three months into implementing this exercise of Everyday Friday, it would be interesting to know the impact of the same on Monday attendance levels. Organizations could make this their New Year resolution.

Source: EconomicTimes Blog