Neglected aspects in design for development of people

There is a deluge of ‘canned’ programs in learning and development today. Online tools and techniques will hang out for the ‘convenience’ of the keyboard buffs and corporate clients. Civilisation today is less of heart and more of intellect, they say. In my experience, there are a few aspects I would look at to enable ‘contact’ with reality, or at least those aspects of reality that our senses get numbed to over time. Usually these touch ‘mind-set’ issues. A requisite range of experiences normally helps.

1.       Structure ‘uncertainty’ confrontation through the requirement of ‘choice-making’. i.e. The learner chooses what he or she would do away from the online screen. At least one personal change that the learner would like to make. At more complex designs that require concentration bereft of cognitive biases, one change the learner would like to make in the norms of the group he or she belongs to is a challenge. The consequence of choice is owned by the learner. That is a choice in design of learning too.  

2.       Get to root or core issues.  Although it presents itself as a behavioural issue, seeped in emotionality, it actually may surface from ‘thinking’ skills or the cognitive domain. Do learners ‘frame’ their issues right? Do they argue without fallacies in reasoning? Do they curiously frame questions that get them the information they need? Are they smug in the certainty of the organisational hierarchy? Likewise, do cognitive pursuits get curtailed for lack of emotive expression?

3.       Get to ‘expression’ of self in our times. The outcome is a grounding in an alternate awareness that gives introspective nudge “In what frame of reference am I speaking for myself?” If the learner is a specialist in accounting, can he or she speak on custodianship of ethics from the standpoint of a salesperson? If the speaker is a CEO, can he or she speak as a ‘mentor’ of new talent? If the learner is a high-potential leader, can he or she speak of what it means to belong or identify with a national culture other than his or her own?

4.       Get people to ‘thought’ leadership with sufficient preparation. Avoid the ‘ppt’ or ‘deck’ as aid to present remote ‘information’. Instead, the audience gets a position paper of specified lengths based on primary and secondary research which are cited for others to learn from. Get the learner to immerse in the domain of thought he or she will present. Intimate engagement gets the learner to develop ‘justified beliefs’ – the cornerstone of knowledge.

5.       Involve stakeholders of sustainability, not merely ‘shareholders’ of profit. Agility, self-awareness, interpersonal competence and organisational citizenship based on discretionary behaviors, is born of choice. Only if, learning is done from meeting or exceeding legitimate expectations of the local government and community where the firm is engaged, as also those of customers’ customers and supplier’s employees.  Most significantly, your fellow learner is also a stakeholder, evolving continually into the future.

Action learning is one rich methodology that will aid in this respect. Obviously, this experience goes not only away from the classroom, but a considerable time is devoted away from the online devices that take away from sensing the reality in which competence is required to be built. Am referring here a compelling video from MIT, where Ed Schein also mentions the potency of feedback – it is culturally offensive!
What do you feel? What do you think?

Musing on Risk as action

The accomplished Dr. Verghese Kurien passed away yesterday. Some say he orphaned the little girl who appears in Amul advertisements. Social innovation was a huge risk in Dr. Kurien's times. He influenced millions of farmers to cooperate in milk distribution so that animal husbandry became a well supported activity. On my first visit to Gujarat in the 1990s, I desired to meet him, but am glad that I at least got the opportunity to visit the city of Anand to know from up close what the impact has been.Was shown around by my mother's cousin a resident doctor in the area then. He was traveling when I visited in the context of a conference organised by EDI - the Entrepreneurship Development Institute. That was my first brush with entrepreneurship theory and a first-hand exploration too. That was my first paper presentation outside of my alma mater (TISS).

In the same week as of this legend passing away, Kochuouseph Chittilapally of V-Gurad and Veegaland or Wonder-La fame was being honoured by the National Institute of Personnel Management in Kochi on the occasion of its National Conference. 
Mr. Sreedharan of the Konkan railways and Delhi Metro fame was being consulted for his prowess in the same space of time. The contrasts between the 3 profiles, an illustration of risk and innovation ingredients in accomplishments. It is also fascinating that cousins Ravi J Mathai and Verghese Kurien traveled to Gujarat to make their mark on the nation. That some who take risk also innovate may also be true. 

Last week, we went on a social visit to my dad's cousin. Innovative he still is. But risk is not a feature he would take to the marketplace. He has designed and crafted his own furniture, laid marble on the floor himself, developed a functional coconut scraper with his own hands on the welding machine; but he won't sell his ideas nor take it to an entrepreneur. That robs the joy out of doing it he says.

His late elder brother on the other hand was a maintenance engineer in paper factories. He learnt economic aspects of the production process and in his retired life had husk of grain and related material to make for water proof paper, which in bundles, he exported to other countries, from his own backyard.

Perhaps, he cultivated a business orientation during his career, that inspired the output side of his endeavours. 
The younger brother lacked the desire to engage the people in the commercial world. Am not saying the elder one was more adept at risk, but am sure, the brothers defined meanings in opportunities differently.

A friend recently wrote thus : “It has been my experience when moving deeply out of my comfort zone and watching others that it depends what part of a life is being put at risk and how important that part is in those moments.  There is the magic of the pull of the  moment--the taste of the challenge--the internal terror-the adrenalin"...My few bits of learning on this for now as below.

1.     Risk can easily be confused with impulsivity.

2.     Risk is a personally invested experience in the unknowns.

3.     Anxiety can impel risk, it can also grip in ways that control others. 

4.     Intuition and risk being related can make for innovation at times. Reducing risk to a logical procedure of finite steps is mocking at its essence.

5.     Mindfulness may help the self to engage in acts considered risky. Rationality may have little explanation for such choices, as presence in authentic form could augur higher outcomes than one plans for. 

What actions will make for your PRESENCE in our world? Will it be 'risky' to act so?

Conception of viable boundaries for Learning and Development (L&D)

SHRM India had published an article in March 2011 that I wrote on WHAT’S NEXT IN LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT: REFLECTIONS OF A PRACTITIONER. I reflect on one of the points made last year. It is to do with ‘boundaries’. Here’s an extract from a point I made.

The boundaries of the organization are getting redrawn due to varying physical stations of the learner – home, project and base location for example. This blurring may imply that ‘developmental’ processes – whether for career, for training or organizational development, will mean newer kinds of recognition of learning needs and corresponding interventions. It requires greater investment in understanding what works in the context of the evolving learner – from the nouveau-urbanite, and the telecommuter to the aspiring shop-floor apprentice and the assertive front-office sales agent. These dynamics of L&D scenarios need observation, especially because information is impoverished if the learner has no means of applying it in his or her particular context. 

I surprised myself on the extent to which this dimension holds good. The recent context has induced a risk-aversion, and yes, a definition of boundaries in organisational life. I write this to arouse the perceptual threshold that leaders miss due to dysfunctional adaptation.

1.      Budgets are a symptom, not the cause of capability building: CEOs and Finance leaders will find it easier to cut spending in downturns. Some CEOs discover their L&D orientations in such crises. Others concentrate on structural aspects of capital before feeling comfortable about ‘discretionary’ spends. Visionary CEOs I engaged with did not see L&D budgets as a risk. Yet, their boundaries of thinking are interestingly poised. The mediator is their need for control. They like to control the nature of L&D as if their prowess in budgetary allocation will naturally spring expertise over learning content and process in ‘organisation’. This is a boundary that L&D specialists may find tricky to negotiate.

2.     Inter-cultural boundary management is precipitated by global commerce, and not reduced by it : There is a lag effect in the field I observed. MNCs in India have been around for a while. They staffed India with headquarter personnel on ‘international’ assignments of fixed periods. While that extended tenure of their organisations in India, the local workforce of Indian origin has had more than virtual teams to contend with. Early adaptation meant a reconciliation to task based management, with a ‘transactional’ relationship exterior in business operations. Employees segmented their roles so much that their readiness for the future will hinge on redrawing their boundaries of the ‘self’ itself. Leadership responsibility of global impact is a huge expectation of late. While the challenge is an opportunity, maturation is often contrasted with global counterparts who have longer work experience.  This lag is an inter-cultural one, not just of ‘best practice’ imitation.

3.     ‘Focus’ as language of boundary and confusion with intent : While economic crises help clarify choices of business imperatives, ‘focus’ on a product-market, is different from ‘focus’ in L&D decisions. Focus on expense control can cut out more than is necessary for development to be experienced. Without immersing in a meaningful learning experience, the learner may be more distanced from the organisation, than dip-stick polls and ill-framed problem statements can suggest. It is building redundancy of learning processes that matters. More learning must happen than is applied. That is when a learner is willing to commit action, and even conceive of development. A free for all learning climate is no option either.

What’s your focus on learning and development? Where do you draw the boundary line when under stress? Is India readying in relevant ways for the global economy because of learning?

CEOs state a problem too many

Often coachees meet their coach with reference to a ‘problem’ they have. When coachees are CEOs, the ‘problems’ tend to have a trend alright, only to be differentiated by their experiences, personalities and visions of who they think they are. The coach on the other hand looks for the invitation from the coachee, not in terms of the beliefs and values; but in terms of their clients’ inner discovery of themselves. Now, this invitation commences with a trigger akin to friendship. 

The seasoned coach however will qualify such an invitation, for her process is not about ‘friendship’ but about respect for her capability to engage in deep developmental experiences.

In coaching, the bottomline is not personal, but about the levels of thinking that the relationship between coach and coachee can unfold in positive ways. Coaching is about systems, the personal, the group and the organisation, where the transforming person links it all in integrative ways.

In my recent months, CEOs I’ve engaged with have come in various hues.  The coachee immaturely seals opportunities by misconceiving choices. The common challenge they represent for themselves is the distillation of self in the present from the self of past successes. They find it difficult to clarify the emergence they will need to embrace from the set learning patterns they are comfortable with. It is a slow unlearning for leaders who do not go within themselves.


What can stop them from doing so? Here are some reasons I can think of even as I am aware that some of these could grip the most unsuspecting amongst us, including yours' truly. 

1.       Purpose Clarity : A lack of enthusiasm in inspiring themselves and others to the future with endearing focus

2.       Hesitant Initiative : A fear of staying the distance to implement aspects of stated focus

3.       Social Savvy : Not dealing with different people with forthright diplomacy 

4.       Touchiness : Paradoxically, the CEO-self embattles images of personal glory with fragility.


Each of the above could command levels of specific detail. Expecting me to be more candid here will  border on casualness. Here, suffice it to say that CEOs demand compliance more often than they unleash contribution. Habitual acts lock the emotional brain so tight as to produce unproductive routines. The coach uses powerful questions that inspire novel thinking patterns. New productive habits then get anchored in the personal system of the coachee.

Leadership is a choice, as is personal development. So is survival. If growth is not an option, the choices are in terms of how to proceed.

Imagine framing lack of operational efficiency in terms of non-compliant team-members for instance.   That could be a different problem than the one the CEO is stuck with.

Indian Roads – lessons on the Chariot and Of the Charioteer

There are a few advantages of the perpetual reconstruction on Indian roads. Especially in big cities, it arrests your mind, if you are willing to be led there – by your unconscious. So it was, that despite reserving an extra hour for travel to the airport last week, obstacles unseen by the traveller’s eye slowed traffic down. I got into a conversation to distract the driver from the time-bounded targets he normally meters. So the insights about the hands on the wheel came in early.

Sitting on the rear seat, I was wondering which community in Bangalore would keep the tail-lump on the male’s head. The driver was speaking chaste Kannada with his employer, and I was curious to know which unknown part of rural Karnataka did he migrate from. “I’m from Gonda in UP”, he said in chaste Hindi, that did not quite resemble the taxi driver experiences I would have in Mumbai. Now, now, since when was he in Bangalore? “1994!” What brought him to this city then? “My uncle was helping me get to the army, but his son got through, and I was rejected. I had suspected money changed hands then, but,  I stayed on with the image I had of Bangalore. In school text-books, we were taught that Bangalore has the same weather all year round – and it was pleasant, unlike our home in Bihar…” (What an eternal curse, I thought to myself). 

That stumped me further. “My family belongs to Bihar, but my father settled in UP. We farm there...”   “So whom do you have here for family?” as I heard him talk to someone like he were to pick up on return from the airport. “Oh, that was my cousin, who needed employment. So he drives this car by day”. And then came another call “I told you I will be home this morning. Keep hot water, and some break-fast..” Well, the ride was long enough for me to know that the driver was a couple of years into marriage, and that his wife was just back from his home-town, as she could not take well to the death of their girl infant six months ago. She had congenital brain and heart defects. The struggle of life on the roads put aside all manner of infrastructure hurdles aside. Perhaps, the Indian employee works largely to service his or her social role, and not for the sake of career per se. 

The same day, after deplaning, I looked for the placard bearing my name. None was there. So peering through my hand-held I retrieved the hotel’s phone number. “Sir, the driver is not there? He is at the exit, sir…just a minute…”. I had already waited 10 minutes. The hotel called back “Sir, he is five minutes way – got stuck in traffic”. The driver came, and rather low on energy, he picked up my baggage, and I eased him into the next trip. “Do you need to wash your face or drink some water before we start?” “Sir, we are ready”,   looking relieved by the question itself. So, I was keen to hear of the traffic at mid-day. “No, sir, this car was stopped by the traffic police. Our hotel owns this car. I am an employee of the hotel. I do not know about the taxi-registration”. He was trying to explain his delay. “I have told the manager”. It was a sight to see the chain of spots on the road, where instead of marshalling traffic, policemen were piled in motor-worthy corners of the road on the 15 kilometre stretch to the hotel. 

So I asked him to be certain of his awareness of his context “Does this happen in Modi’s Gujarat?” Unflappable, the calm driver on the wheels was making sure that a ruder motorist went ahead of him, than to kick up another highway fracas.  “Sir, everything happens here, including sale of liquor. Cash flows without question.”

This Jaipuri driver in Ahmedabad and the morning Bihari descendant were migrants eking out their lives. I marvelled at their bounded rationality, evenas I gulped at the consequence of my education. While both my chauffeurs of the day reciprocated their truths it was their trust in me that left me wondering, “They trust us their secrets as a release from their stresses, on an implicit assumption – they will not want their stories told on their account, not at least with their identities revealed. They culture us in sympathy into their own context, and deflect us from our fleeting comforts only to deceive both conversationalists from the reality they need to confront”. 

Today my perpetual calendar with quotes says this from the Upanishads “Know the Self to be sitting in the chariot, the intellect the charioteer, and the mind the reins”. Where do you think your hands of action are?

Performance - will you drive it or elicit it?

Let us face it. Organizations do not do anything—only people do—and if organizations are to perform at all, their people must perform first. Individual, group, organisations, institutions, ecology and so on, would it be? The implications on performance of humans at the contemporary workplace are not lost on anyone interested in workplace excellence. Fred Nickols made a glorious attempt in his paper "Dawn of a New Era" earlier published in Performance Improvement, Vol. 51, no. 3, March 2012,  © 2012 International Society for Performance Improvement  ( Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) • DOI: 10.1002/pfi.21243). 


Here I attempt to make concise points of mention from that perspective.

1. What Shifted : What happened in the pre-wikinomics era was largely the result of technology and economics. Work shifted in dependency. The shift was from the availability of materials to the premises of information. General Dynamics, General Electric and General Motors generally became ‘smarter’. Warheads and drones too have ‘information’ at their tips! Some, like Peter Drucker, referred to this as a shift to knowledge work. Fred Nickols says “It would be more accurate to refer to it as a shift from prefigured routines to configured responses. Instead of doing what someone else had figured out, the work of many people now required them to figure out what to do.”

2.  Who shifts? We cannot ‘engineer’ the outputs of people in high skilled, high-end jobs. The new workers have to do it themselves. For information-based work, the information varies, the conditions are nonstandard, the interactions vary, and the outcomes sought vary. Consequently, activities have to be configured in response to the circumstances or the context at hand. Job-crafting came up in response I guess.

3. How does it occur? When work activities are essentially intangible, the focus of control must shift from activities to results or outcomes. The focus of control must be on the intangible work, not the worker. In such circumstances, the principle of managerial control must shift from ensuring compliance to eliciting – and not soliciting contributions from the worker.

4. Where does it happen? The role of the worker, shifts namely, from an instrument of managerial will to that of a relatively autonomous agent acting on behalf of the employer in the employer’s best interests. The standards that matter are variable and internal to the worker. Knowledge is now widely dispersed or diffused; indeed, in many cases, only the workers possess the required knowledge in idiosyncratic code at times.


5. Why does it matter? Employees are living control systems who design their own performance. Orchestrating that kind of outcome is not done by using models that depict people as compliant, conditioned beings capable of being manipulated ad nauseam.  Not anyone who is able to exercise adequate control over others will figure this shift easily either. Top Management should be genuinely and intensely interested in how to help people craft their own performance because the path to organizational performance passes through the ever refining sieve of individual discretion.

6. Whom does it matter to? Conditions for performance are controlled today in more sentient ways. Models of human behaviors and performance in the workplace must correspond to an irreversible aspect of human evolution. Humans are more than what a manufacturer once thought of autoworkers "I just want to hire a hand, but the whole person always comes with it.” They are not simple, stimulus-response organisms. Cultures they create are intangible assets.

“They have, they set, and they achieve goals” says Nickols. I am personally delighted that my association with Bob Ebers allows me to work on this frontier of engaging the science of yield from the wisdom of groups. Through statistical aggregations and content analysis of individual opinions a range of possibilities are presented for human judgement. Predictive analytics and behavioral economics are 'out there'. So are balance-sheets and stock-markets. Performance is felt 'in' employees, and not elsewhere. Leadership is about recognizing this subtle balance between 'externals' in the dynamic environment and the 'internals' of the employee coping, if not thriving on both realms of change.


This blog is an acknowledgement in part of the great opportunity of making contemporary web 2.0 technology work on behalf of a humbler leadership working in service of enlightened employees. Performance is no longer what it used to be. And people are at it indeed.

Measure for Success not for Seats filled - Are you both eligible and suitable?

Always useful to listen to a creator like Dr. Dan Harrison. The enmeshment of mathematical matrices and psychology of human preferences or tendencies is the Harrisons Assessment Talent Solutions (HATS). This note is to help recall some salient aspects of Dan’s approach. Am glad I had some direct interaction of high quality with him over the past few months. This is from my recent one on May 23, 2012 in Bangalore.

1.       In human assessments, especially for the workplace, two fundamental purposes need fulfillment. They are a) Predict Job Success and b) Inspire Performance. Now while that may seem obvious and ordinary, the uniqueness of such languaging is that values for science through measurement and values for humanism through accurate concern for human beings are both accomplished in HATS without compromise or deception.

2.       Without a method to integrate both prediction and inspiration, we find that the larger picture in relation to an incumbent’s job is lost. Often, we hire for eligibility or what people do, and fire for lack of suitability or for what people eventually become. Quite a shame is that not?

3.       In recruitment and related people management processes, for want of method, the numbers in measurement that business reviews today are the number of seats filled or attrition by some direct cost related demographic. Filling seats does not guarantee capability against competition. The measurements required are that of target role eligibility criteria, and person-job-fit for suitability.

4.       Suitability is more than just personality. Personality includes motivation for the job and attitudes towards it that a person has. Suitability includes personality and work preferences and interests. So, when hiring a person for selling medical equipment, over-emphasis on product or market knowledge may blind us from more determining factors such as self-improvement in a turbulent market.  In customer service roles, almost 70% of weight-age should go to suitability, than to eligibility criteria.

5.       Personality hardly remains stable across cultures. Suitability criteria for jobs or roles hold relatively constant across cultures. Hence, assessments that are job or role centric will yield better outcomes, than assessments on rule of thumb or those that are merely ‘assessment’ centric.

6.       Generally speaking the weightage criteria between eligibility and suitability would be 50:50 for upper management roles, 30:70 for middle management roles and 70:30 for entry level roles.

7.       When recruiting, do the most cost effective steps first. E.g. eliminate ‘spam’ candidates. Specify eligibility requirements in ways that weed out irrelevant applications. Then check for suitability. Until then there is no point interacting with them on a face to face basis. If the applicant is both eligible and suitable, you may then go for work sample tests or aptitude third-party assessments like verbal or numerical reasoning. Lowering your costs means knowing how to configure job success criteria.

8.       To ensure predictability of job success, measure ALL aspects of behaviors, including motivation, interests, personality, work-values and preferences. Missing any one will adversely affect the outcome. Without measuring at least 100 traits or tendencies, the complex construct of personality and suitability will be less robust in measurement.

9.       You’ve heard of the lie-detector. Missing reliable ways to test authenticity of response will lower predictability of assessment. For top or upper management roles, you need at least 90% consistency in response authenticity scores. Generally, you will need at least 75% consistency to predict job success through assessment.

10.    75% consistency in response is required to assure satisfaction on the job.  The gap today is that we do not look for what employees want in a job or role. Go further, and the questions become of what methods do we use to get such data about employees' interests and work preferences?

11.    The valid issue today is how do we cut people from the misery of uninformed choices regarding vocations we pursue? Do we end up cutting people from jobs that will inspire them?

So what is then the best data that will help the world of work today? Is it not data on what will make people succeed on their jobs? Hire for passion, train for skills! 


Develop for relationship and help people uncover their paradoxical constraints.  People develop polarities over time. They can uncover them through the Paradox Technology (TM). I particularly enjoyed Dan's humility when I mentioned of Barry Johnson's approach to Polarity Management. These come handy when coaching my executive clients. Just last week, an entrepreneur wondered at the insights he got, and realized what a sustained process development should be. Development is indeed no trifle either, as I have earlier written.