Tag: Change

  • Regression planning

    During our reindeer sledding tour in Tromso last year, our guide, who was a Sámi, gave us a glimpse of their way of living. A semi-nomadic life, built around their reindeer herds, which involved them traveling for several days twice a year across hundreds of kilometres. She told us how the capture and nurture of reindeers, and the lifestyle itself, has changed from a means of livelihood to a tradition that only very few are interested in.

    In Fahadh’s movie Njan Prakashan, there is a hilarious, yet poignant moment, when he is asked to help the other workers plant rice seedlings in a field in Kerala. The workers immediately start off and are soon singing in gusto. Fahadh, who has never done any of this before, stands with his mouth agape, and then asks what the language is! His boss explains how most of the paddy field workers in Kerala now are Bengalis, and they’re singing their customary song. “We’ve forgotten our job, we’ve forgotten our song“, he says (roughly translated). (more…)

  • Evolving against entropy

    ​In the last fortnight, I had two interactions with customer care teams. The first was Kotak, for a bank account. There were failures at multiple levels, but the biggest takeaway was how difficult it was to get through to a human. Chatbots have their uses but this was extreme! Twitter DMs weren’t a help either. The second was Amazon, and that surprisingly included being put on hold for about 15 minutes and transferred 5 times! Thankfully, the problem was resolved in 30. But given the famed Amazon customer-centricity, this was a disappointment, and I wondered if at scale, it was inevitable. 

    What causes it? The best frame I have seen is entropy. (via) Yes, that physics and thermodynamics thing – the degree of disorder/randomness in the system. Though the meaning remains the same, the application changes. In the context of a business, it is the tax applied by the system between input and output. Just imagine the effort that is required to get things done in a corporate structure as against a startup. While it is theoretically possible for a complex system to have lesser entropy than a simple system, I have not seen it in practice. I can imagine why it is so – the randomness that can be generated by different touchpoints, and their optimization for following rules as opposed to providing solutions. What happened to me with Kotak and Amazon were examples of that.   (more…)

  • Knew you, again

    Jon Westenberg wrote on a subject I too have been mulling over recently – It’s Sad When Someone You Know Becomes Someone You Knew – on people who have become footnotes in one’s life. I could relate to it, though I do think that many relationships have a context-based shelf life. I have written about this before – way back in 2007.

    My recent thoughts on the subject, however, are on a couple of tangents. It’s about how people change across time, and the way we react to it. I’ve noticed that I tend to ‘freeze’ people at the last set of close interactions we’ve had, and be very surprised to realise they’ve changed. Silly but true! In some cases, it seems I have expected them to remain as-is even after a couple of decades, and get annoyed because I find it really hard to relate to their current version! [posts in 2008, 2009 (3rd para)] In other cases, I come across a person’s published work, or opinion, and ‘refuse’ (in my mind) to accept the excellent thought/nuanced perspective because I find it to be incompatible with my view of the person I had known! Someone I know had become someone I knew. (more…)

  • A divided existence

    A phrase I came across recently captured my ‘mood’ in both work and life spheres (links to my most recent posts) very crisply – nostalgia for the absolute. Coined by the philosopher George Steiner, it isn’t a coincidence that it reached me courtesy a Breaking Smart essay.

    As I have mentioned earlier, the entire series has given me a lot of perspective, and it’s heartening to know that the kind of thought bubbles I have are more common than I thought. There exists a dichotomy however. My perspectives are largely ‘Promethean’ when it comes to tech (and the implications of its disruptive power) in the work context. However, in the larger life scenario, I think I am quite the ‘pastoralist’, more comfortable with sustaining changes to the prevailing social order.  (more…)

  • Re: Org

    Timehop, which takes me on a nostalgia trip everyday, reminded me recently that it has been a year since I wrote The Change Imperative. The opening slide features a quote – “If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less“- attributed to Gen. Eric Shinseki. In the times we work in, I believe this cannot be overstated, not just for individuals but for organisations as well. Even as business dynamics force changes on the external manifestation of an organisation – the brand – any organisation that faces a client/consumer will also be forced to adapt its internal structure and practices to suit changing needs.

    For a long while now, I have been ambivalent about processes. I have worked in an era, and in organisations, where processes had a way of getting things done. But in parallel, I have also felt that many a time, processes have a way of forgetting what they were made for. The output overshadows the outcome. Over the last few months, my surmisal has been that, to use a Taleb classification, processes can make an organisation robust, but not anti-fragile. This very informative post by Aaron Dignan of Undercurrent – The Last Re-Org You’ll Ever Do -highlights many ways that organisations have tried to change standard structures and practices, and even suggests a six step path to reorganisation. (more…)