The Hindu Business Line : Personal paradigms at work

Bill devoted the entire morning session to repeatedly bring out the power of the self-fulfilling prophesy that influences our perceptions and dictates our life’s choices. He got the team to list the various situations awaiting decision from the senior management; next, purely based upon their intuitive perception, he got them to classify them on two dimensions; was the situation requiring routine treatment or inviting a new thinking (X-axis) and whether the decision was aimed at containing risk or tapping into an opportunity (Y-axis).

Categorising the types of decisions according to their orientation to the situation (X-axis) and perception of the situation (Y-axis), he brought out the cultural practices that defined the people philosophies.

It is these perceptions that dictated the profile of people to whom these decisions would be referred, the time they would require to devote to the decisions and the speed or conviction with which these will be adopted. Did the organisation ever consider validating their perceptions to check their assumptions?

Growth: Every single exception was ‘escalated upwards’ for a discretionary consideration before an approval was accorded; but 100 per cent of them were approved without a single case being denied or referred back with a query.

Did all these situations present an opportunity for growth? Did the organisation learn anything insightfully new from them?

Potential: Several decisions were singled out to be arising out of vigilance checks, process quality infringements, contractual deviations and instances of non-compliance to statutory requirements.

Each was a new situation in its own right and demanded dedication of the senior management’s time and effort.

Were these documented and codified for prevention in future? Is there a culture of fool-proofing against known risks?

Self-denial: How many new insights from the customers or the employees were treated as ‘nothing extraordinary’ as to be dealt with in a routine manner until they got adopted by the industry as a standard, much to our own disadvantage later on?

Blind depicts a level of immunity of the organisation to risks that it repeatedly but studiously gets into, demonstrative of an organisation culture that is very much arrested or closed to any new inputs.

How can the senior management team learn to validate and draw upon the wealth of their perceptions to improve the cultural flavours defining of decision-making styles?

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