 "Robert L. Carraway")
They disregard the fact that every situation is different. Organisations have to remain grounded and learn to adapt themselves to different situations, Robert Carraway tells Sangeeta Tanwar
You say intuition and rational analysis complement each other. Where and how should a leader draw a line between the two while taking crucial decisions?
I will start by saying that my background is all-in rational analysis. I love rational analysis and there was a time in my life when I thought that if everyone would go by rational thinking the world would be a better place to live in. I have changed completely and now I believe rational analysis has become very subservient to intuition. Intuition was always going to beat rational analysis at the end of the day. And that has a lot to do with how we try to protect ourselves. So you may say then what's the role of rational analysis? The role of rational thinking is to inform our intuition. Now intuition does not work like a logical rational mind. Instead intuition stems from emotion.
For rational analysis to impact intuition it has to have a proportional impact on how one feels about certain things and it should be more impactful to affect an individual's actions. Most of the analysis done in companies today turns out to be a total waste of time. Because it does not have the potential to make a difference in how leaders take decisions. It's not only important to come up with right rational analysis; rather it's important to pull out the right rational analysis that's going to be meaningful to a leader.
In what ways can organisations and leaders leverage quantitative analysis and big data to facilitate error-free decision making?
One way of looking at it could be that big data is wonderful but the challenge lies in finding patterns using big data. With a lot of data out there, people are bound to discover a lot of patterns - of which some are real and some are not so real. Therefore a big challenge with the big data is how to tell which pattern is real and which one is a mirage. Most of the cases it could be that since there is a lot of data one gets a pattern but that could simply be a function of data.
The second way of looking at it is that every organisation realises that there is something in big data. And therefore they are building a group of data scientists within the organisation. On the other hand we have a group of people running the business - those who know the pain points of running a business and understand the business model. The problem is there is a gap between the two sets of people. A lot of times leaders do not understand what data scientists are doing, so the solutions offered by the data scientists fail to appeal to leaders' intuition. A lot of organisations are struggling with this issue. Clearly there is a need to bridge this gap.
Innovation is increasingly the primary ground for competition in today's world. How can organisations motivate leaders to think innovatively?
Some companies have the most detailed processes laid out to encourage innovation. This may work for a particular company. However, on a larger level, organisations have to make innovation visible to motivate leaders and workers to think innovatively. Some organisations may achieve this by making the end goals clear to its people and lay down steps to achieve the same. Another way of achieving this is by changing the conversation from 'innovation' to 'learning' because innovation automatically comes out of learning.
How can managements, leaders and professionals take advantage of the psychological and cognitive influences to identify and avoid biases at the workplace?
To begin with you need to be aware of what your biases are. Tip number one to avoid biases is not to jump to conclusions. The fact is that the moment we hear something, our intuition comes into play immediately associating a positive or negative feeling from our past to the new piece of news that we encounter. Embrace the feeling and go ahead with it even though the initial reaction may be that a situation will not work out favorably. The point is to get out the negative feeling right away because if you do not get it out immediately, the bias will come out later. It may come out in subtle ways which you may not recognise. And when that happens no amount of rational analysis or counter point of view will appeal to your intuition.
The next step is to find out why you are feeling the way you are feeling in the current situation. Look back and identify the decision or experience that is making you feel the way you are (negative) and look for similarities between the two situations. Do not rush through this because then you may end up concluding that last time you took a risk which failed and this may impact your decision making in the current situation. The next step is to figure out the disimilarirties between the two situations - figure out how is the current experience different from your past experience. One way to do this is to think about what different outcomes you might get through your actions this time around. Navigating through our biases takes a lot of hard work. However, our intuition can help us overcome some of our biases and open up new opportunities for us.
What are the characters that define globally successful brands and organisations? Is successful organisational culture replicable?
It actually ties very much into the way we train our executives and managers. The biggest problem in education today is the way we teach. We give students a new technique or a methodology and then give them a problem or a case to fix. And incidentally that methodology works perfectly in solving the given problem. And then the person spends the rest of his or her life trying to find solutions using the original technique or methodology handed to her. This approach never works because every situation is different. Organisations too face this challenge as they are always trying to replicate a successful model - disregarding the fact that every situation is different. Organisations have to remain grounded and learn to adapt themselves to different situations. They have to keep the end goal in sight to come up with the right solutions for different problems.
