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When I joined ThoughtWorks, a common scene I witnessed in the evenings were playing games. Age of Empires was the most commonly played one and the gamers were very fanatical about it.  When I wanted to play, I was given a chance to take part but when the fellow gamers found out I was a rookie, no one wanted me in their teams. They forced me to be at some level so that I can play along with them and be part of their teams, I was made to train myself in the weekends and then get back to playing with them. Same for other games like Cricket. If there was some level of seriousness, then better be prepared.

There was also a music band, I had practiced playing movie songs on a computer keyboard and some software for a very long time, may be around 8-10 years. So I thought I had a hang of music when I expressed interest to join the band. I could readily see that I was moved out of singing, drumming and keyboard to merely being an MC for the event as I lacked skills that were good enough for an office band. One of the band members made me join a music school and after about two years of practice I was finally taken back into the team. I have seen this among other disciplines of art, people are not ready to take you into the team if you cannot match up to their expectations.

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Workplace is different, because it is does not have an easy way to measure productivity or understand expectations. Basic expectations of being a good team member is understood well, but when people don’t see those behaviours generally it is tolerated or seen as the job of the manager to interfere there. There could be many reasons to this one, one of them is work is seen as a job description to be fulfilled for a salary; not something that is done because you want to do and you are compensated for it. Workplaces won’t be difficult to run if people know what to expect from their team members and be very strict with the outcomes just like gamers, musicians and artists.

 

 

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I was thinking life was getting easier in some areas until I stumbled on a quote that said ‘Life does not get easier, we just grow stronger’. Simple, but a deep thought. If something is getting easy for us, it means there was an external factor that made it easy for us. For example, scientists are working round the clock to find new medicines that makes it easy for us to recover from illness but building an athletic fitness and becoming physically strong requires a lot of work.

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Getting stronger always means we have to work towards it, we never get strong without exposure to something that makes us look weak or vulnerable. So when we observe things become easy to us, we just need a pat in the back to ourselves that we have gotten stronger to handle this easily. Being strong is a choice, getting easy things is a matter of someone else making it for us.

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In the film ‘Sully’ when the captain is interrogated about what measurements he made that made him decide to ditch the plane in the river instead of taking it to the airport, he responds by saying ‘I eyeballed it‘. This has been written about by many authors like in ‘Hare brain and tortoise mind’, ‘Thinking fast and slow’, ‘Blink’ etc. It is hard to prove as a ton of processing happens completely subconscious.

I also happened to read about this in the book ‘Maverick’ by Ricardo Semler, who was the CEO of Semco. Semco is one of the most unique workplaces that had piloted very radical ideas in the 1980’s when management by the book was in its peak. It was very successful for the political environment that was in Brazil at that time and that company’s model has been studied by many people. Semler has an habit of throwing detailed reports in the dustbins and ask for headline summaries from his managers. He also says in another book that many of the times that his managers’ headlines seems to be right about forecast and prediction than those that were backed by solid research and numbers. He practically asks everyone to eyeball the situation.

Eyeballing is not easy, it comes with years of dedicated practice in an area. It is not possible to ask a football striker to explain how did that person know that the goal keeper is going dive to the right. They just eyeball it, that skill gets improved with tons of feedback and dedicated effort to improve.

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At desk work also many times these situations happen, people will develop muscle memory (otherwise eyeballing skills). They will know just by a glance that something is wrong, it will be hard to prove but letting them make a call based on their hunch and giving them space to learn from their action will improve the effectiveness multifold. We have been conditioned that we can be wrong as long as we are backed by reports and numbers, but I learnt that there is no substitute for experience and gut feel.

The innate laziness of our mind will make us very efficient in heading towards right decisions. We can train this by creating mental models (some examples here) deliberately that will keep improving our eyeballing ability.