It was the eve of a festival and I was returning back home from another city. The gateway to my home town was choking with unusually high traffic with everyone trying to rush to meet their near and dear ones. A stretch of few kilometers took more than an hour. It is at this time I witnessed a miracle. There was a sound of an ambulance siren approaching, on hearing almost every one on the road made their best effort to make way for the ambulance. In such a dense choking traffic there was a pathway made under a minute good enough for the ambulance to pass through. The patient who must have survived her illness might not even realized how tons of strangers on the road help save her life.
We humans are altruistic by nature and some how from inside it makes us feel good when we help others. Reader’s digest also mentioned in one article that may be only humans who were helpful to each other survived droughts, war and other adversities so that trait is deeply ingrained within us. There are also some beliefs about collective intelligence being superior than the sum of all individual intelligence. This is very evident from team games like football where the understanding between the team members a mix of skills gets the team to win. I have observed the striker scores more goals than anyone else in the team and most of the times ends up being the most valuable player. In my opinion the striker who scores a goal is largely enabled by the other 10 in the team.
Workplaces are no different, at many workplaces team work always matters; and many of those workplaces have awards like employee of the month/quarter/year or super star awards. The awards definitely help a lot to life the spirits of those who win it but it also puts a dent in the rest of the team’s spirit as the winner is enabled by the team and hardly there is a credit to the team. It is better to do away with these kind of awards and much energy can be concentrated on removing negative influence in the team like someone who exploits the system and team setup. It takes only one selfish person to bring down the morale of a high performing team, we must make sure our workplace does not offer any dividends to someone who tries to exploit; instead make the workplace such a way that the more cohesive the team becomes the more rewarding and enjoyable it is to work.
Humans over time have acquired the skill to use a linear scale. Radio Labs aired a talk which explained about experiments done with children and some tribes who have not been exposed to linear numbers. The experiments suggest that we are conditioned to use numbers in non linear scales. It is easy to express differences in ratios than linear count between them. The experiments have also been replicated on animals and found that they also understand differences in ratios than the count in between.
We are accustomed to say that the difference between 1 & 2, 11 & 12, 1001 & 1002 are all same. When we project these numbers side by side as countable items like trees or birds in a picture; every one will immediately spot the difference between 1 & 2, most will spot the difference between 11 & 12 given some time to count and people will struggle to find the difference between 1001 & 1002 unless the images are arranged in neat grid with enough time given to count. The results of an experiment with Amazonian tribe who had not much formal education is here. In short, it illustrates that people will be inclined to choose their scale to be logarithmic instead of linear one. Musical scales are non linear where the frequency doubles every octave. Like music even the colour frequencies of VIGBYOR is non linear.
We deal with numbers day to day and most of the working force have spent significant amount time in school playing around with numbers which were in linear scale. Deep inside us we still carry what we inherited from our ancestors and are well suited to deal with ratios. May be that is why our ancestors designed the musical scale to be non linear. “The Da vinci code” novel also talks about golden ratio which is observed every where in nature and that is non linear.
In software development I have observed this is true when it comes to estimations. Instead of mapping estimates to days of effort it is more easy to represent it in Fibonacci series (the ratio is 1.6 or golden ratio in fibonacci) or Log base 2. Trying to fit in a linear scale has created more misunderstandings between team members as each one had a different picture on where to place an estimate on a linear scale. I have observed dissonances in estimates from people even when using logarithmic or fibonacci, that dissonance will increase manifold if we use a linear scale. If we try to deal with numbers in ratios in day to day life then may be we can get lots of advantage by using our hard wiring inside.
Maintaining an inventory will always cost money. Millions of wealth is spent in optimizing supply chain and some have earned billions by cutting down warehouses or having zero inventory policies. New technologies, online presence, faster shipping has made people make more money by optimizing their supply chain. In my school days owning a knowledge bank like encylopedia, tell me why, how stuff works were considered to be prestigious. The advantage of large inventory of knowledge was very evident in General Knowledge exams and quiz competitions. School curriculum also relied on the application of knowledge especially in mathematics, physics and chemistry. All those days, I was relying largely on access to printed books with little or no exposure to computers. My dad’s workplace (manufacturing and engineering) also had a similar environment with little access to knowledge when immediately needed.
Technology for sure evolves at an exponential pace. In two decades internet and communication technologies has revolutionized data access such that a great amount of knowledge is available at finger tips. Does this make our process of learning and keeping ourselves up to date an expensive time consuming activity? If knowledge is available in a handheld device at any time, is it worth going through lengthy college courses for performing day to day technical jobs?
Knowledge is a basis for a thorough understanding of the fundamentals. A strong foundation of fundamentals is a prerequisite for great productivity. The more the understanding, the more is the creativity. The ability to deal with higher levels of abstraction also increases which in turn helps to deal better with our limited working memory (refer to Miller’s law). Access to knowledge/information is a boon to us to increase our ability to learn more, not just to help us remember less. Let us keep learning everyday.
Novi's 