Futuristic Corporate will be Fullscale Live Scientific Experiment Labs ... testing theories across conventional science, politics, economics and social milieu

He lamented at first.
Followed with a provocation.

"Why are there no universal theories in social science and psychology or the interdisciplines overlapping one or more of them?"

Sometime back, i was listening to Herbert Gintis' comment above. Herbert Gintis is an American economist, behavioral scientist, and educator known for his theoretical contributions to sociobiology, especially altruism, cooperation, epistemic game theory, gene-culture coevolution, efficiency wages, strong reciprocity, and human capital theory.

Herbert was voicing for social science and psychology what Clayton Christensen was voicing for management or companies... when he mentioned in several of his talks... "Where are the theories?". 

By theory, he meant specifically "what causes what and why-how?"

Imagine a company. 
It has some product or service.

It assumes certain things about consumer. (((recall conversations with marketing and sales and boardroom, people are constantly talking about some assumption about their target group behavior/emotions/goals)))

It assumes certain labor-ation and collaboration of employees with some current and future skills. (((recall the assumptions about humans again in the role of employees)))

And creates stepwise functions towards serving an experience to the consumer. (((recall process or quality or IT conversations for defining various policy-process-review)))

Thereby projecting non-financial outcomes and financial profitability or gains of some kind. (((recall the selective and unquestioned financial metrics that aggregates human beings into statistics....)))

If we closely observe the above, every abstract statement (last four above) when filled with content or real case, is actually a testable hypothesis...falsifiable hypothesis. "What works and what doesn't work?"

As the company continues to work, it can dynamically and agile-fully keep testing its experiments and adjusting its scientific statements.

Some of the statements turn out to be true when done repetitively.
Some of the statements have to be revised.
Some of the statements are proved to be wrong. 
In some cases, a finer granular statement come up as a valid statement. 
Most of the times, all the statements cannot be backed by resource for implementation or pursuit or testing, and some of them have to be prioritized and results to be reviewed.

In some sense, failure of any statement or change exercise or complete company, is actually a step towards falsifying some assumptions or theories.

So, what is happening today and what ought to happen tomorrow?

The intention and the culture of the company has to become one that of scientific temper. 

The way people interact with each other essentially should be in spirit of peer-review-scientific theories. 

There can be Annual Report and Analyst Calls that could have a segment of these scientific approaches and findings. 

Some of you might think that management research is already in that direction. Our answer is a big yes. But it the functioning of organization like a scientific experiment company that is at the core of our provocation. Where companies dont look at some small set of their functions as scientific...product design or AI or something...but the whole of company as a science lab...the internal interaction dynamics, the interaction with and prediction of consumer dynamics...the financial outcomes...and so on. 

It is not an option anymore. 

The success of organizations in times to come with be to adopt scientific rigor in their internal and external interactions. Those who are able to do this successfully over and over again, would keep winning the game. 

It is not to say that organizations won't focus on being humane. 

Actually in The Great Paradox of our times (prosperity and advancement on one side ...and glaring challenges on the other), a Dual Tranformation approach is necessary....one that makes us more scientific and at the same time more humane. 

One is not a substitute for the other. More work has to be done to ensure both work in tandem and collaboration and contextually.


...write back in the comment section with your email id and we shall write back to discuss more. 

Utility Monster is busy at the moment ! Please try again later ! Thank you for using Utopian Services

Philosopher Robert Nozick's famous thought experiment invokes a utility monster as a character. And this utility monster derives much higher utility than any other human being for any product or service consumed. And if we want to create a world of maximization of utility, then hell this monster needs to corner almost all of the planet's consumption. 

In some simplistic construct, humans want to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. 

Lets look at some thought threads. 

Thread 1:

Suppose companies and their technologies globally keep working on increasing pleasure for humans and reducing pain, could we imagine a world where there is only pleasure and no pain? Is it even possible? And if indeed such a life is reached, would there be need for more and more and more pleasure? Is there possibility of humans to have infinite appetite for pleasure?  ...to be continued

Thread 2: 

Suppose it is the case that no matter what happens with all technologies and political-economic-social milieu, humans will continue to have pains. But now they shall be caused by different reasons. Does the existence of both pleasure and pain then clearly create the constant need or necessity to innovate? Such that of the various things causing pain, some will keep getting managed...while others will continue or some new ones will come up. In such a scenario, the things that caused pleasure would continue to have lower marginal utility over time (or we will get used to it) and hence we now want more pleasure and hence innovating further. 

Thread 3:

Development of various technologies and their political-economic-social milieu such that people now and in times to come will experience many many many more episodes of pain and pleasure (with all shades of intensities) in shorter and shorter age duration, and thus develop the "uselessness" of these or "controlled use" of these and thus move on a path of self-awareness led consumption. 

...this is a write up in progress...will be continued shortly

What is strategy?

...write-up is being constructed...these are rough notes...will be weaved in soon and published again...

In the last eight years of reflections and meditations and connecting with diverse thinkers, i have been able to develop a few tools for helping me navigate various situation. 

One such tool is to look at a word that i have been using for a long long time. And then stop and keep looking at it. Write it down. Close eyes and bring imagery around it or sheer spelling. Say it audibly louder to my own self. 

And then attach a few question (devices) to see what happens to the word? 

Imagine the word is "strategy".

Then attaching question devices:

What strategy?
Where strategy?
When strategy?
Who strategy?
Why strategy?
How strategy? 

The idea is to stay with the question and not jump at the answer. 
Some answers may arise and they can be noted as answers-in-progress and not final answers.

Then look at some other tools,

Does a newborn baby have a strategy?
Does a one month baby have a strategy?
Does one year old have strategy?
Does 10 year old have strategy?
What are similarities and differences in these strategies?

The idea is to stay with the question and not jump at the answer.
Some answers may arise and they can be noted as answers-in-progress and not final answers. 

Then look at some other tools:

Does matter have strategy?
Do plants have strategy?
Do animals have strategy?
Does a patient in vegetative state have strategy?

The idea is to stay with the question and not jump at the answer. 
Some answers may arise and they can be noted as answers-in-progress and not final answers. 

The look at some other tools. 

Are there places where strategies don't apply? (Example: On the planet of Mars, on 19 degrees North and 72 degrees East, what strategy do we need to have for building a Parliament Building?....we don't make strategies for places that are currently not apprehended and human-occupied yet).

Are there times when strategies don't apply? (example...you do not make strategy for undoing India's Freedom Struggle. However historian and other disciplines can have counterfactual approaches and different scenario outcomes)

It helps deeply to develop a practice of having deep insight meditations and co-sensing and co-discovering with a committed group to deeper reality. 

The word and concept of strategy have been defined differently by different thinkers on Wikipedia. 

Henry Mintzberg from McGill University defined strategy as a pattern in a stream of decisions to contrast with a view of strategy as planning, while Henrik von Scheel defines the essence of strategy as the activities to deliver a unique mix of value – choosing to perform activities differently or to perform different activities than rivals. while Max McKeown (2011) argues that "strategy is about shaping the future" and is the human attempt to get to "desirable ends with available means". Dr. Vladimir Kvint defines strategy as "a system of finding, formulating, and developing a doctrine that will ensure long-term success if followed faithfully." Complexity theorists define strategy as the unfolding of the internal and external aspects of the organization that results in actions in a socio-economic context.

It turns out that strategy has to have some coherent context possibilities, coherent resource allocation possibilities, coherent action possibilities and coherent goals possibilites...meaning strategy has to have some elements of possibilities. Sometimes the possibilities are not visible by all. Sometimes some of the elements seem possible but the others not so. 

Strategy has elements of one or more of

• maintaining something
• modifying something
• creating something new  
• letting go of something
• ignoring something
• focusing on something

... to be continued

If you think you know the customer, you don't know. If you think you don't know the customer, you know.

...It then struck me that whether one is in corporate or politics or general civic life, one needs to have a "keep at it" on "what one can know better?" and then "act from it"....basically "better understanding led better action"

In the last eight years of my revised journey on this planet, I have been fortunate to come across so so so many wonderful thinkers and seers...blending ancient wisdom with modern science. Some living and some living beyond.

Long back, i was listening to Swami Sukhobodananda ...and he was sharing his insights about Adi Shankaracharya...and somewhere in the middle of it, he mentioned ..."one who believes he knows does not know it...one who believes he doesn't know knows it". 

This kept puzzling me for many many weeks and months. One of Harvard's courses (that i took online) on understanding Ancient Hindu texts also talked about all vedas being aparavidya (lower knowledge or proximate to the science or the inquiry of the day and the person)...while true deeper knowledge is paravidya (higher knowledge). 

...It then struck me that whether one is in corporate or politics or general civic life, one needs to have a "keep at it" on "what one can know better?" and then "act from it"....basically "better understanding led better action". Because in the transactional world that we are drafted in, there is humongous opportunity to understand better and act from it. 

Let me share a small story.

It was 8 pm on a day in November 2018.

And the crowd had thinned in this garden by then. May i say that various forms of loneliness-es or belongingness-es was now slowly crowding the homes.

Watching most people in the garden felt like their legs want to crash in the bed, while the "will" wants to make a dash towards preparing for a fitness pageant. 

This young lady was switching between a walk and a small stop at the bench. 

It was busyness as usual.
And then something jumped out of her for attention.

If you look at the types and names of various female hairdo, one could easily pardon majority of the population for being illiterate about it...the types and what they called !!!!

This young lady was sporting a high back bun with a slight messy finish. 

But to hold the bun, she was using a paintbrush...
...what???!!! a paintbrush????!!!

I am pretty sure that the manufacturers of the paintbrush have the faintest idea that they could come up with cool business line of paintbrushes as cosmetic accessories.

How could a company into manufacturing of paintbrush develop frameworks to be able to understand this? 

How could a company develop frameworks to understand customer?

The starting point is to have something called epistemic humility...that one's knowledge is limited and there could better ways to know things. 

The second point is to understand the "why" of the customer purchase. 

For long, these "why" were assumed or narrowly researched or conventionally ensconced. And the product development would jump to putting bells and whistles to product attributes, or characterizing the customers into conventional categories or looking at trends or simple looking at what competitors are doing. 

But if one does some reading of the work on how humans make decisions, one would blown by the body of work that has happened and still continues to happen...decision science, behavioral science, cognitive psychology, moral foundations theories, motivations theories, evolutionary psychology theories, social physics or other forms of sociological theories, systemic thinking theories, game theories, identity theories, power structure theories, etc. 

One is not saying that we stop making decisions and learn these disciplines and then come back. All one is saying is as prudent leaders, you could strategically allocate time and resources towards interdisciplinary understanding of your customers and employees. 

When people buy product, they do not buy it out of context...they actually make a contextual purchase. 

People buy/use a product for getting some job done to make progress given a circumstance. (Clayton Christensen, Harvard)

Do people buy products with the same reasons?

A nuanced view would reveal that there are tons of things involved in people's buying decision. 


As the chart nearby 
suggests,

Same/Different person can have same/different job to be done for which they hire or buy same/different product, and experience same/different emotions, 
and desire same/different outcomes.  


They do so in order to progress towards some goal (implicit/explicit, mono/multi, short term/long term, ...)....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerd_Gigerenzer 

In addition to this, the before-during-after of the buying decision has certain circumstance to it...(physical structure, social norms, etc). What Gerd Gigerenzer, German Psychologist, calls "ecological rationality"....meaning given the norms and rules and values one is in and also the physical structures around.









Or what B J Fogg (considered Guru by various tech giants in Silicon Valley) calls the ability map in his overall theory of human behavior (MAP...Motivation-Ability-Prompt). Ability would mean aspects of social deviance, props required to manifest the behavior, etc)

Many times the customers are not aware of these nuances that could be occurring owing to what Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman calls System 1 thinking....fast, reflexive, effortless. As we go through the calls, meetings, emails, notifications, to-do lists...hours and days and weeks...we actually rely a lot on our automata (habit factory).  



So, let us sum up.
Customer's buying and use decisions are extremely complex.
Customers buy or hire product to get some job done.
These jobs are lined up towards some of their goal(s).
And these jobs occur under some circumstances. 


Now, there is an added dimension this in our times.

I was reading Wharton Prof Kartik Hosanagar's book sometime back (A Human's Guide to Machine Intelligence). His book begins with the story of Tai (a senior at the University of Pennsylvania). The story opens with Tai waking up to an AI enabled morning alarm and goes through the next few minutes using various products or services that are power by algorithms. Prof Kartik makes the case for algorithms being the new strong structures (influencing rules, norms, values) in our lives.  (((You can watch my conversation with Prof Kartik by clicking on the adjacent link))).

So, the circumstances around us are changing fast. And they are essentially the political-economic-social influences which are now being amplified in myriad ways by technology. These then are leading to VUCA world...Volatility Uncertainty Complexity Ambiguity. 
The VUCA world isnt just for Pentagon or the Leaders. Everybody is experiencing the VUCA world. The buying-using-reflecting-liking-commmenting-sharing behavior of customer is changing fast. 

Companies will need to keep compass on what are the jobs to be done for customer and the nuance (progress they want to make given a circumstance) around them on one side, and the various technologies that are emerging and figuring out ways to dovetail them into their product. While doing this, reinventing their organization to speak to the emoployees' own AMP (autonomy-mastery-purpose) while getting cusotmer's jobs done. 

Happy Knowing!!! Happy Not Knowing !!! Wishing you to hold space for knowing and not knowing together. Performing duties with the knowing (karma yoga) and being in gyan yoga and bhakti yoga to be open to further knowing. 

Picture abhi baaki hai ... hamesha

more we see, more we have not seen, until we see the seer

Picture abhi baaki hai...hamesha (((Hindi for: The movie ain't over yet...always)))

"Customer should be the starting point in the business."
"Customer should be the central point in the business."

We have all heard this !!!

"So, then look for the pain points of the customer."
"What are you solving for through your product?"
"What cultural tension are you addressing?"
"What value are you adding to the customer?"
"What job is it that the customer wants to get done, for which your product is hired or bought?" (((Clayton Christensen, Legendary Harvard Professor followed by people like Steve Jobs)))

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clayton_Christensen

And we have all heard this too !!!

And there are zillions of products and services across the world.
Attempting at meeting the above definitions.

According to one Harvard Business Review article, Thirty thousand new consumer products are launched each year. But over 90% of them fail—and that’s after marketing professionals have spent massive amounts of money trying to understand what their customers want. What’s wrong with this picture? Is it that market researchers aren’t smart enough? That advertising agencies aren’t creative enough? That consumers have become too difficult to understand? 

Let's park this for some moments. 

Now, the world already has a zillion different product and services. And these products or services are hired/bought by the customer to do some job?

The question is, " Are all jobs legitimate?"

Or in other words, "When the customer wants to get a job done, is the customer aware that that job is really really required?"

Or in other words, "what feature or filter does the customer need to have in order to figure out the real deep need for the job to be done?"

Or may we ask, "having used the feature/filter to figure out deeply the need for the job, does the customer need to give in and get the job done? There are aspects of self-control and or being upright that would make people not really do the job all the time?"

Or could it be the case that the customer has conflicting jobs to be done and ends up getting one or few of them done because of various reasons of physiology, emotional, psychological or social.

The famous saying, "people buy things that they don't need with the money that they don't have to impress people that they don't like".

In fact, if stretch the arguments in favor of "markets", then the tenet that customers (humans) want choices. "choice" is good...choice is liberating...echoes all the way to infinity. 

The challenge is that too many choices leads to 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Schwartz_(psychologist) 

• action paralysis (Barry Schwartz, American Psychologist)...or
• it so happens that one feels guilty of not choosing the other, while not savoring the one chosen
• sometimes one endows way too much importance to that which is chosen, because one is not able to reconcile and signal to others that they made a wrong choice

   
So, now lets recount two fundamental challenges,

a. Customer's understanding of job to be done and deeper reflection of its real need to be done or not,

b. Paradox of choice.

So far, so good !!!

There are theories around how to find out "what job the customer needs to be done?". 

Some say, "ask the customer". Naysayers to this would argue that the customer either

• doesn't know or
• can't articulate or 
• gives socially desirable answers or
• doesn't know what he doesn't know

Some say, "observe the customer". Naysayers to this would argue that the observer either

• isn;t really trained in thorough observation
• is governed by impulses and biases
• is trying to fit the observation to the problem at hand and/or the hypothesis
• doesn't observe adequately

Hmmm!!!
So, we now know that when we try to solve for something or address a pain point or develop a value proposition or help get a job done, there are inherent human limitations.

The idea is not to get saddled with these.
Albeit, create ways and means to overcome them. 

One of the argument against the above framing could be that, "Look! There are so many successful products and companies. They obviously are getting things right! Aren't they?".

And the answer is "Yes and...
Yes and that this is partial. 
Yes, there have been progress.
But that doesn't mean that the world is alleviated of all of its problems and suffering.
And it is also not to say that there would be a day when all the problems would indeed be alleviated.
And i need to mention that one is also not asking that only Utopia would do and anything less is regress. 

What we mean to say that we need to weigh in both the progress and the challenges. 

We need to certainly celebrate the various things achieved...lower infant mortality, lower pregnancy related deaths, lower diseases like polio, etc, scientific adavancement leading to several conveniences of living and travel... (Steven Pinker, Harvard, in his book "Enlightenment Now"). 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Pinker

The world today has way way more conveniences than just a 100 years back, and yet people feel more inconvenienced at the slightest of bump in their paths. Maybe our patience quotient is drastically down. Or maybe our aspiration or expectation quotient is drastically shot up. Or a combination of both.

The world has cheapest mode to travel and communicate, and yet loneliness is on the rise.

The world has many avenues to experience pleasures, and yet the pain is on the rise.

The world has way more entrepreneurs and yet the unemployment is on the rise. 

The world has made great progress through reason and science and humanity, and yet there are newer challenges 

https://www.worldfuture.org/members/1228445

This is what Benjamin Butler (Futurist) calls "The Great Paradox of our Times". 

Organizations might need to not only look at "what job does the customer wants to be done?", but also create platforms for enabling customer to deeply look at the "jobs to be done". Through various contemplative and reflective practices. 


Organizations might need to enable people become deeply aware of their shortfalls and incompletions...their blessings and their gifted abilities...the complexity of human life and relationships...

...their products need to dovetail these

and no matter what an organization is able to achieve, such is the human life that there would always be things yet to be done and improved...

...hence the movie ain't over yet...always

Till Debt Do Us Apart

Manthan that leads to various "amrit" and "vish"
... "fruitful truth" and "bitter truth"
...in a way metaphorical Dhanvarsha

We do manthan for our client.

Manthan means going in deep meditation and then insight jamming.

We have been doing that for Dhanvarsha.

And we have come up with a moot finding. 

We wanted to get at the root of "Why does Dhanvarsha exist?.

Or a much deeper question was "Why does lending exist?"

And "does lending means simply lending...or there are deeper meanings to it?"

So, its good to start with basics.

Customers (human) hire a product or a service because they need to get some job done.

The basic nature of the job remains fairly stable over time. 

The technologies or product that help customer do the job keep changing. 

As organization serving the customer, they need to be able to crack down deep to understand what job is it that the customer wants to get done and hence design our product around it. Let me share something what i mean by it. 

Let me start with a cliche, 'humans are social".

Hmmm!!!

What does it mean?

It means a lot of things depending on the filter you put on.

Need to belong or co-operate or pooling the risk or sharing responsibilities or memetic complexes or....

Ok!!!

Then what???!!!

If we nuance it further, we reach a point that humans have limitations. 

Limitation in terms of our sense-perceptions.

We can only see upto a distance.

We can smell something if its proximate to some distance.

We can touch if its immediately near.

We can hear only upto a distance.

In some sense, our sense-perceptions have a range...bounded by a range.

There are similar different forms of limitations. 

If we go back thousands of years, then we can imagine that finding food would be such an uncertain event. It would mean that we may venture out for hunting or foraging, but it was not at all certain that we shall surely find food. 

So, how did we overcome this limitation?

We started pooling our efforts, risks and rewards.

This is one of the key reasons of us being social.

Thus establishing a mutually agreeable banking channel. 

Sometimes i would get the food and i would share.

Sometimes you would get the food and share.

Sometimes we both would get different food and we would share.

Sometimes i would fall short of something and would get from you.

This give and take (also known as reciprocity) became an important fabric of being social.

Certain relations had no clear measurement of how much given and how much taken (example family or relatives or friendships).

Certain relations had easy give and take measurement...some level of leniencies.

Certain relations had very tight measurement of give and take.

(((There were other relations too...but that for another day.)))

Reciprocity (give and take) endured limitation. 

Reciprocity (give and take) endured shortfall. 

Now lets cut to our current times. 

Where are our limitations?

Where are our shortfalls?

Oh ! God !!!

(((sighing deeply now)))

Look around you.

Look at people around you.

They have expectations from you.

You have expectations from them.

How many times do we truly fulfill their expectations?

How many times do they truly fulfill our expectations?

We quickly realize that we all "fall short" or people's expectations. 

We experience "shortfalls".

And then we resort to various ways to manage these shortfalls.

In one such ways, we experience shortfalls in our monetary situations.  And then we look for ways to manage these shortfalls. 

However, the popular way to manage shortfall is by "borrowing" or "taking loan".

But is that the real solution?

Providing loan is an also option.

Using analytics to figure the credit-worthiness better and providing loan is also an option.

But, does that take care of the "shortfall" in real sense?

Could there be a disruptively innovative way to manage shortfalls? 

An inclusive lending company essentially is in the business of enabling their customers manage their shortfalls. 

However, "shortfall" is not simply a "financial shortfall".

• Shortfall could be a shortfall of business understanding.
• Shortfall could be a shortfall of marketing understanding.
• Shortfall could be a shortfall of economic and industry trend understanding.
• Shortfall could be shortfall of enough helping or skilled hands in running the business.
• Shortfall could be shortfall in managing emotional life, social life, etc.

• Sometimes the customers seems to be growing, but there could be limited understanding of the above and hence the money borrowed (though seemingly working) could be used more efficiently if the deeper level of shortfall is understood and worked upon.

Now that we realize this, could we get back to the moot question:

What business we are in?

An inclusive lending company is in the business of abundance.

I believe that an inclusive lending company is fundamentally in the business of helping their customers manage shortfalls (lack) of various kinds by creating abundance of various kinds. 

Knowing this, how to think about the product offering?

Fundamentally there are three kinds of business models.

Solutions Model (like Mckinsey, Bain, Accenture, TCS Consulting, etc). The problem is not clear. The solution team walks in. And figures out a solution. 

Process Model (like manufacturing unit or a process operations unit). The problem is clear. The product to solve it is clear. And it keeps going on with incremental innovation.

Networking Model (like association or platforms). Essentially selling memberships of various kinds. 

Given that we established earlier that the "shortfalls" are deeper rather than monetary, there is a need for our product to be able to deeply understand the customer and then cater a product which is not just money. 

So, when our unit of observation is the customer...meaning when our sales team approaches them...what is it that happens?

My guess is that every customer would have some strengths and challenges. Monetary shortfall would be a SYMPTOM of it. 

Our sales team or lead generation team needs to develop keen insight finding skills in order to gather information about the above...for a deeper sense of the various kinds of shortfalls.

In some sense, our sales team is actually a consultant's team...."Value Creation Officers". They need to be trained in this over next 3-6 months. 

And when the customer receives this kind of "consulting based value creating service", it means we are creating "Social Capital". 

What resources are required therefore?

(((needs to be probed and arrived at further...following are indicators only)))

• Extensive Training Resources for reimagining the roles: frontline and support staff. Moving from "Lack mindset" to an 'Abundance Mindset"
• A different "look" for our sales team (consultants' look)
• Rebranding marketing collaterals.

What process we need to excel in? 

(((needs to be probed and arrived at further...following are indicators only)))

• SME-Management Consulting.
• Measurability of Value Creation for customers.

Conclusion: 

Money is the modern version of age old give-and-take (reciprocal) relationships.

Only that we have become very tight give-and-take society.

This has depleted the kind of relationships where 

• eased-give-and-take happens...
• where pure giving (not expecting) happens

...meaning depletion of social capital.

We are not "only a lending company".

We are not "only into financial inclusion". 

We are in the business of creating abundance for our customers.

Creating abundance by various innovative ways to tackle customers true shortfalls.

When we do that, we truly create social capital. 

Moral of the Story

"Till debt do us apart" has the tone that we need to be able to reimagine the society such that "debts" of various kinds do not break the social capital of the fabric of humanity.