“Feedback is the breakfast of champions.” ~ Ken Blanchard
Really! Please honk!
In India, you’ve probably noticed “Horn OK Please” painted on trucks and buses. It’s a friendly invitation for other drivers to honk if they spot a mistake or feel something’s off. Rather than taking it as criticism, it’s really about looking out for each other on the road. This idea can teach us a lot about how we handle feedback in our everyday work lives.
🔍 A Little Cultural Insight
Think about it: when you see “Horn OK Please,” it means, “Hey, if I’m not driving right, feel free to let me know.” It’s not about blame, it’s about making sure everyone stays safe. This simple message encourages openness and helps create a smoother, more supportive journey.
🚙 Tata Motors and the Indica: when customers “honks” and they listens
Consider Tata Motors and their journey with the Indica, India’s first fully homegrown car. When the Indica first hit the roads in the late ‘90s, customers loved its spaciousness and affordability. But they also pointed out issues with performance and reliability. Instead of ignoring the feedback, Tata Motors listened, addressed the problems, and made improvements. By doing so, they built trust and turned the Indica into a beloved model across the country.
👂 What Can We Learn?
Just like the drivers who welcome a friendly honk, managers and companies can benefit from being open to feedback.
Here’s how:
• Keep the Conversation Open: Let your team know you’re all ears, just like that “Horn OK Please” sign.
• Listen and Learn: Don’t take feedback as a personal attack. See it as a chance to improve.
• Act on It Quickly: When someone points out an issue, address it sooner rather than later. This shows you value their input and are committed to making things better.
👣 Simple Steps to Embrace Feedback
1. Talk Regularly: Set up casual one-on-one chats or team meetings to invite honest opinions.
2. Provide Safe Spaces: Use anonymous surveys or feedback boxes where people can share their thoughts without hesitation.
3. Show the Impact: When changes are made based on feedback, let your team know. It builds trust and encourages more open communication.
🥜 In a Nutshell
The “Horn OK Please” idea isn’t just about driving, it’s a reminder that honest feedback helps us all improve, whether we’re behind the wheel or managing a team. Just like Tata Motors did with the Indica, embracing feedback can lead to better products, better services, and ultimately, better results. So next time someone offers you a “horn blast” of feedback, take it as a chance to grow and steer towards success.
When it comes to new ideas and innovations from the team, the ultimate bottleneck is management. Their time and interest define whether the ideas are going to see the light of day! And as usual, words drown in various biases, and a billion-dollar idea will be killed without even realising its potential, just because the manager could not agree or find time to “rethink” his objections. Clearly, it’s not a new issue.
When iPhone peaches to Steve Jobs, he ridiculed it initially, believing that a mobile phone should focus on essential functions rather than extravagant features. It was he who was thinking differently while reviving Apple and avoiding bankruptcy, ultimately leading to the creation of the revolutionary iPod, which transformed how the world consumed music. However, it was his ingenious team, fueled by innovation and creativity, who dared to think again and found a compelling use case for the iPod as a phone. They envisioned a seamless integration of music, communication, and internet capabilities within a single device, thus paving the way for what would become the iPhone and revolutionizing the entire smartphone industry in the process. Through their collaborative efforts, they not only changed the way individuals interacted with technology but also set a new standard for what a mobile device could achieve in our daily lives.
For sure, each successful enterprise has an innovative founder, however it’s the team who make the enterprise succeed again and again and give the edge.
The book “Think Again” by Adam Grant, discusses the importance of rethinking and unlearning in a changing world. It emphasizes the value of being open to changing one’s mind and embracing doubt. Confidence combined with humility leads to better rethinking and learning. Challenging our own beliefs and seeking new perspectives can improve decision-making. Encouraging others to question their assumptions can lead to more open-minded conversations.
🦾 Modes of Thinking
It’s important to recognise the mode that we operate in while discussing an idea with someone. Especially when the ideas is not belongs to us, but we are the decision makers. The three modes quoted in the books are preachers, prosecutors, and politicians.
In each of these modes, we take on a particular identity and use a distinct set of tools. We go into preacher mode when our sacred beliefs are in jeopardy: we deliver sermons to protect and promote our ideals. We enter prosecutor mode when we recognize flaws in other people’s reasoning: we marshal arguments to prove them wrong and win our case. We shift into politician mode when we’re seeking to win over an audience: we campaign and lobby for the approval of our constituents. The risk is that we become so wrapped up in preaching that we’re right, prosecuting others who are wrong, and politicking for support that we don’t bother to rethink our own views.
🔬 One more mode “Scientists” mode
The mode which emphasis on questions everything is called as Scientist mode. For sure, it’s a methodology which researchers are trained to use, it’s not limited to white lab coats. This mode comes to action when we are in search of truth. The way to operate this mode is build the hypothesis, which you like to make it happen, and test this hypothesis by discovering knowledge.
The biggest hurdle of using Scientist mode is “ego”, and “we have done everything in past” a status quo bias.
✋Status quo bias
This cognitive bias leads people to prefer maintaining current practices or traditional methods, often resisting changes or new approaches. It’s driven by a comfort with the familiar and a perception that past methods are inherently safer or more effective.
In organizational settings, this bias can hinder innovation, as it causes people to dismiss new ideas by overvaluing past successes. Another related concept is sunk cost fallacy, where past investments in a particular approach make people reluctant to abandon it, even if it’s no longer the best option.
⁉️ How to “Think Again”?
It’s all really come down to acknowledging that we are prone to these biases, and overcoming this will truly bring innovations to organisation and will sustain growth long term. Few practices mentioned below, which I believed from my experience are really helpful. Also few of them are also aligned to over all theme of “Think Again” practice mentioned by Adam Grant.
1. Embrace a Scientist Mindset: Approach ideas like a scientist rather than a preacher, prosecutor, or politician. This involves forming hypotheses, experimenting, and being willing to change beliefs based on new evidence, which can help challenge assumptions about past practices.
2. Rethink Familiar Practices: Grant suggests actively questioning the effectiveness of familiar practices and regularly asking, “What if we tried a different approach?” This helps counter the comfort of “we’ve always done it this way.”
3. Encourage Intellectual Humility: Recognize that being wrong is a natural part of learning. Leaders can set an example by admitting mistakes and valuing learning over being right, which encourages others to embrace new ideas and reduce reliance on the past.
4. Seek Diverse Perspectives: Invite input from people outside the usual circle who may offer fresh viewpoints. This approach helps expose blind spots and reduces the tendency to default to what’s been done before.
5. Focus on Small Wins: Trying small, low-stakes experiments with new ideas can make people more open to change. These incremental steps help build confidence in different approaches without overwhelming the organization.
🔖 Summary
The approach of “Think again” and “Think Different” is a practice which make us pause before getting overwhelmed by the newness of the idea.
A pause and change in perception will bring the focus back to this question of how to think differently and think again, for the concept which we may think not worth of our time.
Management being ultimate gate keeper of the funds and resources, are the responsible ones who should practice “Think Again” and allow team to “Think differently”.
I hope this small blog will bring some insights and will help you “Think Differently”
The three processes—people, strategy, and operations— remain the building blocks and heart of good execution. But as the economic, political, and business environments change, the ways in which they are carried out also change.”
Larry Bossidy, Ram Charan, Charles Burck
Change vs. Inertia
Change or not change, that’s the constant tug of war an organization faces. Change being only constant, and our love of inertia (why to change), leads to this war within each organization. A successful company becomes successful, by knowing customer better than its competition, but then same company faces competition to safeguard its turf due to its ‘belief’ that they know customer! Customers are more prone to change, and they have fewer option to avoid it, and the organization which constantly tap such changes in customer’s expectations make it sustain and bloom constantly!
Recently I read book “Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done”
Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan emphasizes the importance of executing strategies effectively to drive success in any organization. The book argues that many companies fail, not due to a lack of vision, but due to a failure in execution. It breaks down execution into three main processes: people, strategy, and operations. The authors highlight the role of strong leadership in establishing a culture of accountability, aligning the right people with the right tasks, and maintaining a rigorous focus on the practical steps needed to reach goals. The book provides actionable advice for leaders to ensure that plans turn into results by consistently focusing on follow-through and engagement at all levels of the organization.
⁉️ The Question
With such challenges, the book help answer following three questions, these aspects not only enable a faster change but also help us being more dynamic and adaptive to constantly changing environment.
How can executives effectively bridge the gap between high-level strategic decisions and the day-to-day choices made by employees at the front lines of the organization?
In what ways can traditional strategic planning methods be reimagined to foster more creativity and innovation within a business?
What role does fear of change play in preventing organizations from adopting new strategies, and how can this fear be mitigated to encourage more effective decision-making?
The thing is not always what we assume it is. Often, we get in our own way when solving problems with a new way of thinking, because we’re afraid it won’t yield better results than the tried-and-true methods of yesterday! We need a framework for thinking through the most common problems with a new lens on what might work to bring about the most effective, long-term solution
👂Where is the competition, who is listening?
In business, where competition is between products rather than companies, the line of sight between a CEO’s decisions and whether a customer will buy a product at any given time is much less clear. The individual outcomes of customers’ decisions are far from easy for executives seating in head office, removed from the front line, to predict and control.
If the judge of the value of any product or service is the customer who chooses to buy, not the provider, then it is the provider’s (Company’s) people at the front line, in front of the customer, who are best placed to determine what the customer values. It is up to the rest of the company to help the people in the front lines, where the revenues come in, to satisfy those customer needs. The lower level, in effect, is the customer of the level above it. And like a customer, it should expect to get more value from those services than it pays to get them.
Companies should build Cumulative advantage as the layer on its initial competitive advantage by making its product or service an ever more instinctively comfortable choice for the customer. Focus on helping customer make easy choice over making the product a habit.
🎲 Customers are beyond Rationality
The common belief about competitive advantage is that successful companies choose a position, focus on certain consumers, and design activities to serve them better. The aim is to get customers to buy again by matching the value offered to their needs. By creating unique and personalized experiences, the company can maintain a competitive edge. This way of thinking assumes that consumers make careful and logical decisions. Although emotions may play a role in buying, many times these decisions come from a conscious thought process. A good strategy understands and responds to this thought process. However, research in behavioural psychology suggests that buying decisions aren’t always made consciously. Our brains work more like machines that fill in gaps: they take incomplete information and quickly complete it using past experiences. This fast thinking, known as intuition, includes thoughts and feelings that come to mind quickly and strongly influence our actions. It’s not just what we remember that shapes our quick judgments but also how easy and fast we can remember it. When we decide based on what “feels right,” it usually means our thinking process was smooth and effortless. Hence, one reason people often choose the leading product is simply that it is the easiest option available, as it stands out in the shopping environment.
😶 Customer Loyalty – Never take it for granted!
If consumers are slaves of habit, it’s hard to argue that they are “loyal” customers in the sense that they consciously attach themselves to a brand on the assumption that it meets rational or emotional needs. In fact, customers are much more fickle than many marketers assume: often the brands that are believed to depend on loyal customers achieve the lowest loyalty scores. So why do fringe brands like local competition survive? The answer, perhaps perversely, is that with big-brand loyalty rates at 50 percent, just enough customers will buy small brands from time to time to keep the latter in business. But the small brands can’t overcome the familiarity barrier, and although entirely new brands do enter categories and become leaders, it is extremely rare for an established fringe brand to successfully take on an established leader.
🫀Strategy not for faint hearted
Strategic planning often gets bogged down in numbers and analysis. This creates a sense of scientific rigor, but it can also lead to a lack of creativity. Many managers find that the annual planning process is time-consuming and doesn’t produce truly innovative strategies.
To break this pattern, we need to shift our thinking. As the saying goes, “In strategy, what counts is what would have to be true—not what is true.” Developing a winning strategy is like creating and testing scientific hypotheses. It involves imagining a new reality where our ideas would work and then figuring out what needs to change to make that happen. This creative process is just as important as the analytical one.
Few steps one can follow for such strategy building: A Possibility Based Approach
Move from Issue to Choice: Conventional strategy-making tends to focus on problems or issues, such as declining profits or market share. As long as this is the case, the organization will fall into the trap of investigating data related to the issues rather than exploring and testing possible solutions.
Generate Strategic Possibilities: Constructing strategic possibilities, especially ones that are genuinely new, is the ultimate creative act in business. To generate such creative options, you need a clear idea of what constitutes a possibility. You also need an imaginative yet grounded team and a robust process for managing debate.
Specify the Conditions for Success: The purpose of this step is to specify what must be true for each possibility to be a terrific choice. Note that this step is not intended for arguing about what is true. It is not intended to explore or assess the soundness of the logic behind the various possibilities or to consider data that may or may not support the logic—that comes later.
Identify the Barriers to Choice: Now it’s time to cast a critical eye on the conditions. The task is to assess which ones you believe are least likely to hold true. They will define the barriers to choosing that possibility.
Design Tests for the Barrier Conditions : Once you’ve identified and ordered the key barrier conditions, the group must test each one to see whether it holds true. The test might involve surveying a thousand customers or speaking to a single supplier. It might entail crunching thousands of numbers or avoiding any quantifiers at all. The only requirement is that the entire group believe that the test is valid and can form the basis for rejecting the possibility in question or generating commitment to it.
Conduct the Tests: Typically, at this step you bring in people from outside the strategy team—consultants or experts in relevant functional or geographic units who can help fine-tune and conduct the tests you have prioritized.
Make the Choice: In traditional strategy-making, finally choosing a strategy can be difficult and acrimonious. The decision makers usually go off-site and try to frame their binders of much-discussed market research as strategic options. With the stakes high and the logic for each option never clearly articulated, such meetings often end up as negotiations between powerful executives with strong preconceptions. And once the meetings are concluded, those who are skeptical of the decision begin to undermine it. With the possibilities-based approach, the choice-making step becomes simple, even anticlimactic. The group needs only to review the analytical test results and choose the possibility that faces the fewest serious barriers.
Summary 🔖
It’s a new model, introduced in the ongoing dialogue about the existing frameworks we rely upon to enhance the effectiveness of our strategies. The essence of this discourse revolves around a fundamental truth: you are the master of your models. It’s vital to understand that if you find yourself constantly attributing failures to your model while simultaneously striving to harness its potential, then, inadvertently, you have granted it a monopoly over your thought processes. This situation creates a paradox where the model, rather than serving you, becomes an oppressive force, dictating your decisions and stifling creativity.
Imagine this scenario: you enter into an agreement with a model, believing it has the keys to success. You attempt to optimize your connection with it, tweaking here and there, but the results remain disappointing. Each setback chips away at your confidence, leading to a self-blame spiral. You question your abilities, thinking you simply have not mastered the model’s intricacies. This is a dangerous mindset; it breeds dependency and diminishes your agency.
In contrast, if you adopt an empowered position and hold your model accountable for its outputs, you take the reins of your intellectual journey. You evaluate its effectiveness in delivering the promised results consistently. When you find it lacking, instead of forcing it to work for you, you make the courageous decision to discard it and seek out better alternatives. It’s an exercise in discernment and strategic thinking—embracing flexibility and adaptability rather than a rigid adherence to a failing system. If a model does not meet your needs or align with your goals, there’s no shame in letting it go. After all, your primary objective is to cultivate strategies that genuinely foster growth and drive success, not to be shackled by ineffective tools. Embrace the autonomy of ownership over your models, ensuring they serve your aspirations effectively rather than the other way around.
Coaching is one of the most important tools a leader can use to make his team more efficient, productive, and interested in achieving the common goal. However, knowing this fact, we typically struggle to ask the right question to coach one. Some time, coaching becomes mentoring and loses its focus. The focus of Coaching is to make one more productive and help him achieve his short-term goals. It’s significant to note that coaching is a collaborative process, where the coach and coachee work together towards the cochiee’s goals. The coach provides guidance, support, and expertise, while the coachee actively participates, takes ownership of their development, and implements the recommended strategies.
The process necessitates a focus on short-term objectives, thereby necessitating the coachee’s efficacy in assisting the coachee in attaining their desired outcomes and enhancing their effectiveness. This goal makes this book a useful guidebook for a leader to be a better mentor.
The book is about seven questions, which a leader can ask to be a more effective coach. These questions are:
Whats on your mind?
It is a question that says, ‘let’s talk about the thing that matters most., it is a kick-start question.
And What Else?
You create more opportunity to create more insight on the topic.
What is the real challenge here for you?
This makes you pay attention to the things that immediately need scrutiny.
What do you want?
Is the listener aligned to coachee? This helps bring the trust between coach and coachee.
What was most useful for you?
People don’t learn while seeing or doing things, but rather when they recall and reflect on something
If You Are Saying ‘Yes’ To This, What Are You Saying No to?
It’s a strategic question. It asks people to be clear and committed.
How Can I Help?
It’s a lazy question, this is a clear and direct question.
Each question, is an open-ended question, few are enticing to give an alternate to the proposed solution, few are challenging one to explore further, few are helping in finding the other side of the story.
Each question is powerful, but they need additional information to be more effective. Based on situation, requires, these questions can be tweaked and sequence can be changed, or a few questions out of seven can be asked.
Our job as manager/ leader is to help create the space for people to have those learning moments. And to achieve that, we need to ask questions which will make them die deeper to find solution and learn in the process.
Get this #goodreads as one tool in your toolbox. And following mind map for more insights.
Iconic Oral B Brush designed by IDEO, of which Tim Brown (author) is CEO. Till this point, we learned about ‘design thinking process’, with empathetic thinking, Defining the problem statement, Ideate the concepts, build prototype, test and launch the product.
The designer who designed it, once went to near by sea shore, and found few of colorful brushes washed over beach! the design came to its end of the life cycle, most of the part of the brush was intact.
Designer can’t prevent people from doing what they want to do with its product they own, but that doesn’t excuse them from ignoring the larger system. Often in our enthusiasm for solving problem in front of us, we fail to see the problem that we create.
Change by Design
The book is all about all round thinking while designing a product/solution for a problem. IDEO is the company, which has brought the ‘design thinking’ concept to masses. and Auther himself is known as one of the founding members of this key concept.
Key Concept/ Take away
Ideas for #Leader
What is design thinking
Finding interdisciplinary team members
Putting people first
Inspiring the birth of great ideas
Ideas for #Process
Look : Look at inspiration, ideation, and implementation together to become great at design thinking.
Prototype : Build the prototype of your idea and begin testing as early as possible to help you encompass all areas of innovation at once.
Storytelling : If you want to make your great new idea stick, use storytelling.
About Author
Tim Brown : CEO of IDEO
Tim is leading IDEO, and key person to bring ‘Design Thinking’
He has published many books/articles for this topic including for innovation.
Process on ‘how to innovate’ is explained simply, with three step approach. Innovation is an ongoing activity, its not an on/off like activity. One has to be mindful of his surrounding, get inspiration and how quickly we can bring idea to life thru rapid prototyping. Few example like complex product like google glasses the prototype was done in 30 min!
I Understand role of Empathy in design thinking, but the insight I got from this book is, empathy without action is of no use, what we need to do is act quicky and convert idea into reality by rapid prototyping.
