Teaching Variation through Games

Teaching process variation to people is not very easy as the human mind tends to look for patterns and trends instead of variations. It has to do with the psychology of the person, as variation means change and discomfort and they tend to avoid that.Instead they tend to look for some kind of rationale in every variation to make it easier to file away that in their memory. So instead of teaching them variation directly, I have always found it more effective to teach trends and patterns and through that, go into the topic of variation.


For example, a simple flash presentation of a shooting game is very effective training material. Get the people to play the game a couple of times. Then stop and ask them to state their experience. You will notice that some of them would have already noticed patterns like where the target appears most and least. Now with the information sharing, the rest of the team will be more alert in the second round and get more hits. Post this, you can get the room to recount the few times that the targets appeared in areas that they least expected (Outliers) and how they were most comfortable when the target appeared in two-three areas. (In-control)
Now is the time when you divert their attention to how comfortable the business is, when delivery is within certain time frames, and how outliers are least expected and we mostly miss them, as they are not part of our process. This makes them think.
Remember, thinking means that the explicit information has been processed and internalized. Conversion has happened, from short term to long term!Memory of course...

Knowledge Transfer!

Every large organization struggles to keep its most precious assets from leaving the company and most often, always fail...peoples' brain's! Plan A would be to retain good talent,let the bad talent go and to ensure that there is a good PIP in place for the mediocre.(Performance Improvement Plan for the uninitiated)Since we all know that it doesn't work on this planet, we'll have to resort to Plan B. In a nutshell plan B would be about converting tacit information from leavers into explicit which in some form will remain...easier said than done!


Lets go back some years. Make that many many years. The time when there was no paper to write on, and lengthy poetry to document. Storytelling was a very effective method where information and knowledge was passed on from generation to generation without getting lost. Whether the trinity was invented to describe the neutron, proton and electron or the Ardhanari was conceptualized to take forward the knowledge of matter and antimatter is still debatable. But the fact that it has been carried over means it has worked. Now we can transfer information and knowledge without worrying too much about it getting lost. But Wisdom? That's another story altogether!