Great post! Why don’t “Best practices” don’t work most of the times? I can see a few reasons:

1. They become generalized & abstract (e.g. Getting up early is good for health, or good communication is cornerstone of technical leadership)

2. They are stated in a context independent manner. However, they are really context sensitive. (e.g. Want to become healthy? Run for 20 minutes every day).

Bright spots try to fix both these issues. A bright spot acts as a concrete example as against an abstract one. Also bright spot, by definition, works within *your* context. Hence, what ever subtle/cultural biases apply for you, in all likelihood they apply for the bright spot as well.

Keep posting.

Vinay

While all of this is excellent diagnosis, apart from me and my self restraint, where do we start addressing this issue – at schools, homes, corporations, municipalities, etc. ? Like Swami Vivekananda had perceived in the 1890′s itself, three Indians cannot come to a consensus even today; what then we are talking of a nation.

Do you recall my discussion in karmayog-hyd earlier when I had brought in a mention of ‘Games Indian Play’ by Prf. Raghunathan of IIMA.

You are talking about taking decisions about marriage and career of our boys. How many take independent design decisions at work? How many can defend their design decisions?

How do we break the vicious chain or circle? One begets the other and the cycle never breaks and we quickly find excuses to justify why we are what we are.

Decision making from an young age and at the same time a good secure family environment supportive of even wrong decisions by their kids would make a start. As long as parents continue to believe that they are responsible for their kids’ education, career, marriage and at the end their happiness also – this country will continue to be what it is. Kids lean on parents and they in turn lean on the kids and they do not want to leave one another.

The country and its citizens should GROW up…

I enjoyed your language and ofcourse I am able to see your yearning to see the society to improve…

Love
Tiger

I might suggest changing the title to – do we trust other people enough?
and that can lead to another question – do we trust ourselves?

One of the basic problem is that the rules are applied on everyone.
e.g I asked one of my colleague as to why don’t we have work from home facility?
To which the reply was, we don’t know if people will really work when they are at home.

I agree with that response, somewhat.
Instead of applying this rule on everyone, people who don’t give results (whether WFH or no WFH), should be told so. And give the flexibility to others who work & give results.

The idea of blanket rule is equally bad.

Thanks for this article. But we are facing same issue. As you said, that tough middle class mentality is very tough to adopt the change. In our company, we are trying make our team members like decision makers and ownership of what they are doing, it is kind of really a challenging task for us to convenience them in that direction. We tried for few months and got tired of it.

But we don’t want to give up. with our 35 members staff, if we can bring the difference in 10-20% members,we might success in a sense.

Lets wish for the best

Once again good one from my favorite Akki.

Thanks
Satheesh k

We are doing our bit to emphasize the importance trust in our company – but after having read your post, its become apparent that we need to go on overdrive in this regard.

When you are hiring a “trustworthy” person, how much should the hiring mechanism be responsible for this?

In the huge growth potential in offshore, there is a big “unemployable” section of Indian graduates.

This “unemployability” is not just technical but also behavioral. Behavioral science is called “soft skills” or optional training/coaching in the software industry i.e. when people are on bench lets train them to behave maturely.

Self-organizing teams cannot be built by relying on “trustworthy” people but by building a mechanism of trust.
e.g. Case of stationary self-organization. Put cameras (feedback mechanisms) and retrospect on the footage to understand the problem rather than putting in a “manned” procedure. Its not just the stationary but a case of inducing self-discipline. We have security cameras all over the place. Why not use a camera for instrumenting feedback?

When you want to build trust, look for personal alignment of an individual when the person is hired.
Conduct the behavioral ironing when the new joinee is booted into the company culture.

Trust cannot be just expected, trust can be built.