Transcript
Edited for readability. Recorded in 2020; figures are as spoken at the time.
Introduction
In this talk, I have been asked to draw upon the experience that Illumine has, working across 4 million people in the last 5 years, on bringing changes in thinking, and changes in the way people think about the new world – changes in mindsets, changes in approach. This has been done in large corporations, in the IT industry, outside the IT industry, with the Tatas, Bharat Petroleum, State Bank of India, on a large scale – with 2-5 lakh people. We have worked with more than 5000 schools, and more than 700-800 colleges.
The basic idea that we are working on is: How do we ensure that each one of us is going to become a transformative agent wherever we are? This is the single message. Can each one of us become a single point (locus), from which waves of contribution can enter, first for oneself, for the organization, and then for society? This is the work that we have been doing across the board. And today’s objective is – How do we translate that into the profession that you are in, i.e., Bid & Proposal Management?
Another request made to me was to help people focus their attention on the idea that they can shift the needle or transform the situation around them. Because in the world today, one is working with different people, different stakeholders, and all kinds of pressures across the board – in such an environment what is it that one can do to truly transform and make an impact?
The question that comes up is if each one of us wants to create an impact and be a transformative agent in the world that we are living in, there is one question that we want to ask ourselves – Am I a contributor?
Not –
- Am I a worker?
- Am I working hard?
- Whether I was successful in my previous contract, or successful in ABC?
But –
Am I a contributor in 10 different ways to 10 different people?
The whole conversation in the next 30 minutes is about this one question. In order to think about this question, it is very interesting if we can think of ourselves at 2 levels –
- Who I am? We are universal at the being level. We transcend the ‘professional’.
- What I do? We are professionals.
Two parts to one’s identity – Being & Function
Pouring one’s being into whatever one does
We take on multiple identities – as parents, children, citizens of the country, etc.
All these identities sit around ‘what I do’. Whereas the ‘who am I’ is the most powerful thing about us.
If I want to be a contributor, I need to do 2 things–
- Pour the ‘being’ into whatever we do. Some people call it ‘passion’ – bring in passion into what one does, invest energy into everything, bring light into the activities one does. Which means – pouring one’s ‘who am I’ into what one does.
It is easy to distinguish between the people who pour their being into what they do from those who don’t. Those who don’t seem to be somewhat detached, dealing functionally or transactionally with the work, or with people – and you know that that is not the same; that they are not actually there.
Our first question is – Can each one of us pour our being into what we do?
- Engage positively with one’s environment
There is a feedback loop from the environment. If this feedback loop is positive, that means if the work is inspiring me, then it gets into a positive cycle, then I put in a little more into the whole thing. And if the work despairs us, then we seem to want to put in a little less of ourselves into our work. This sounds logical, but we need to question the logic a little as we go along, because there is an issue there. Because a lot of people tell you that they cannot engage deeply because they are bored of their work – it’s because they believe that their environment doesn’t inspire them, even though they are looking forward to do inspiring work.
If each one of us is a contributor, then we need to ask ourselves – can this state of engaging passionately with everything we do, and also enabling the environment to inspire us, be a consistent, sustainable state of affairs?
The shift: from Victim to Creator
Most people are on-and-off contributors. If the environment is positive, we pour ourselves into it; if we are excited, we pour ourselves into it, if it is something we are passionate about, then we pour ourselves into it. But if things are not happening our way, we are ‘off’ – which is not the Contributor Way.
Therefore, an on-and-off contributor is not the same as the steady-state, sustainable contributor. It is these steady-state, sustainable contributors who have made consistent long-term impacts in their professions. They are the people who will build this country, build their children, and their communities. They are the people that organizations absolutely hate to lose. If we want to achieve that steady state of contribution, what do we do?
This brings us to the next question – If contributors have to learn to engage passionately with everything they do, and they need to learn to stay in all sorts of circumstances, then it sounds pretty heroic, right? I want to be inspired irrespective of circumstances, and engage passionately not just with the things I am passionate about, but with everything I do – whether it is boring or not. That is the aspired state. How do we get there?
If we need to engage passionately with everything we do, then we need to transform our vision of our response to life. We need to ask ourselves – how do we radically think of ourselves differently? If we also want to stay inspired, we need to reframe the environment each time, relook at it slightly differently. How do we do that?
Here is a simple meme that is self-explanatory – ask yourself how many times you feel caged?
This is at an identity level. It is not external. It is not happening from the outside. It is what we believe we are. We believe that we are caged. We believe that we are victims of circumstances. No one has come and told us – “Oh, you are victims”! We have slotted ourselves as victims. We have constructed a cage around us and are sitting inside that cage, locked the cage, and thrown the keys away! And we say – “Look, I am a victim, I’m, trapped, I can’t do anything. There are so many problems but look at these guys, they are so unreasonable. I am so pressured all the time. How do you expect me to make a difference? I need space, I need empowerment, I need resources, I need help.” – Caged.
What we want as contributors, is to take on the “Who am I”? of creators of our destiny. We are the people here, we are the agents of change, we are the creators of our destiny. Then comes the second part of the story – how do we look at circumstances? These two are talking to each other.
Say you decide to take on the creator identity, the next day you find that everyone is making demands on you. Let’s say so I am working with a range of stakeholders in my life, and they all seem to be making demands of me. And they have conflicting demands. Each of the different stakeholders in our life has a different motivation, a different KPI (way of measuring oneself), different style of putting pressure on different things. We therefore frame our environment as a system of demanding stakeholders. “I live in a world of demanding stakeholders.” Once I am locked up in this that already implies that the work is not inspiring. How can any work inspire you if all you have are people who are pressuring you? Then no work can inspire anybody. But if we reframe it to say – “I am actually working in an ecosystem of stakeholders with whom I am creating solutions”, then we are talking a completely different language.
Each person as a potential Agent of Change
How to look at work differently - the SBI Case Study
Let me give an example to state my point – we worked with SBI (it was a celebrated case study – HBR carried a case on this). The problem was – if you take a Branch Manager in SBI and ask him ‘what do you do?’
He will say “I am a nobody, I am at the bottom of the pyramid. I am 45 years old and I am still just a Branch Manager. On top of me (hierarchically) there is a Regional Manager, General Managers, DMDs and a Chairman. I am really at the bottom of the food chain – what do you want me to do? There are demands from the head office, from my Regional Manager (RM), everyday my branch is filled with customers who are making unreasonable demands of me, I live a harried life.”
We took the same Branch Manager and carried out some experiments, across India, across contexts. If you were a Branch Manager and you thought of yourself as a community change agent, how would you think? One Branch Manager in a branch outside Chilika Lake, Odisha, makes an impact on 3 lakh fisher people. He engages with the community, figures out that in this community the men are drunk through the monsoon because there is no work, and they are deep in debt, because they have no work. It is the women who need to be empowered. So he goes out there, figures out. He doesn’t do any work, he just uses the SBI visiting card, and gets all the stakeholders, together and helps them get alternate livelihoods. And he says, by the way, also put your money in my branch – so they all become his customers.
He has transformed the lives of all these people and suddenly he says I am such a powerful person! I am impacting 3 lakh lives. How many people in large companies can impact 3 lakh lives? And this is just one Branch Manager.
We repeated this story with mango growers, stone carvers in Konark, SMEs in Hosur, all kinds of places across the country; just to make the point that a simple Branch Manager can be an agent of change.
Therefore, how we can transform our environment is left to us. It is about how we see that ecosystem, and asking ourselves how we can reconstruct that ecosystem. And when you do that suddenly you will find that you are sitting at a very central place in the ecosystem. You are at the hub of the ecosystem, because you are assembling the entire ecosystem to make a goal happen – which is that you want to be competitive, or win something. You are really the most powerful person there, instead of the most harried person. It is the way we construct our sense-making of the world.
The shift: from a world of constraints to a world of possibilities
This takes us to the total story. How do contributors think? If you are a non-contributor, you have a double whammy hitting you. On one side you are saying, “I am a victim, I am a nobody, I can’t make a difference in the world” I am complaining all the time, I am finding fault. And on top of it, I reinforce that sense of myself, with a vision of the environment as demanding. So I have everyday proof that I am really a victim. I am building the proof that I am a victim, by demonstrating data from the environment to myself and saying, see today A, B & C pressured me, and therefore it proves my original thesis about myself that I am stuck. You are getting into a negative reinforcement of the data cycle.
Or I can flip the whole thing around, and start out by saying, “I am a creator of my destiny”. Here is an ecosystem that I am transforming, that I am a ‘hub’ of. And suddenly you have a new set of data hitting you every day. The data is reinforcing the idea that I am a creator of my destiny. So you use this double whammy of saying that I am a creator of my destiny, I am also someone sense-making my path, and together, I am trying to make a difference.
This positive vision of being, and a positive functional vision (positive vision of ‘who am I’, and a positive vision of ‘what I do’) – together when it is multiplied, contributors are born. When that happens, a frameshift takes place in one’s vision of the world itself. Today, some of us might have a world of constraints, but I am moving to a world of possibilities.
If you actually sat down in your office, and asked; “what is my world of possibilities”, it would be an interesting exercise for yourself. What is the world of possibilities in which you live? If we want to put down the constraints, we can put them down in 10 minutes flat. If we try to put down possibilities, we will have 2-3 at the top of mind, after that we will run out of steam. But I challenge you to put down 10 huge work possibilities that you live in. Those possibilities are the pathways to contribution. What will you do with that pathway to contribution? What happens because of looking at pathways to contribution? Will things change? What will change? How will you transform as a contributor?
The need for transformative agents in our nation
We may start off with small contributions in the world around us; what I call responsive contributions, where what we do is for oneself, and the world around the self. Then you expand that to the next level where you start becoming huge value creators for the organization; and finally become transformation agents in society.
How many of us are going to be transformation agents in society five years from now? We need five times that number. We need every person we can get, to be transformative agents – if we really want to do something for this country.
Question & answer
What is the challenge of seeing money-making as the purpose of one’s work? Are there other goals for getting to work?
- EMIs (or one’s bread & butter) can be satisfied any which way.
- The issue is that with this view, it is very easy to flip into a victim mode. If I was rich, I wouldn’t need this job. Actually, it is a formula for falling into a victim mode. It is the fastest way to fall into a victim mode. The kind of purpose of work is important because if my purpose of work, it is very easy to slip into a cage. Whereas if the purpose is large, most cages won’t fit in. The individual will be much larger than most cages. So it is very critical that one has this purpose of work- unfolding one’s possibility – because it then allows you to see every situation as a learning situation, as an exposure situation, as an opportunity situation, as a situation of transformation.
What is the extent of one’s contribution?
Am I contributing only towards myself – which is just being responsive because I need to do well in my job? Or am I not only working for self, but I am also trying to genuinely transform and create sustainable value for the organization? We must understand that bringing a bill is not equal to sustainable value. It is responsive value, because it is a task based thing. Sustainable value is something else altogether. Have we thought about it? Have we gone deep into the subject of asked what would sustainable value for the organization means? And are we really architecting it?
Then comes the largest question – can I use my profession, expertise, knowledge, all my capabilities, all that I have, to widen the zone of my impact, in and through work? Also, outside my work, I am impacting the larger environment in which I live in. Whether we like it or not, we are people getting impacted in an environment.
Questions that are yet to be explored:
- Clarifying the purpose of our work
- Clarifying the extent of our contribution