Thinking in Systems

The job of a leader is to get the right team, which according to an estimate provides three times more output than an average team.

The work of a leader isn’t as simple as hiring the best talent, and merely putting smart people together as a team is not an effective strategy.

Any combination of individual intelligence does not make an intelligent group, no matter how logical it sounds on paper.

The ‘A’ Players, the cream of individual intelligence, bring in drive, integrity and the ability to mentor, but all of which is not possible without the collective effort of other players of the team, who are not A players.

We increasingly find it difficult to focus on the hear and now without checking our phones. We seem to go through life in a state of "continual partial attention." We're there but not aware of where we put our attention.

While modern technology has its advantages, our attention span is suffering. Teachers are noticing that current students find it hard to read books that previous students used to enjoy. Teachers think that students' ability to read has been compromised by short text messages and video games.

• Sensory: We can more easily tune out from sensory distractions. For example, the feel of your tongue against your upper palate is an incoming stimuli your brain weeds out.
• Emotional distraction is more difficult to tune out. When you overhear someone mention your name, it's almost impossible to ignore.

Those who focus best are relatively immune to emotional disturbance.

• A social infrastructure: society needs a supply of creative innovators who are willing and able to challenge their physical environment in order to better themselves.
• Social incentives: there need to be incentives in place to encourage innovation.
• Social attitude: a creative society has to be diverse and tolerant. People must be open to new ideas and individuals.

“Invention occurs at the level of the individual, and we should address the factors that determine individual creativity. Individuals, however, do not live in a vacuum. What makes them implement, improve and adapt new technologies, or just devise small improvements in the way they carry out their daily work depends on the institutions and the attitudes around them.”

• When automobile safety laws were introduced, the drivers started taking more risks while driving, leading to more pedestrian accidents.
• Children (and even adults) take more physical risks while playing a sport with protective gear.
• Safety features like Anti-lock brakes in vehicles ended up increasing the accidents for taxi drivers in Germany
• Child-proof caps on medicine bottles made parents careless about their being opened by kids, including the ones which don’t have the safety feature.

Having a safety device in place, and armed with the knowledge that we can push the envelope a bit, the appetite for risk increases.

• People who have an emergency fund in place tend to be less careful about their investments.
• People wearing a face-mask in this global pandemic feel like they are safer in crowded places (It’s a face mask, not an Iron Man suit).

Wisdom is not as simple as just reading. The rules and simplicities given by others may make us feel we're getting brighter, but it is not real.

Owning wisdom requires a discipline to continue learning and not to shun the details and complexity. It is boring. It takes time. But it is the only way.

When a certain disaster or calamity happens, we work towards ensuring that the same calamity can be dealt with in the better way, the next time it happens. The pain or loss that we suffer motivates us to do so.

We forget in our preparation and resource allocation to the ‘last’ disaster, that we have neglected many other things that are more likely to happen.

• Life has a tendency to surprise us, and we will be most likely smacked with something totally unforeseen and unrelated to the last disaster, that one was prepared for.
• A better strategy is to realize that it is inevitable that life will hit us unexpectedly, and to grow and learn from the same.
• Being adaptive, flexible and resilient would increase our adversity quotient, making us strengthen our inner resources, and enrich our experience.

External beauty and pleasing appearance often influence our perception, and we believe that this would dictate our experience after we attain it.

The day-to-day experience of living in a particular place cannot be judged by its outer beauty. Our relationships and social health are more important than architecture.

During the peak of World War II, where it was expected that the citizens would go through hell, the opposite happened. People turned out to be more resilient, driven and motivated during the war.

The looming threat of being dead at any time turned out to be beneficial for the mental conditions and toughness for the individuals. Suicides lessened, and social unity and community bonding increased manifold.

• We, as human beings are naturally adaptive to a disaster or crisis, and bad times are improving our morale and strengthening our community spirit.
• Groups of people collaborating, caring for and working with each other, hand in hand, are the ones who are most likely to live through any crisis.
• The necessary conditions that we need to flourish as individuals and as a species, ironically, emerge during bad times.

• Usually, a typical job interview has the employer(s) sit in a room (or a video conference software) and make them answer unstructured questions, gauging their ability to charm them, and appear as the right fit by feeling like ‘one of the gang’. The candidate is selected or rejected based on how good he ‘performed’ on the interview day.
• Charisma can also be faked during an interview process, and the interviewer can be duped into hiring a wrong candidate who was able to manufacture charm and likeability to get selected. This makes hiring based on what is portrayed by the candidate to be inherently flawed.

In an ideal world, the competence of a person should get him or her the job. In reality, bias gets in the way and is normally related to age, gender, race, appearance and even social class.

Another common mistake is to hire someone who is well-liked by the interviewer due to them being similar. This eventually narrows down the range of skill sets and diversity of thinking in the workplace.

"“I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers.”"

Apart from people, the observer effect is famously highlighted in the thought experiment of the physician Erwin Schrödinger.

He states that if a cat is placed in a box of radioactive atoms that may or may not kill it in one hour, the cat is in the state of limbo until someone observes it by opening the box. The final outcome does not happen until someone observes it.