Understanding Human Psychology

 I was recently attending a training session where the facilitator made an interesting point about feedback. He said that feedback is not something you collect for the sake of collecting it. It is not a box to tick. The purpose of feedback is improvement. It is about understanding what is working, what is not, and what can be done differently. That reminded me of a story I had read some time ago. There was once a lion whose lioness told him that he had bad breath. The lion didn't like hearing this and decided to verify it with his trusted counsellors. The first to arrive was the sheep. The sheep bowed respectfully and said, "Your Majesty, I am sorry to say this, but your breath smells awful." The lion was furious. He immediately pounced on the sheep and killed him. Next came the wolf. Having witnessed what happened to the sheep, he decided to play safe. "My Lord," said the wolf, "your breath smells as fresh as the spring breeze." The lion knew the wolf...

We live in a world that seems to reward speed. The faster you respond to an email, the better. The faster you finish a report, the more productive you are considered. The faster you solve a problem, make a decision, submit a form, prepare a household budget, complete school homework, or crack an interview, the smarter you appear. We learn speed in school may be, where solving your exam paper in a given time before others are done with it, it's considered smart, winning a race is amazing- it becomes more about speed than fitness.  Somewhere along the way, we have started believing that speed and smartness aka intelligence are the same thing. But are they? Back in 2009-10, I used to teach the Introduction of a Learning Organisation to MBAs, that's when I read the concept of Systems Thinking. And I was fascinated that although everything in the world is dependent on each other, yet I never had seen the world this way before. Then I kept deducting how actions take shape and snowbal...