How to play the inner game of mind

Photo by Jaryd Rice from Unsplash

If we want to play the inner game of mind, we must get equipped. To get equipped, we must understand our mind, and the rules by which our mind functions. Psychologists have discovered that we have three minds: experiencing mind, narrative mind and thinking mind. Each of this mind performs different ‘functions’. Each of this mind works with its unique rules. We have to learn these rules if we want to utilise them for our benefit.

Keith Stanovich and Daniel Kahneman (Noble prize winner) brought these minds into limelight. For an individual who has limited knowledge of psychology, Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking fast and slow will considerably help.  Here is a brief recap to help you understand the functions and rules of these three minds:

• Experiencing mind is the mind that functions in the ‘present moment’. Whether we are in relationships, or whether we are privately designing a creative plan, our experiencing mind is in action. This mind produces results by ‘pausing’ so that, instead of reacting, it can respond to the situation/event. When we cannot ‘pause’, we often make mental errors derailing our results.
•  Narrative mind is always in action. When our mind has inadequate information about reality, it helps us make ‘sense’ of a situation so that we can move forward. To make sense of situation, narrative mind constructs ‘beliefs’ (or assumptions). For instance, you may adopt the belief ‘Be proactive’ to ensure success. But beliefs are beliefs; they are useful in certain situation, but dysfunctional in others.  For instance, ‘positive mindset’ may help in certain instances. But it also promotes suppression of ‘emotions’ which damages thinking mind’s capacity to find ‘better solutions’. In other words, we must learn to ‘pause’ our narrative mind, identify the invisible beliefs we unknowingly use, take the effort to ‘verify’ them, and if necessary, modify them.  
• Thinking mind helps achieve external goals like making a business plan, designing a bridge, or writing a software program. This is our most-trained mind. But this mind also has a blind spot. It has a tendency to simplify complexity by ignoring the unintended consequences. Due to this blind spot, thinking mind can help man reach moon, but cannot help eradicate poverty. Due to same reason, thinking mind can help us achieve internal goals like happiness in personal life and relationships, only if  we 'pause'  the thinking mind and use it smartly. In other words, instead of using our thinking mind blindly, we must Pause and use it judiciously.

Across all three minds, one theme is common. If we learn to “Pause”, we can play the inner game. We have developed three Pausetive tools to help you play the inner game with these three minds. These tools are developed like Monitors. Like a heart-rate monitor measures your heart-rate, we have developed three monitors to help you track your progress of playing with these three minds. It will therefore help you identify the gaps, if any, and take the next step to equip your mind better. This will help you play the inner game smartly. Once, you can play it, you can more than likely win the outer game of external goals.

All this is psychology. Terms will be initially difficult to grasp. But the effort is not very much. You may have spent considerable time in understanding stock market and financial instruments to maximise the return of your money. We promise you that you will spend even lesser time in understanding psychology to maximise the returns from your limited life. Not only will this effort help you achieve big results, but it will also help you achieve the results that you intend.   

In the next blog, we shall describe the three Pausetive Monitors.

Play the Inner game

In the introduction to his classic book, The Inner Game of Tennis, Tennis coach W. Timothy Gallwey asks us to imagine our life as a series of games. Sometimes it is real game like playing tennis. Or it could be “games” like writing a software program, launching a new training program, or even nurturing a child. In order to play these games well, he argues, we need to understand that every game has two parts: an outer game and an inner game.

The outer game is played against an external opponent to overcome external obstacles and to reach an external goal. Mastering this game is the subject of many books offering instructions on how to swing a racket, club or bat, and how to position arms, legs or torso to achieve the best results.

Most of us are fairly comfortable playing many of the outer games in our lives. Some of us have even achieved a lot of success in, for instance, in work, sports,  or music. 

But Gallwey claims that it is the inner game that often prevents people from playing the outer game. One may achieve a one-time success in a business or a work. But to consistently produce results in work, one must be good in playing the inner game.

Inner game  takes place in the mind of the player, and it is played against such obstacles as lapses in concentration, nervousness, self-doubt, and self-condemnation. In short, it is played to overcome all habits of mind which inhibit excellence in performance.

And it is our inability to play the inner game which thwarts our results, be it in work, relationships or personal life.  We surprisingly spend huge time and effort – in schools, colleges and work – to play the outer game. If we are in knowledge industry ( doctors, engineers, or administrators), we spend huge efforts in learning medicine, arithmetic or science. If we are in sports, we spend huge time in perfecting the physics of game and creating the body required to maintain the game. If we are in entertainment industry we spend huge time in perfecting the musical notes, for instance.

But we surprisingly spend little or negligible time in learning the rules of inner game.  For instance, do you know the difference between thought and emotion? Or understand the difference between fear and anxiety? Or empathy and sympathy? Or assertive communication and aggressive communication? Or beliefs and values? Instead of understanding our feelings, we often club all the feelings in one label, such as “I am upset”. Or “I am bored’. All these feelings tell us something about ‘us’. But because we are not ‘trained’ to hear it, we often ignore, suppress or bypass them.

If we spend years in learning Algebra, History or Geography, why don’t we spend at least a little time learning about our own minds? Because, if we do that, it will open to us our huge potential of which we are capable of. This blog will help you understand the rules of Inner game and how to play it.

Is visionary really a characteristics of an individual?

In the Times of India, I read a column of Swaminathan Aiyar about the reforms in Bollywood. This is a brilliant example of how visions get created.

Imagine someone in Bollywood having a vision of making 'successful serious cinema' 15 years back, say in 1992. I am talking about making movies like Khosla ka Ghosla or Life in metro. In 1992, it would have looked like a dream of an exuberant impractical youngster who does not know anything of cinema industry. A empathatic viewer would have even lauded the ability of 'youth' to do the impossible.

A systems thinker however would have told us that such a dream required numerous elements to come together, most of which is outside control of any single person or group. For instance, it needed the deregulation of Indian TV to bring in new type of directors in the forefront: a critical mass who were willing to experiment and had nothing to lose. But that would not have been enough. It also needed a heavy dose of liberalisation in capital markets to provide finance to new producers. Even that would not have been enough without a adaptive distribution channel. State had to forego the entertainment tax for new cinema theatres to help make multiplex theaters. This enabled making of cinema halls which allowed 3 lakhs of Hindi speaking population in Karnataka to afford a Hindi movie or 1.21 lakhs population of Bengali in Delhi to enjoy the movie in Bengali. Each of these three different huge systems were required to make Khosla ka Ghosla possible over a period of 15 odd years.

Which youth can alone realise such a vision? Books and researchers explain that visionaries are needed to make a different industry. How true is that? As you would have realised, even money or resources alone, howesover large, cannot influence such large systems. Any amount of hard work, commitment, dedication cannot turn a vision into a reality because one cannot make things happen at such a large scale.

Therefore, when we see some individuals achieving their impossible dreams, we should be careful in describing their achievements. We could applaud their ability to patiently wait for the 'systems to change'. We could call them committed, hardworking, and passionate individuals who 'prepared' themselves fully for the system to present to them the right opportunity. But can we call these individuals visionaries in a strict sense?

If a systems thinker were to define a visionary individual he would define it differently! According to systems thinker, he would be an individual who can see the interplay of these large systems and can 'plant' the saplings in these systems to watch them grow. Not all saplings grow. So, depending on their growth or withering, he would keep on changing his course. If he has the resources to use leverage points, he will use them. Or else he will wait for his time to come. He would also forsee the presence of choke points in a system and initiate efforts to de-bottleneck them. And above all, like a farmer, he will wait for the right time to do the right thing and hope things will coalesce to convert the sapling into a fullfledged tree which can bear fruits. And if the fruits do not come in his life time, he will smile and hope someone younger than him could pluck the fruits.

How to manage your organisation as a whole

According to principle of non-linear thinking, it is far more effective to manage something as a whole.

But how does one manage a huge organization as a whole? Earlier, man devised a fragmentation approach. He broke the organizational 'whole' into components, calling them functions and departments, 'strengthen' each of these components, and hope that together they will produce the whole. We have seen many ‘unintended’ but ‘logical’ consequences of this approach in our organizations. One of them was that the departments conflicted with each other to such an extent that ‘politics’ was discovered.

Another was the constant pushing required for each department ( often called as motivation in the management language), because no department could see what it was contributing to the whole. The worst was that the ‘quality’ parameters were determined not by the real customer, but by internal department rules. Unintended consequences of this approach have been so many, that many management theories were invented to ‘contain’ them.

Later, man also discovered another alternative to this ‘fragmentation’ approach. Let us call this ‘wholistic’ approach.

In this approach, different ‘components’ are linked together to form one link – raw material to finished goods (and even to customer in some cases). Instead of having ‘inventory’ buffers to take care of the ‘stoppages’ in the manufacturing process, these inventory buffers are removed so that when the manufacturing process stops, everyone in the link knows that the ‘whole’ has stopped. Different components (including quality) come together to solve the ‘problem’ so that the flow in the link is ‘reestablished’. Each component (department/function) can now see the whole and therefore knew what is required to ‘maintain the flow in the whole’.

As soon as the manufacturing process ‘stabilises’ in a new flow, the inventory buffers and other buffers are further removed. The newly created instability in the flow ‘pulls’ different functions to come together and ‘solve’ another problem. No external push or motivation is required to ‘energise’ them. The flab/slack is removed from the manufacturing process in this manner until the entire process becomes ‘lean’, with all waste removed. All the support functions – quality, HR, finance, purchase – know their roles clearly in this flow. The objectives of customer satisfaction, productivity, cost and safety can be traded off dynamically, not sequentially. The organization is now managed as a whole.

If you have already heard of this approach, you are right. This is called lean approach. All the tools and techniques have been devised for you to implement this lean approach. Earlier they were devised for manufacturing process. Now they are well documented for service processes in banks or order taking. They have been tested and implemented in many organizations across the world.

Despite this knowledge, what stops an organization to implement this approach of managing their organization as a whole? Is it ignorance of the management theories? Or is it man’s desire to ‘control’ all the time because of which managements cannot relinquish control to the front line staff?

I wonder what are the causes. Do you know any?

Stress drives ones behaviour to nuts

I read a TOI article on Wednesday August 9, 2006. It was captioned ' Stress in Iraq driving US soldier’s nuts'.

It explained the stress that soldiers were going through in Iraq. One of the soldier reported ' the unit was full in despair." Another soldier said ' It drives you nuts. You feel like every step you might get blown up. You are just walking a death walk'. Soldiers often drank whisky and took painkillers to relieve the stress of not knowing whether the day would be their last. These soldiers reportedly went to a house, killed a girl’s parents and then raped her.

Psychologists have reported many ‘situations’ where one behaves beyond what is considered to be normal. Stanford experiment where ‘normal people’ told to become ‘guards’ used ‘dangerous and inhuman punishments’ on the ‘prisoners’ is well known. It is well accepted that normal human beings, can behave very differently, if the ‘context’ is appropriate. For instance, normal ‘honest’ citizens are known to ‘hide’ their ‘incomes’ to save income tax. They alter the very definition of honesty to suit their behavior.

Surprisingly, despite the huge amount of evidence, human beings still refuse to ‘accept’ the power of a ‘situation’ ( context) that can change one’s behavior. For instance, when told about this US soldiers, they refuse to agree that, in a similar context, they may also behave in a similar way.

However, I have found countless situations in organizations where individuals do behave ‘abnormally’ in a situation. Sales people are often seen to make claims about their products which are blatantly untrue by speaking a ‘white lie’. Or production departments often book ‘sales’ to show high quarterly sales that will look good in a balance sheet. Or HR executives often go back on promises they make while recruiting by citing that they did not promise anything in ‘written’. Or bosses often make grand promises, even when they know that they cannot keep their promises.


All these are normal individuals who behave ‘differently’ in a given situation. Although it may look ‘unethical’, the behaviour is absolutely understandable when one accepts the power of ‘context’. However when Enron behaviour happened, all organizational executives sound ‘shock’ and claim that they will never behave in the same fashion. But I am sure, that in the same situation, we all (almost all of us) would behave in a similar manner.

Are managers paid for anticipation or responsiveness?

I was seeing a match of India versus Pakistan. Virendra Sehwag hit a slash. It went through a second slip. Inzmam, the Pakistan captain, put a second slip immediately. In the next over, Sehwag hit a uppish shot through covers. Inzmam put a man in short cover. Had Inzmam been a manager he would have got a good performance award because he was responding quickly to the situation? But because he was a sportsman, the commentators handed him a pink slip for 'responding late to the situation'.

I had gone to meet a plant HR manager, a group company of a multinational. When i asked him if he has a problem of lower demand, he said they have none, because 'sales' is managed by the multinational firm. He told me that they have no problem of attrition, because engineers are paid well. When i asked him that there is a problem of quality, or at least quality at higher cost, he said there are none, because quality processes of mother company are replicated in this plant. He was patting his back that everything is running smoothly. Unfortunately managers are not trained to notice 'how unattended problems slowly accumulate' to show their presence on one fine day. And because they respond after the problem is visible, the response is too late to rectify the situation in time.

I remember visiting a call centre three years back. The VP was showing me the excellent facility of lunch and cafeteria provided to the employees, pick up provided to them from the house, the training imparted to them on regular basis, the excellent salary package provided to them as the 'reason' that they cannot have any problem. But only after meeting a call centre representative i could see the 'problems simmering' when he told me that ' what he hears in 8 hours of job is just complaints and complaints' and then he has to hear his supervisor give him a verbal lashing that he failed to 'meet the average call duration time below the target'.

How long this call centre 'system' would have 'accumulated the problems' until they became visible? Any manager with a little bit of 'non-linear thinking' ability ( also called as systems thinking) would have guessed that the problems will appear sooner or later? Today the problems in call centre have been allowed to accumulate to such an extent that the entire delivery model of call centre is being overhauled. If you have read the Jim Womack book on 'Lean solutions for services' you will realise what i am talking about.

The same is true of any company, any organisation. Not that managers should look for 'problems'. Not that every problem should be 'attended to' or 'fixed'. Not that every 'unfixed problem' festers and becomes larger.

Unfortunately managers never learn the very basics of how problem symptoms appear, how to anticipate the problem situations in advance, which problems to address before they grow beyond a limit, which problems symptoms to ignore completely.

Managers are just unaware of the mathematics of problem accumulation and resolution. Even though managers could be good intuitive system thinkers, they rarely learn systems thinking consciously. Without having the capability to view the whole system at a time, and not just fragmented function, they can never learn to anticipate problems. They can just respond like Inzmam. One ball later, one month later, or even one year later.

A systems needs impartial observer to rectify problem situations

I had gone to meet a call centre VP. He was facing lot of issues with his call centre representatives. The issues were common. High attrition rate was one of the biggest problems. As I talked to one of the CCR’s (Call centre representatives), I was surprised at the amazing insight he shared with me. He told me that all the problems that his group is facing is due to billing errors of a mobile company. The errors occur due to the mistakes in the ‘billing process’. According to him, 80% of the billing mistakes were due to this. He wanted to talk to the mobile company, to resolve the problem at a root level. When he tried to talk this problem to his boss, he was told that ‘Call centre is earning money because of the calls. If he solves the problem, there will be no calls for them.”

This is a typical ‘systemic’ problem. Problem in a downstream process happen due to the upstream issues. Problems in downstream call centre occur due to the billing errors upstream. The same happens in any organization system: whether it is service centers of repair, or delivery centers of companies, or quality cell in a company.

These problem symptoms cannot be solved by doing anything in that department or function. In the above case of a call centre, the call centre would avoid resolving the problem symptom because it affects their revenue.

But if the call centre was part of the mobile company, the problem still cannot be resolved. For a college student, the solution looks simple: call both the department heads and tell them to solve the problem. But for anyone working in a company for a long period , this problem cannot be resolved easily, because the systemic issues get ‘escalated’ with time. Departments are at logger head with each other because each is serving a different purpose. The two departments may also have historical baggage of ‘conflict’. The bosses in the two departments may also have aggravated the ‘divergence’ further by emotional outbursts. Further, if the root cause of a problem symptom in one department is in another department, there is no incentive to ‘resolve it’ for the other department.

For a system, even though the problem symptom and its root cause are apparent, such live systems require an impartial problem solver. Not only the problem solver be really ‘impartial’, but he should also be ‘perceived’ as impartial by the concerned stakeholders. A consultant fits this bill well. Managers often joke that ‘Consultants, even if they prescribe the same solution as the managers-at-work, are listened to because they are paid’. That is not completely true. They are listened to, because stakeholders see them as ‘impartial’. Infact some of the consulting assignments fail because one of the department ‘feels’ that the consultant has been brought in by other department. The ‘process’ of selecting a consultant is therefore as important as selecting an impartial consultant.

The ‘systemic’ nature of an organization makes it also necessary that the managers in the organization use the ‘impartial’ perception of a consultant smartly. Of course, the systemic nature of an organization also compels managers to use consultants in a particular way. Consultants are useful in certain situations, they have to utilized in a specific manner, and their expertise, to be useful, has to be channelised in a specific manner. If managers fail to understand this, they can only spend tons of money on consulting, with nothing to show.

A system can be controlled innovatively

Systems thinking has a wonderful concept called 'variety' to help managers 'control' their divisions or departments without inviting the dysfunctional consequences of overcontrolling. Ashby's book on variety is the bible on this concept. The book name is W. Ross Ashby (1956): An Introduction to Cybernetics, (Chapman & Hall, London).

We use different ways of attenuating and hope that it will work. For instance, police assume that criminals are more likely to repeat 'crime'. In short, by reducing the systems variety and enhancing systems variety to manage it , we try to match the environment's variety with the systems variety. When we succeed in matching the two, we can manage that environement well.

Typical western executives are prone to increase the variety of senior managers and executives by instituting control systems, governance systems as compared to increasing the variety of bottom workers and front end officials. Increasing popularity of ERP can be explained to the need of western executives to increase variety at the senior levels . On the other hand, eastern executives use worker participation methods ( and enhance vareity at bottom levels) to increase the variety of a system.

Let us take example of how police can increase the variety of a system. Police can use ‘technology’ to increase their variety or they can use ‘community’ to increase their variety.

An article of Trichy police, Page number 47, in Business World of 3 July 2006 explains how police can enhance their variety by involving community. Some of the ideas quoted in the article are

• Engaging community in street lighting and other issues to gain the community’s trust and confidence in police
• Inviting community to become part of the policing system, through use of suggestion boxes and complaint system
• Using NGO's like self help group of women to counsel women ( who are divorcees, who are wives of difficult men like drunkards and small criminals ) to help them start new businesses
• Using NGO's to address the specific professional issues of fisherman to help them avoid criminal activities
• Running an ex-convict rehabilitation program with NGO to ensure that criminals do not 'return' to crime

Both methods of enhancing variety have their positives and negatives. What methods can managers use in their departments, divisions and units?

Systems thinking is the only known tool to understand organisation

Systems thinking is thinking about a 'whole' , and not about individual elements. Systems thinking has a long pedigree. Unfortunately, it has remained in the academic world. We will use this blog to discover the different facets of systems thinking useful for corporate executives.

Systems thinking is non-linear thinking. It is using the variables of feedback, time, delay together to understand what is happening or has happened. And then finding a best leverage to either remedy the situation or move into an intended direction.

Linear thinking is about x causes y. Cause and effect are directly related both in time and space. For instance, better sales performance causes better sales. Using this thinking, whenever 'sales' goes down, we try to improve 'sales performance' by training sales officers, motivating them through rewards and so on. This produces the result for a time being. But sooner than later, the variables stop impacting.

The feedback loop kicks up. For instance, rewards may stop 'motivating' the sales officers. Or the 'marketing' strategy may have become a bottleneck. Or the competitor may have changed the 'game'. This feedback loop may kick after a gap of time. Understanding the effects of such feedback loops along with time and spatial gaps unravels the underlying 'structure' in the 'system'. It therefore enables an executive to devise better strategies and take effective actions.

Systems thinking is therefore useful for creating outputs in work, in relationships, in taking better decisions because it helps us understand the 'as-is' world without distorting it. We shall use this space here to understand how to use systemic thinking for understanding and therefore managing large companies. We will use this space to understand how to use non-linear thinking to generate huge outputs with less effort, time and cost.