At the beginning of 2009, a situation remarkably similar to today's, but little less in complexity in comparison, unfolded and the organizations over the world started looking at their mission-critical dashboards. There were numbers all across - Numbers pertaining to the performance of company shares on the Sensex, updates of trends, numbers pertaining to sales, profits, and moreover numbers across the workforce they had with them. It was a phase wherein the reaction and impact appeared to be gradual and it wasn’t a knee jerk action or sudden repulse. The organization’s executive board and leadership team at most of the organizations-initiated rounds of meetings and deliberations on how to tackle the situation and slowly the overall scenario started to become more specific and grimmer. As the US economy started to shrink and the ripple effect started to take its effect, it was evident that the impact would soon be felt across the Asian continent. This was the onset of a recession in the 21st Century!!!
Eventually, the message started to float that there shall be an eventual consolidation of businesses and subsequently the human capital. Costs were reviewed and all freebies stalled. As an HR manager at that time, I managed operations of teams across the west zone in India, and we were a strong 12 member HR team with 6 MTs (joined recently). I knew that under these circumstances, the support functions and less relevant teams across would be the ones to bear some impact, however, the extent of impact was still an ambiguous scenario as this was the first time most organizations were facing such an adverse macroeconomic situation. As time passed, the effects of the recession started to take a grave turn and we received an email from the corporate HR team seeking a list of people who could be considered for rightsizing and eventual outplacement. It was evident that the most relevant and productive lot would last, but the business units which were struggling would have to be wind up. The very next day, my reporting manager called in for a meeting with me to determine the next steps and the round of discussions triggered across all the business units. I remember I was overwhelmed with emotions.
As we gazed at each other, my manager briefed that the first round of lists was to be derived based on previous performance ratings, pedigree and business scope (that was all data), the objective was to keep the determination of manpower based on tangible variables.We had advised the business heads to initiate a similar activity and come up with a list and we had parallelly started with arriving at a list for the human resources team. As we sat across the table, he asked me to start writing the names of team members in our teams. It took a fraction of a minute to arrive at the list and then there was a blank look on each other, as for now we had internally recalibrated our thoughts and approach and we intended to start afresh, recalibrate and have a clean slate and start working towards dynamics which was New!
The discussions started off with each member and their credentials and slowly it drifted away from data to gut feel!!! The gutfeel of what and whether the possible prospect would turn out to be a good resource and were we mitigating for false negatives. The element which influenced our perspectives was, we had a new team with almost 50% fresh MT graduates, and it was hard to determine their potential and future prospects. This was where the experience of the HR leader pitched in. An assessment in terms of a brief interview was the key that would enable us to determine the best fit, for example, we determined a team member X who had requisite MS office and Excel mastery and we believed she could manage the whole process independently. I call this theory “Intuitive Transition”; a transition to non-data, non-reference-based decision making which most of the leaders and managers switch to in a complex situation as one surpasses a tipping point.
I’d further discuss a recent instance of critical decision making, wherein “Intuitive Transition“ was triggered. As the Covid-19 pandemic started to escalate, countries started to scramble for actions which also included blocking the inter-country travel. The data and previous history and medical experts predicted that at that moment (mid of Mar’20), harsh steps of curtailing travel weren’t needed. So, the administration was following what trends advised. However, as a leader one comes across precarious situations that don’t align with your intuition and senses. This is when one must transition to Intuition. In those dynamics, it so happened that The President of one of the most powerful countries believes in his intuition and shuts the traveller’s inflow from China. A decision that has probably been able to save millions of lives and turned out to be significantly prudent and essential.
It is worthwhile to acknowledge that many top decisions in the recent past have been based on intuition; I refer to the Operation Geronimo, wherein no CIA agent was cent percent sure about the presence of the world’s most wanted fugitive. The flow of incidents as in the public domain claim that decision to launch a raid over the fugitive’s premises took over 100 days and therein too there were multiple rounds of deliberations with data and facts, however, the final call was again based on senses (i.e. intuition).
Going back to the previous instance, we started with a cue of data of the team members but finally transitioned to our perceptions and beliefs about an individual’s competencies and relevance on the team. Whilst we ponder upon the idea and perspectives, wherein we give leverage to our judgments, it’s also critical to understand at what stage, time and context is the right time to transition to an intuition-based decision making.
Based on various experiences of experts and key leaders, it’s observed that:
The first reaction to a situation is often the most relevant and as it is subconscious, is less likely to be biased, opinionated, or influenced. This reaction is an important cue, as your subconscious mind reacts in a non-biased manner and is basically a tacit competence which is developed by an individual over the period of time and is probably subconscious expertise of the domain.
Another aspect is the context,the context of knowledge and understanding of the subject to the decision-maker is the key. In similar situations, the decision making tends to be based on previous experiences, however, in new areas, it’s imperative a subject matter expert intervenes adding to your assessment and understanding of the situation.
Also, it’s worthwhile to note that many a time, certain situations would have a specific pattern, i.e. recurrence pattern. Like this COVID situation, the pattern and history suggests that China as a country has been always hiding epidemic breakouts in its country, it’s evident from SARS response, Mers, etc., China has not been open about things, so there’s a pattern to its behaviour, a smart act by the WHO and others would have been looking at the trend and previous patterns, the institutions should have not trusted China’s version and pre-emptively taken action to restraint their people’s actions or movements. Similarly, most instances have a history and a unique pattern aligned to its recurrence, one should be observant to those aspects as cues or supplementary variables (like events happening on the same dates, recurring post a similar frequency or time frame) these are some secondary variables that I believe can be noticed.
The gist is - a pristine decision making is not ideally arrived at through data most of the times but through human experience, expertise, and revisiting patterns of history and these variables are the key to arrive at an optimum conclusion. At Human Resources, Managers and Leaders come across a lot of complex intricacies that are novel and unique. The key to addressing these is to determine all variables, give it a thought and go by the gut feel, and hopefully one wouldn’t repent that decision!!!
At the same time, no decision is bad or wrong decision and given the context of agility and responsiveness’s imperative the HR folks learn key decision-making skills and master the art of deciding and determining things!!!
About Author - Sahadeo Chaudhary is a Global Professional in Human Resources, Traveller, Blog writer and a Thought Leader. He is an HRCI certified professional with 15 years in the HR domain, a subject matter expert on Global Mobility, HR Processes and Culture Building. He is currently based in Mumbai and has resided in Canada and USA]
