Aneesh Banerjee: Episode 374

Transcript

[0:00:13] NVN: Resilience is one of those qualities that we tend to think of as being inherent. Some people are resilient while others aren’t. In their new book, The Resilient Decision Maker, authors Joseph Lampel, Aneesh Banerjee, and Ajay Bhalla, set forth the idea that resilience is something that we can cultivate and grow across all areas of our lives. They demonstrate how we can build resilience in different areas of our lives and what that resilience, in action, might look like when faced with various challenges. How we can be more resilient people and more resilient leaders, more resilient at home, and more resilient in our work. In this book, the authors steer us away from aspirational ideas about what we should look like as we navigate the various challenges in life, and instead, look at what we can be like as resilient human beings who are both cognitively and emotionally driven. In your book, The Resilient Decision Maker, you guys are talking about this idea of resilience, which I feel is something we don’t necessarily hear a lot about. Talk to me about, “Why resilience?”

[0:01:22] JL: There’s a number of reasons why resilience is, I think, important. It’s always important but really important today, and that’s because we have a number of myths about strength, and about ability to deal with walls, the ability to make decisions swiftly, decisively, the ability to have foresight, and to basically, if you wish, never have to really deal with challenges that knock you back. There is this kind of aspirational idea of what decision makers should be. That idea of it is quite at odds with what decision makers are really like, and what they have to put up with. I think that’s why we decided to write this book, because we had so many people that we met. Students, colleagues, when you work with companies. And the decision making process that we saw there was very different to the kind of decision making process that often you have in both the popular media and of course, even the kind of text books that we actually do teach our students. For that reason, we thought this is a very important topic.

[0:03:19] NVN: All right, so, listeners, you probably noticed that we have multiple voices here today, and I’m actually joined by the three authors of this book, which is sort of an unusual scenario. I’d love to hear from each of you, starting with you Ajay, why you came together and how you came together to write this book? Aneesh, we haven’t heard from you yet, I’d like to direct this next question to you, which is, as you guys came to this idea of resiliency, was it something that the three of you noticed separately and came to separately, or did you each come to the idea of the importance of resiliency in your own way?

[0:06:39] JL: Can I add something else in terms of resilience? A lot came to us together during the 2008 financial crisis, and I think it was at that point that we could really see resilience, was really crucial. After a long boom where it seemed that success was maybe not guaranteed but was a fairly high probability, we moved into environment where suddenly, people were confronting extraordinary challenges. But I began to think about this even before that. Doing work I was doing on the film industry. I’ve been doing work for the film industry for a long time and I spent some time with film producers in London, and one thing struck me talking to them, is the extraordinary resilience that you have to have in the film business if you’re a producer. Because they will spend like months, if not years, and spend it together on projects, film projects. You know, you had to get the actors, the script, you have to get investors, you have to get – this is a very complicated kind of system where things can easily go wrong. And indeed –and many of their projects would collapse, and collapse at the very last minute. I mean, sometimes the key actor back out. The investor will back out. Something just went wrong in terms of their ability to schedule everything and they would simply have to let go of the projects, and I was struck by the fact that they bounce back. They didn’t move too much, they sort of took it on the chin and they moved on to the next project. What I was struck by is their ingenuity, the exercise in being able to sometimes – to take projects that fell apart and use different elements to bring it together to a new project. To survive in that business, it was very clear to me, you had to be very resilient. That resilience, at that point, I didn’t think of it so much that conceptually, I just saw it as a personality type, I think became clear when we begin to work on resilience after the financial crisis, and looking at companies for example in the case of employee ownership companies, and their resilience. There we were doing more scientific work if you wish. Actually measuring things, trying to get the bottom of it. But certainly looking at other work we did, I think we could see the relationship. And that was sort of, for us, something very important, in terms of an insight into the nature of resilience.

[0:08:53] NVN: That makes a lot of sense. I know that at the very top of this conversation, Joseph, you were talking about how we had this aspirational idea of what decision makers should be like. And then, Ajay, I believe it was you who mentioned this idea of being rational. Does rationality tie into our ideas about what we think decisions should be based on, and are there any other elements that might come into play when we’re thinking about this aspirational ideas of making decisions?

[0:09:27] JL: I think if I could just say a few words about that. The aspirational idea, okay, argues implicitly, if not explicitly, that one should have total control of one’s emotions. At the extreme, they should completely cut of one’s emotions. This is an attempt to argue that the rational, i.e the cognitive and emotional are separate and should be kept separate. So that the extent to which our aspirational ideas of resilience, it’s often aspirational ideas of completely removing emotions from the equation, and just being a purely rational, cognitive, intellectual individuals. And it is that, that we really, if you wish, tackling if not attacking. Trying to, sort of, change the image, and try to argue that the two interact, they go together. The reality of decision making is, you cannot separate the emotional from the cognitive. Resilience is the ability to deal with both, and deal with both as resources, and bring them together, and they both in fact that sometimes they deplete, they run down, and sometimes they go up, sometimes they go down, but this is really the nature of resilience, is bouncing back with the sustaining sense of purpose. The bouncing back implies that you are able to overcome, if you deal with the emotional, while also retaining the cognitive.

[0:10:53] NVN: Aneesh, do any examples of this come to mind for you? This brings up a good point that you guys, in this book, discuss various types of challenges and then with that, different forms of resiliency. Can you talk to me about some of the different types of challenges, and then the sorts of resiliency they’re accompanied by?

[0:12:49] JL: Well, we make a distinction between active and reactive challenges, okay? Active challenges are challenges that you bring about yourself. If you start a new business, or you take on a project. By the very nature of action, you’re going to create challenges because you’re trying to launch a new product or you're trying to – that will create a set of problems, set of issues that you have to tackle. If you had not done that, if you’re not started a new business or launched a new product, those issues or problems would not exist. That’s why we call them active, okay? In effect, you create your own challenge, by virtue of the fact that you take active action, okay? You take action. Reactive challenges on the other hand, are challenges that occur to you, or impact you, without you having had anything to do with the challenge. Obviously, one can take the obvious thing such as, when natural disaster, also things like losing your job. Things like, you know, something goes on in the business that you had not anticipated. That is reactive challenge, and the point is, both requires resilience. We actually talk about it, difference between active resilience and and reactive resilience. They’re both somewhat different because they come at you from a different direction, you know? The point is, on the other hand, we say is when within each one, there is also variation, okay? You have momentous and you have trivial. You have momentous active challenges and trivial active challenge. You can have momentous reactive challenge and trivial reactive challenge. Aneesh mentioned getting an email which will be irritating, and that’s kind of a trivial reaction challenge, something that you don’t anticipate and comes at you, makes a demand or brings bad news in a small way, and it’s not a big thing but if it accumulates it can really quite affect you in a very particular way. Like, when momentum active challenges, you know, they could be something very big in terms of starting the business or it could be something very small. I mean, we start a business, sometimes there are big issues you have to do with the supplies not delivering, and quite critical. It could be small things in terms of employees not showing up and you’re really shorthanded and so forth, you know? That’s really, like, the kind of, the nuance between the big and the small momentous and, the trivial active and reactive. With that goes resilience as well, the kind of match each one of those active, reactive, momentous, and trivial. The book deals with resilience first. It is different types of challenges, different types of magnitude of challenges, but then it tries to go further and try to look at different levels of challenges, and resilience in terms of individual resilience, team resilience, and leadership resilience. We try to dig deeper into what it is that makes an individual a resilient decision maker? What is it that makes for resilient teams? So we go in quite a bit of length talking about how in teams, we help each other become more or less resilient. You bring your resilience to the team and to some extent, we talk about players and believers in a team, people who believe what the team is doing, people who say, “What can I do for the team?”, and people who say, “What can the team do for me?”, and about the dynamics that occur at this point. About people giving their emotional cognitive resources, sometimes, to people who take them and don’t give back, in which case, it leads to a spiral. Or vice versa, if there is trust in the team - that helps resilience build up. We deal with this. Then we talk about leadership resilience. Which I think is very important, and we make a distinction between leadership resilience and individual resilience. Of course, good leaders are people who can look at the world, see things deeply, have a very good analytical capability, being able to move rapidly to a decision, so forth. Those are the classic good decision making qualities. But for us, resilient leaders, not certainly simply is good at making decisions. A resilient leader is somebody who helps other people make good decisions. They have resilience, to give their resilience to others, help others make decisions. They are they are able to lend their emotional and cognitive resource to others so that is what makes them a resilient decision maker. So, we have these three levels, and I think that is the second part of the book or the middle part of the book rather, deals with that extensively. So it is important to know that about the book.

[0:18:25] NVN: It seems to me like it would be easier, in circumstances where I have active challenges, to exemplify resilience because I have some sort of choice in the matter. I am curious about how people build up these skills for the reactive challenges, when you have no control, but still strive to enact this. So what I am taking from that, which I feel like is a message of hope actually, is that resilience is not necessarily something that is innate to us, but it is muscle that we can build. Am I understanding that right?

[0:20:50] JL: That is correct. You know, it is interesting that people used to think resilience was innate. Even today there is some people who claim that some of it could be built into your DNA, but we disagree, in part because we think that there are different kinds of resilience, as we mentioned, and in part because there is not a lot of evidence that this is not the case. Resilience is something that can be built up, something that can be developed, and it doesn’t just belong to extraordinary people. Because many people we celebrate: heroes, great explorers, scientists, political leaders, great business people, demonstrate or exemplify resilience, and so at some point there is a tendency to think that resilience belongs to exceptional people. Well we say, “No, the evidence is very clear that it does not only belong to exceptional people.” It is possible for everybody, but of course there are different levels of resilience. You know, some people have more resilience or less resilience. But the important thing, really, it’s because some people are able to develop it more than others. So, the book is a message of hope because it says, “Yes, you can grow with resilience”. You can get to know and grow your resilience. So, knowing your resilience is the first step, and then growing is the next step, and one of the things we argue in the book is that a lot of people don’t know their own resilience. In part, because they are trapped or, if not trapped, you could say they are overly influenced by the aspiration model of decision making and action. And because they are overly impressed by that aspirational model, they tend to therefore feel that they cannot measure up to it, but in reality, if you begin to see decision making in the full, both the cognitive and the emotional, then you begin to realize that you are very much part of it. So the question then is get to know your resilience. So we have tools to try to help people do that, and then try to grow your resilience, so in other words, go further.

[0:22:46] NVN: Perfect, and the other thing I really like. Ajay, I believe you spoke to this at the top of this interview, was that there is the idea here of building up our tolerance level for mistakes so that we can bounce back, and to me, that just strikes me as such a human idea, that, yes, we are all going to make mistakes, and not make the wrong decisions sometimes. So it is about learning to ingrate that. I am curious, as you guys have been working on this book, looking at research, working with people, have you felt your own levels of resilience growing, and if so, how has that impacted your lives?

[0:24:10] JL: I can speak for myself and say the answer is yes in both accounts. So starting with knowing your resilience, I mean the book in effect is obviously an exploration of resilience in the large sense that, you look at evidence, you look at historical examples, but its inevitable, you think about yourself while you are doing it. You think about your own resilience, thinking back on situations that you’ve been in, thinking about situation where you felt that you were short of the aspirational model and basically berated yourself for not being “stronger.” Writing the book made me realize in fact that I was walking through exactly the processes I was describing. So it got me to understand my own resilience better, to know it better. And I suppose that, moving forward, it also started me thinking about how to grow my resilience. So, in that sense, the book has been, if not aspirational, certainly very influential on the way I think about myself.

[0:25:12] NVN: How about you Aneesh or Ajay?

[0:25:57] JL: If I can add something to what I said earlier. One of the things in the book that we deal with is something we call, “the resilient decision making zone”. The resilient decision making zone is about the idea that you have when you are confronting a challenge, okay? You are going through a zone which is, kind of, too awesome to speak. What is the tendency to make rash decisions? Because, the stress, the challenge, is putting so much pressure on you that you want to end it as quickly as possible. Emotionally and cognitively, certainly emotionally, you find it very difficult to continue thinking about the problem, dealing with the issues. You want to finish them off very quickly, and you make a rash decision, which you do truly regret. The opposite is being unable to make any decision at all, because this is a situation where your resilience is low, so you simply don’t make any decisions. You procrastinate, you postpone, you avoid, okay? So, what we’re saying is that, to some extent, the trick is to try to be within these two bad outcomes okay? To move between them in some ways. And to me, when we worked through that, we saw that, certainly in the literature at least, especially in the literature, also I could see it in myself because I am very much prone to that. I am the kind of person who feels the pressure and the challenge. In the past, I could slip back on decisions that I made and where the wrong decision, the bad decision, because I wanted to it end as quickly as possible, the stress involved in making decisions or vice versa. Sometimes I was procrastinating or unable. I was freezing, so, like somebody, you know, that climbs a ladder and there is a strong wind. What you do is you hang onto the ladder, not like, just finding the resilience to come down and get it over with. So this is something that from our personal experience came into the book, into what we call the resilient decision making zone.

[0:27:55] NVN: Perfect. Aneesh, do you have anything to add about your experience with this? The other thing that has really struck me is I have listened to you guys talking about this is – so the subtitle of this book is, “Navigating challenges in business and life.” And, to be honest with you, when the phrase, “business and life,” when I see that in a subtitle, it often doesn’t strike me as authentic, because so many topics are just inherently more applicable either to business or to life. It can be tough to straddle. This idea of resiliency and decisions and what you guys are talking about really does strike me as being applicable to both business and life, probably in equal amounts.

[0:30:13] JL: Yes, I think you are absolutely right. It is applicable to both, and I would go one step further and say, “because business and life cannot be kept separate.” They cannot be divided, and one of the things we say in the book, we try to really emphasize in the book, is that you have to accept that they are not going to be divided. It is another prescriptive idea we often get, you know this is business, this is personal, this is life, this is business, and I keep things separate. “Don’t bring your problems to the office,” or something like that, you know? But in reality we’re human beings. Of course we are going to bring the problem to the office. We may not want to share it with our co-workers, fair enough, but we cannot say to ourselves, we cannot create compartments of business and life, because our emotional cognitive resources are in both and they flow from one to the other. If we do really well in business, it probably makes our life, personal life easier. It makes it easier for us to deal with that personal challenge to some extent because we feel better about it. We feel more confident about ourselves. We feel we have a greater ability to deal with challenges so we can do that in person. I mean, likewise if we can deal with challenges and in our personal lives, sometimes that helps us know and grow our resilience in general, which we bring to our business as well. So, in that sense, that is why we put both in the title, and one of the other reason was because many of our examples, many of our stories, do not separate business from life, right? So, we didn’t have the typical “only business” examples, what we have in all of our examples is to show that the individuals involved, or the teams involved, you know, they both applied life to business and through which, to some extent applied both their abilities in business to life.

[0:31:49] NVN: Beautiful. Thanks for joining us for this episode of Author Hour. You can find The Resilient Decision Maker, on Amazon. A transcript of this episode as well as all of our previous episodes is available at authorhour.co. For more Author Hour, subscribe to this podcast on your favorite subscription service. Thanks for joining us, we’ll see you next time. Same place, different author.