Bystander Effect

Have you witnessed a fellow human in distress in public and failed to help? Incidents like teenager molestation in Guwahati or victims in Delhi gang attack, which many people witnessed but froze or ignored to help the person and became mere spectator.

Bystanders are less likely to intervene if there are other bystanders watching the same incident, people freeze each other, its more likely that more people see the same event more likely they will not help. Bystanders in a group always wait for other person to take the responsibility, many times the people perceptions of the situation is altered by the numbers in a group, and even though they may want to help personally but there are many thoughts crossing their minds - like appearing foolish or some body else would help.

In a group people take cues from other people around and there is a diffusion of responsibility in a group. However, if there is only one person on the scene then that person is more likely to help as it enforces that if not him the victim will die, there is a direct sense of responsibility.

Next time, If you become a victim and see that there is a crowd watching you but not helping then identify one or two person within the crowd and ask them for help and tell them specifically that they would be responsible for your tragedy due to their inaction.

Social Loafing or Social Facilitation

In teams where the individual efforts are pooled together and are not evaluated individually. If the team members have less apprehension of individual evaluation then they are more likely to slack off and tend to take free ride on the group efforts. Its true in both collectivist(although lesser) and individualistic society.

However, in a team when the individual efforts are evaluated and rewarded accordingly, it leads to greater evaluation apprehension and the individual team members are more motivated to put their best performance.

Sometimes, the members in group would perform more than their capacity if they feel the rest of the team is unreliable. Also, in some cases less capable would put in more effort to match to the higher productivity of other team members.

Groups loaf less when the members are friends, identify themselves and feel indispensable to their group. A small cohesive group with a task which is challenging, appealing and involving is more likely to be more productive collectively then individually.

Micro-economics Principles

Micro-economics is management of the scarce resources for the greater benefit of society.

Any opportunity available has a Opportunity Cost which is the cost of the next best alternative available that was passed over.

In a sequence of decisions Net Marginal Benefit Principle allows to choose the next best alternative choice given the associated opportunity cost with each decision.

The Invisible Hand Principle lets the society move towards making efficient decision as individuals make decision which maximizes their profits.

Trade allows people to exchange things and maximize their overall benefit.

Example :

I need to manage my time (scarce resource) across multiple courses that I am doing  (Invisible hand principle to educate oneself for better life) . Among the 20 odd courses I am taking simultaneously, I see that I would have to Trade some of my personal tasks to get more time that I can allocate to studies. Still, I cannot manage all the courses and have to choose only 10 courses based on their Opportunity Cost. And among these 10 courses activities (lectures, quizzes, assignments, readings, projects) I would have to choose activities based on their Net Marginal Benefit.

New Business Model in Society

Old Dominant story of business assumptions 
- Business is primarily about profits and loss
- Only Shareholders matter
- Limitless physical resource world
- Capitalism works
- Given opportunity, business people cheat
- Business works because people are competitive and greedy - Invisible hand effect

New Story of Business
- Business are for a purpose.
- Business creates value for everyone
- Most people work ethically and business increasingly have ethics
- Capitalism works because Humans are complicated and cooperate to create value
- Business and capitalism are the greatest system of social cooperation. Competition is important but value creation is the main engine of capitalism.

Business Strategy Anlysis

Strategic analysis is the evaluation of an organization current competitive position and the identification of future valuable competitive positions and how to achieve them through a business strategy

• Vision and Mission of the organization operation in product and market terms.
• Define the strategic Plan to leverage internal resource and capabilities to accomplish the mission
• Strategic actions – Individual actions taken to execute plan to attain mission

Building a business strategy for an organization

Understanding Shyness – Stanford Prison Experiment

The Stanford prison experiment performed by Philip Zimbardo in the basement of the Stanford Psychology department wherein group of male subjects were divided into two groups – Prisoners and Guards, after a week of experimentation when the experiment was stopped the two groups had started to identify themselves as prisoner or guard. 

The guards with their full authority had becomes sadistic, their only source of enjoyment was derived by harassing the prisoners. The prisoners had lost total control of their situation and had resigned themselves to whims and fanciful punishment of the guards. The prisoners turned their desperation inwards becoming quiet and introvert. And the guards turned their absolute power outwards and becoming more and more extrovert.

 Both the groups had lost the sense of their reality that they were in a psychological experiment. How often do we allow the sadistic world allow us to prison of our mind into confinement? Do we become shy when we are defeated again and again by the world and resign our fate to the world? Do we become quiet in front of the people who are more powerful? Do we express our true belief to such powerful people who have a different opinion?

Obedience to Authority

The classic work of the Stanley Milgram on the ‘Obedience to Authority’ years ago which has been validated again even today is an amazing eye opener on the behaviour of normal people in the situational context.

As presented in the experiment, it’s hard to believe when people knowingly give the dangerous electric shocks to the other person on the command of an authority figure. Some of the reason which subjects ’Teacher’ gave to justify the action in the experiment where

1.    They trusted the Authority figure to understand what is being done is correct although they are able to hear the cries of the subject being given shock.
2.    They assign the result of their actions to the experimenter and won’t take the ownership of their actions. For them they did as was told to them by the experimenter.

A lot of times this obedience to authority has manifested into dangerous actions taken by the common man on behest of the authority figure

Where have you seen people making decision against their will based on the command of the Authority?

Design Thinking

Recently, I had the opportunity to take the Design Thinking Action Lab course from Stanford University and it really helped to concertize the process of developing a solution to a wicked problem through the process of design thinking.

Empathize - Understand your target consumer and understand the world from his perspective, get into his shoes to understand his pain.

Define - Define his problem

Ideate - Think 50 ideas to solve his problem, practical ideas, cost effective ideas, ideas with unlimited resource availability, ideas with minimal changes, ideas with drastic changes and BLUE-SKY ideas - out of the world crazy ideas. Important thing to remember when ideating don't put your critical thinking hat and stop/obstruct the generation of ideas. If you are doing this in your teams don't be critical as it will stop the ideas flow. Filtering of ideas can be done later but this is the phase to open the flood gates and let the ideas flood you.

After you have listed all your ideas, pick the top 3 - Practical, Favorite and Most Disruptive.

Prototype or Pretotype - This is the stage when you basically, take your top 3 ideas and do a quick prototype or pretotype. The idea is to have a cost effective way to validate a concept.

Test - Get your target customer feedback on your idea prototype and revise it if needed.