Question

Discuss a mental model that the leaders of your current or former organization hold that needs to be changed. Describe the model and explain how it needs to be changed. How will/would making this change, affect the culture of your organization?

Answer 1

This is in reference to one of my former organization that worked with Big Data Analytics. The organization had an employee strength of 25 people and was a small start-up attempting to challenge the current market scenarios.

The leader of the organization (the CEO) was also the founder and the creator of earlier version of the product. Overall he was a very technology focused person and was the key decision maker (who would often override others’ decisions).

The challenge we faced as an organization was due to the mental model he adopted in most business decision making. He had the approach of “Common Knowledge” whenever making any business decisions. This resulted in lesser analysis and empirical studies done to arrive at a decision making. Naturally, the fallout from such activities was poor decisions in many case, loss of revenue, poor ROI and overall harm to the business.

In “Common Knowledge” decision making, we often assume certain hypothesis to be true without any evidence. Terms such as “20% of the existing customers will agree to upgrade their plan” are an example of such statement. While such statements are good as a hypothesis, they cannot be held as a fact and allocation of revenue or budgeting cannot happen based on that. Given this situation, the business decisions need to follow a logical path in order to reduce the risk of random hypothesis.

One way to make changes to this would be to perform empirical studies for any mission critical decision. Before making a decision there should be formal research on the hypothesis. It could be a secondary or primary (better) research and only then should the decision be made. By making this change in decision making and overall mental model, the organization can take risks with more confidence, there will be lesser chance of revenue loss, and the overall success rate will increase.