close
close

Mondor Festival

News with a Local Lens

Observation breeds resilience | Psychology today
minsta

Observation breeds resilience | Psychology today

rRd9_pcC_tc-unsplash

You must first concentrate

Source: rRd9_pcC_tc-unsplash

At no time during decision making and the impact of the resulting actions causes the decision maker to look away. They constantly examine the impact of the actions resulting from their decision, thus allowing the decision maker to enrich their knowledge.

I think sometimes we forget how much we learn from observing the world around us. Every baby learns to talk, walk and socialize through observation. Just like babies, we can continue to learn through observation if we choose to remain open to what is around us.

Highly resilient people tend to take advantage of what is around them and learn from it.

Imagine that you are leading a productive team of 10 members. One member, Terry, was seriously injured in a recent accident. Without it, your team will lack its specialized skill set that is essential to the team’s mission. From your own experience in management and with this team, you have reviewed your options and hired an experienced and knowledgeable temporary contractor. You are happy to have a small marginal budget to cover such emergencies. The team welcomed the entrepreneur and began integrating him into the team’s processes.

The team has never been upset by temporary changes in their missions. From your own observations, they have already shown that they understand that things can return to normal when they get their act together. When Sarah, another team member, left to deliver her baby, the team walked away with a real sense of commitment to the team and its mission. You also recognized that while Sarah was away, other team members learned some of Sarah’s skills that they had observed while working with clients. It was a forced learning situation, but a good one. The skills needed to do Terry’s job are specialized and require attention.

Highly resilient people are always learning. They bring knowledge to the next unexpected moment when they must decide how resilient they will be – much of their knowledge coming from their observation before, during and after the decision. In this example, you have resolved the issue, but you know it is important to continue monitoring the situation.

You see that Jason has shown a real aptitude for some of Terry’s skills. He quickly picked them up and started doing them with real trust even before the arrival of the contractor. You decide that you need to support Jason’s abilities and obvious desire to learn. You decide to allow Jason to continue performing the tasks he knows how to do by calling in the specialist who can fill in the remaining gaps. You even decide to hire a temporary worker who will relieve Jason so that he can continue to do some of Terry’s work without fearing that his own work will suffer.

After describing your strategy with the team, Jason is visibly relieved to be able to continue some of Terry’s work without worrying about his own work, and to be able to learn from the specialized temporary worker.

Things are looking good and your only concern is how long you can sustain these additional costs. Resilience at the organizational level, resources are of course needed. Without available marginal resources, flexibility is impossible, whether the resources are in the form of money, time, or people.

This example may seem simple and obvious, but it contains many lessons for the leader who wants to be resilient and help their organization benefit from that resilience as well.

Four factors that contribute to effective decision making are: experience, observation, Imaginationand Confidence to act. We reviewed the observation here.

Regardless of whether our learning comes from books or from life experience and careful observation, having an open mind to learning allows us to see and record unexpected lessons in our general body of knowledge that we bring to the table. our next decision point. Resilience depends on it.