[CTQ Smartcast] Future Relevance at Choose To Thinq (Part 1)

This is a special two-part CTQ Smartcast by J Ramanand and BV Harish Kumar (co-founders of Choose To Thinq), in this episode, they succinctly talk about the eight-year journey of CTQ.

In this first part of the episode, they talk about future relevance, CTQ’s Future Relevance Manifesto and how at CTQ, future relevance is practised. They also discuss some interesting projects from CTQ over the years, how CTQ has evolved and how future-thinking translates into deliberate actions at CTQ.

 
 

Prefer an audio version of the Smartcast? Listen below.

 
 
 

To watch part two of this special CTQ Smartcast, visit here.

Follow CTQ Smartcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or on your favourite podcast platform.

(Read the shownotes below or skip to the transcript)

SOME OF THE THINGS WE SPOKE ABOUT

  • What is future relevance?

  • Future relevance is as much for organizations and companies as it is for individuals

  • Three questions to answer when talking about the future relevance

  • Never predict one future, try and plan for multiple futures

  • Groundwork is extremely important. Never underrate it

  • Storification as a part of the culture

  • Why must one have a nuanced approach when saying yes to projects?

  • Six pillars of our future relevance manifesto

  • Possibilities over predictions

  • Why has using words like employee or career has become obsolete?

  • How do we at CTQ think about possibilities over predictions?

LINKS TO PEOPLE, APPS, CONCEPTS AND SMARTCASTS MENTIONED IN THE SMARTCAST

PEOPLE

APPS AND TOOLS

CONCEPTS

SMARTCASTS

TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE

00:00:00

Harish: This is a special CTQ Smartcast. We don't have an external guest, but it's Ramanand and me, who are the guests today. We are often asked what is future relevance? How do you, at Choose To Thinq, practice future relevance? We've also been asked to share how we go about knowledge management? How do we reinforce and apply to learning at work? So we thought we'll record this episode where we talk about our own journey at CTQ. What is our Future Relevance Manifesto all about? How does that translate into deliberate actions at CTQ? We also invited questions from our friends, well-wishers and customers, there's a lot of ground to cover. After all, we've been doing this for eight years now. So we've split this into two parts. Part one is where we talk about what future relevance is, our Future Relevance Manifesto and how we practice it at CTQ. The second part has some concrete advice about content curation, learning and curiosity diet. So go on and listen, as we talk about how we think about future relevance.

00:01:24  

Harish: Hi, welcome Ramanand, this is going to be a special CTQ Smartcast recording that we're going to do. So welcome to this.

00:01:31

Ramanand: Hi, Harish, I should say welcome to the CTQ Smartcast, because I'm so used to doing that when we sit here. So from my turn as well, welcome to the CTQ Smartcast.

00:01:40 

Harish: All right, so the reason why we wanted to do this special Smartcast recording is that we wanted to talk about some of the questions that we have heard in person, when we are doing Smartcast recordings, from prospective clients, from people who just hear about us, hear about Choose To Thinq, you know, the questions that we're going to cover today are primarily going to be around future relevance, and how do we practice future relevance at Choose To Thinq. This is almost like, as somebody said, I want to see whether you guys actually do what you tell us to do. Right? So that is going to be the theme of this Smartcast. So the first question, just to set the context, what is future relevance?

00:02:25  

Ramanand: Right. So I'm just taking a historical lens here, the phrase future relevance. So our trajectories until that point had always involved knowledge, curiosity, experimentation. And I think for a long time, like other people around us, we often asked is, what I'm going to do, is it going to be relevant in a few years time, maybe the time frame, in some conversations was two years, sometimes it was five years, sometimes it was even as much as 10 years. So I think, during the course of Choose To Thinq, in the early work we did, we helped some companies with their innovation programs that lead us to think deeply about culture, and how that is born. They applied our own experiences of being in some of these environments, all the things that we synthesized from our reading of books and listening to interesting people. So we realized that partly what we were helping ourselves and the world do was this phrase called ‘future relevance’. And there was no real framework to it. So we are almost assembling it. So what you're listening to us talk about today, this is a glimpse at that work in progress. So to understand future relevance, you need to understand who are the villains that we are grappling with at this point in time. One is that I think everyone listening to us will agree that the world is changing shape all the time, and nothing better than the last couple of years to tell us that the shape of the world is very different. So every time you look out of the window, there is some change in the air. And there are trends like digitization, there are trends like remote working, there is a trend of what we call the rise of the empowered employee. More people have the ability to fashion their choices in the way they want to. This is not the world that previous generations lived in and worked in. And so that is very clear. The second is that...

00:04:34  

Harish: Let me interrupt you there. So I think the interesting part there is also the fact that things were always changing. Because of our reading or whatever, we could see that coming. We always keep saying the future is already here. It's just unevenly distributed. Because we knew that the future was there. We knew that it was just a matter of time before you're going to get subsumed by that future. I think over the last few years the pace at which things have changed has increased manifold.

00:05:06  

Ramanand: Yeah. So William Gibson, who made the quote that you just spoke about, said this quote many, many years ago. But now I think we are actually seeing it on a day to day basis, that uneven distribution. And so the nature of relevance itself has got reframed. So earlier, people were on that ladder, that escalator, that conveyor belt, the whole game was about making it to retirement, making it to the so-called corner office. But today, people have completely redefined relevance differently, people are living much longer, they have longer career spans, should they choose to use that to their advantage. Some people take breaks in the middle and don't seem to suffer too much in their careers. Some people, you know, go off and volunteer for some time and then come back. So everyone's idea of relevance is very different, there is a lot more choice now. But there is a lot more uncertainty, and that’s the next villain along with the shapeshifting. So eventually, these are what people did earlier because it was a conveyor belt of sorts because it was a treadmill. Your first goal was to get onto that treadmill and just hang on. And so the relevance agenda was set to other people, whether it is your boss, whether it is your organization, leadership and planning to take care of your agenda. Now, it looks like we have to own our agenda. So, a lot of these things we've lived through. So I'm really curious to know whether you agree with all these kinds of villains.

00:06:39  

Harish: Right. In fact, you know, I would add, not a caveat, but a corollary, right, so the way you spoke, it seemed like it is meant for individuals. But the surprising thing over the last decade or so has been that companies have also started thinking like these individuals. Earlier, it was very easy. If you were in a brick and mortar kind of office space. The most important thing for a hotel, like a restaurant, was the place, right? Now with things like cloud kitchens, and all that is not true anymore. All those principles of success that companies had learned, most of them have probably turned upside down or reframed. So just like how for individuals, there was this set pattern, a template that you get onto this treadmill, and then do this for the next 30 years, and you have a corner office or then you retire, there is a similar template, the similar pattern for organizations as well. Right. And now that has also changed. So future relevance is as much for organizations and companies as it is for individuals. And we have seen some of the, you know, these great legacy brands becoming completely irrelevant, right. So, and I think that is what has been interesting for me over the last six-seven years to see, what we started off as thinking about future relevance from an individual standpoint, seems to be more and more relevant to both individuals and organizations. So that's my comment on that.

00:08:20  

Ramanand: A very simple way to do this, is to look at the number of people who are, “doing their own thing,” right? So about even a decade ago or two decades ago, you would be considered a maverick, if you kind of stepped off the light, even a little bit. It could be women taking breaks, it could be men taking breaks. And, you know, as I did, between the job that I last had and Choose To Thinq, and there is a lot more of this maverick-like behaviour, which has become mainstream now. So we are no longer surprised by a classmate deciding to take some time off, start something new, we are no longer surprised by a family member who's exploring new ideas for some time. Socially, something has clearly changed in all of this. And so going back to your first question, what is future relevance? I think, you know, let's answer it this way. Let's ask, what is future relevance or this conversation about future relevance trying to answer and I think in my mind, there are three questions. One is that because things are shifting shapes, there is so much uncertainty. We need to identify what will be valuable in the future and that half-life of value is now shorter and shorter. And there is this uneven distribution of information. So finding out what is going to be valuable for yourself, for your team. It doesn't matter if it's an individual conversation, or for a team within a larger organization, the site within a larger organization, the organization itself. Finding out what is valuable is something we need to do to stay relevant. The second thing is, once you've identified these destinations, these little goals, these milestones that keep changing, how do you acquire that value? It could be through practice, it could be through knowledge, it could be through networks, it could be through reflection, how do you actually get it, get that capability to deliver that value? And then finally, we realize that there is a perception aspect to it, how do you showcase the fact that you are indeed valuable at these kinds of things? So I think to make it very concrete for our listeners and viewers. Let's take our Smartcast, a year ago, we did not have anything called CTQ Smartcast. And I mean, we've been hearing about podcasts, and we didn't want to be yet another podcast. But what we realized was the value that something like a Smartcast brings. And I'll let you take up the story of what we did to uplevel ourselves to be able to deliver this kind of value, and the perception of the Smartcast.

00:11:05

Harish: Right. Yeah. So when we started with the Smartcast, it was with a lot of trepidation, right? We were not sure whether A, we are cut out for video? The video was not our default medium. B, there were so many podcasts, you know what extra value we will add to the whole universe of podcasts? So that was the trepidation with which we started. But then we realized that just having these conversations with people that we knew were examples of practising some element of future relevance that we saw was a great way of bringing their story to others. And then slowly, we realized that we also had a point of view, it was not just about us asking the question, and just letting the guest take all the talk time, so to say, right. So we realized that they were also in it for actually having a conversation. Right. I'm talking very tactically here in terms of how the smartcast evolved. But I think that is how we actually made these small experiments, we tried out different things, we tried out different formats, how to show the video, and all these things and got feedback, kept getting feedback from both the guests as well listeners. I think one interesting thing that we have done across all our experiments is that some of our colleagues at CTQ are like consumers, who will take a very unbiased view and give us very objective opinions on what sucks and what does not. So we had that blunt discussion on how to make these things better. And I think now we've got to the point where we are talking to different kinds of people, there are leaders, there are writers, there are people who would not fall under the traditional category of leaders and CXOs, but have done something really good and have sort of re-imagined themselves and their place in their world. And we've tried to draw those lessons. So I think that is what we've done with Smartcast. I think if you take a meta-view of this, this is the kind of stuff that we've done throughout our history of Choose To Thinq, right. I mean, if we look at how we started, I still remember when we were sitting in your house, and we were trying to draw that Ikigai diagram, where we were looking at what are we good at? What is the world going to pay us? Trying to form that intersection, the kinds of things that came out, what you mentioned - knowledge, learning, engagement, making things simpler for others to understand. But, that was again, going back to what Clayton Christensen says, that you don't start with a fair sketch of the future that you want to build. You actually start with a pencil sketch because things are going to change, there's going to be some Brownian Motion involved. And then you have to make some random movements, but then largely the sketch is going to remain in that ballpark. Right. So that's how we started. We did various experiments, initially, it was all about just delivering services. We tried some product ideas, again, these are small bets. We did something called Periscope, which was about helping brand managers and marketing agencies use some assets that they can use across brands. Then we did some quizzing products, we did Simple Interest, we tried something Historic, which then became Iconic India. We tried to do a bunch of things, we treated every customer engagement also as a way for rapid shipping and iteration, right? There are so many experiments that we tried out at these places where, again, our clients were also very encouraging and happy to be part of this co-creation, where they saw that these are the kind of things that we'll get to know only once we try. And I think some of these things will be tried for the first time. So there was no history, no precedence to go by. So those are the kinds of small bets that we placed. And again, it was going back to this idea that doesn't go with one prediction, don't try to predict a future, because that is very dangerous, look at possibilities instead of one prediction, and try to plan for futures rather than one future. So those are the kinds of things that we ended up doing. And now I think, over a period of time, we have now evolved into having this point of view on future relevance. And compounding habits that we talk about, again, started off as an internal experiment. People actually asked us, can we join your internal compound, right, and we started posting about it on Twitter. But yeah, those are the kind of things that we have done. And any specific thing that stands out for you in the last six-seven years that we tried, and we did, which was an example of this, and both something which was not subscribing to the future relevance manifesto that we now have?

00:16:54  

Ramanand: Right. Actually, before that, I wanted to mention one aspect, which is that you mentioned how we got these different guests on our Smartcast, a wide variety of them. Also, you mentioned the fact that some of the people we worked with, especially in the early days were very happy to work with us, co-create, and try out new things. And so they had that future relevance mindset. Now, looking back. And similarly, all the people that we've invited on the smartcast, some people we've known for a long time, some people we've written to them, they've looked at what we do, and have been very happy to come on. So, I mean, before I answer the question of the present, I actually want to say that, to be able to do this, we actually had been all the activities that we had invested, or supposedly wasted time on in the preceding years, had all come to that point where this became possible. So it's like, writing your first book, it's the first book which is a summation of everything that you've had in your lifetime, up to that point, and it really plays a big role as an input. So, partly, it was fortunate that some of these people got associated with it, or when we asked, we got a good response. But a lot of it was groundwork, which we had been unwittingly doing ourselves. So that I think, we shouldn't underrate at all. Because all those investments have paid off. In these ways, people were a lot more tolerant with us, ready to partner. And it's almost like building your own taste over time, right. So all that kind of knowledge over time, helped us do these kinds of things, which are now called future relevance. So that is something I wanted to call out because that is something we need to continue to do. We often talk about the role of present relevance versus future relevance. So present relevance for companies, for individuals, comes from whatever they're doing right now. And they're so successful at it, that they forget to disrupt themselves. And that's where the future relevance aspect needs to be deliberately brought in. When we started Choose To Thinq there was no present relevance for us. We were discovering that or trying to create that survival stakes before we could think of future relevance, but it still was 50-50. We did both in parallel, so that was a big shift. So coming back to your question, you know, we did a lot of things that sounded like really weird experiments. I think one of the weirdest experiments we tried, I think, was something called quizzing for parties, or quizzing for companies to celebrate certain occasions. We knew it was a strange idea. We actually got people to pay. That was the more surprising part for a lot of people when they heard of this. But the idea there was really to go beyond just thinking of it as one single point offering but to think of what it is that these people want from an occasion like this, which they have invited us to do a quiz around the person on whose honour the birthday is. And that actually led us to some corporate assignments, as you said, individuals or teams, it's the same thing. So we did it for teams where it was the occasion for the team to celebrate, you know, five years of existence, all the stories that had developed along the way, there were night outs. And that, in turn, led to our whole idea of storification as part of the culture. So really, you do not know how these dots are going to get connected. And so even with these weird sorts of things, even though we no longer do party quizzing, we did a handful of them, we kind of found ourselves in the middle of this network of these interesting people. And party quizzing, by the way, was partly suggested by someone else, it is not something that we invented from scratch.

00:21:05 

Harish: Just to qualify there, you know, party quizzing is not a quiz on Harry Potter for kids. That is not what we did. We actually created a quiz on the person, you know, whose birthday it was, or whose anniversary it was. So it was a way of celebrating that person which, as you mentioned Ramanand, later, we use that knowledge to think about how to storify values and Storify culture and, you know, bring the human side of leaders to teams, that is what we ended up using the knowledge that we gained from those experiments. But yeah, party quizzing, I think we still have the domain name. I think we should have.

00:21:54  

Ramanand: I think we do. And I remember that one place we did this was for Persistent, where it's then CEO, Dr Anand Deshpande. He wanted to do something memorable. He wanted to get people talking about the event. This was 25 years of Persistent and he invited a lot of former Persistent employees, I being one of them. If anyone else would have just said, Let's do dinner. Let's get everyone, there'll be a few awkward speeches. And then you just wait for the food service to begin. But Anand, he said, I really want people to share authentic stories. But I know that just putting a mic in front of them is not going to work. So he came to us saying, “Can you do a quiz around it?'' And then we further deepened the idea, because by then we knew about party quizzing. And it was a very memorable occasion, a lot of these very interesting stories. I knew some of them through folklore. But this became a way for me to dig into the history of that first project, and it led to some very heartwarming on the spot memories that came out and told you what is special about Persistent as an organization. And so all these little experiments, this willingness to try out a few things. Plus, of course, people who give you that space to try out these things have really been aspects to our future relevance, which we now recognize, and are now trying to make sure we don't leave it to chance.

00:23:22  

Harish: In fact, I will go one step further there. I still remember this anecdote that somebody had shared about, I think their first trip to the US. And, you know, he lost the ticket or something and Anand was very calm.

00:23:38  

Ramanand: Yeah. Anand and our storyteller were travelling for the first time. And interesting, this was not a scripted thing, we didn’t know that was going to happen. And he spoke about losing their baggage bag, and they had to meet these clients and completely flustered. Go back to the story.

00:23:57  

Harish: Yeah. And Anand was very calm and composed. I think that was the point at which he developed that feeling about Anand leading the company is great for the company. And for me, I guess. So this whole mythology around companies and how you build that authenticity for leaders. Now, some of these things will be passed on as folklore. You know, this kind of story is great at the time, right? Maybe that person would have shared it with a few people that he or she knew, but that's where it would have ended. But if you think of the power of the story, the kind of things that it is conveying that is what is the culture of the company, and how great the leaders are, and how these people are actually walking the talk, right, the leaders. And that is something which we know gets missed out, right? Because you're not creating that repository of these stories. And I think that is something like you said, what we took out from that event was this whole storifying of the company's culture. And stories, as we know, are the best way of spreading an idea. So yeah, if I, as an outsider, still remember that anecdote. Imagine the other kinds of stories that are still out there, they need to be tapped. Right? So yeah, coming back to the other thing that you thought was not really in tune with our thinking about future relevance, anything that comes to mind?

00:25:36  

Ramanand: Yeah. So I mean, sometimes we did do some tactical sorts of things. So a lot of the content development work that we did comes to mind, when people come to you and you are looking to grow, you take up a lot of different work. And because this tendency towards experimentation is something that we kind of have ingrained at Choose To Thinq. Usually, our default is yes, and we say, let's find out a way to do it. So I remember some of the content projects that we did were very, very sort of mundane, or not really fitting with the overall vision of future relevance. So this happened. But I think we still turned that disadvantage into an advantage. It taught us a little bit about how to manage our time, it taught us how to invest in, say, technology. We've actually written tools to help us generate content, and that is something that we should do because humans are better off doing more interesting, creative sorts of projects. So I think we did sometimes spend time down the wrong rabbit holes because we are really into information and knowledge. And this gives an excuse to write questions about different kinds of topics or explore them. But in retrospect, it didn't really do much for our future relevance. So I think now we have a more nuanced view of saying yes to projects.

00:27:03

Harish: Right. I mean, it did pay us; we never did any of these things for free. You know, we can always say that we ensure that in the journey from x to 10x, I always say the first thing is to keep that x, only then will you go to 10x. So first, is to survive the present as well. So all those projects did help us on that front. But yeah, I think, being judicious and being deliberate about knowing what is it that is very transactional and its role in your life is to take care of your present, versus what is it that is going to keep providing for and building that future is very important. I think we were pretty clear on that. We've been talking about future relevance. And I think I also name-dropped Future Relevance Manifesto and charter. So what is this charter, and manifesto of future relevance that we talk about?

00:28:06  

Ramanand: So the future relevance manifesto is an articulation of our point of view on future relevance. And the first one is something we've discussed already, which is that, fundamentally, no one can predict the future. And it's really hard for anyone to take a single stance anymore on what the future will turn out like. So first, think in terms of futures, like you said, the plural, which means multiple different scenarios, some of them very good, some of them not so good. And some of them, completely open-ended, can come from any side of the field. So, therefore, the first entry in our manifesto is possibilities over predictions, think of it as a portfolio of bets. So you will have some small bets, we'll have some big bets. So the first one is about not putting your money behind just one horse, but trying and back a horse in a race, maybe more than one horse in a single race, and also think of other animals for other reasons. The second one, is this whole thinking about what is going to be valuable? What is going to help you build that capability towards driving that value? And how to build that perception about being valuable? So these three things, those three questions we spoke about earlier, being able to answer them and to keep doing this. Because again, the world is shifting, the answer to these questions is also going to be shifting. The third entry in this is once you've discovered all of this is to start levelling up but to do it very systematically. So we have a phrase or a concept called Future Stack, where we say that a bunch of skills, mindsets, traits that you will need to be relevant. So you know you consciously work towards that. And you kind of think of what all you need to add to that future stack. And some things you need to maybe drop from your future stack, as well. And along with things like knowledge and practice, I think we're very keen on reflection. So reflection is a big part of this because that's going to keep telling you whether you're progressing or not. And one trap that we all often tell people is that you've done all these exercises, you came up with a manifesto-like this, and then the present kind of intervenes, right. So your future relevance is a problem of, it's important, but not urgent. And so we often tell people that's what you need to be aware of. So it has to be as much about the systematic side, as it is about the upleveling side. So far, we've talked about possibilities over prediction, becoming valuable and learning what is going to be valuable, then actually systematically up levelling. So the remaining three, the fourth item on this list is creating that deliberate system and culture, which will allow these things to happen even if you are sort of not consciously paying attention to it. Allowing the system one of the team, or have the individuals to just go with the flow and get it done. So this is where, you know, defining your values, defining what are the practices, using stories to convey those practices in real life, all those things really come. So we've really discovered the power of culture, especially in the last two years. The next one is what we call compounding or compounding habits. So we all know the power of compounding in a world of investing. In fact, what you said earlier about these trivial things like capturing a story happens. And you know, you lose your baggage, how you respond to it becomes a little bit of an interesting note in your mind. But the trivial done regularly, systematically done repeatedly can have this outsized view. So I tell you the story, you tell that story to five other people, it just can compound from that onwards. And so you really don't know the fact that people build this entire perception about an organization based on just maybe one story told 100 times to 1000 different people. So there is a huge compounding effect, not just in finances, but in the world of knowledge, but in the world of social networks. And so compounding habits is something that had to be part of our future relevance manifesto. And the last thing is that for compounding to really work for your culture, really to pay dividends, this is going to be a long game. Paradoxically, individuals have longer career spans, but teams seem to have, an organization seem to be, therefore fewer and fewer times on these Fortune 500 lists and other such lists. So individuals need to take that long game and organizations need to invest in individuals and give them that long game. And so together, this forms our future relevance manifesto.

00:33:07  

Harish: Right. So just trying to sum it up here. The first one is possibilities over predictions. The second one is becoming valuable. The third is systematic upleveling. Fourth is being deliberate about your culture. Fifth is compounding and sixth is being ready to play the long game. Right? 

00:33:29

Ramanand: That's right. 

00:33:30

Harish: Yeah. So now that we've listed these points from our future relevance manifesto, how does Choose To Thinq work on its future relevance, right? I mean, what are the things that we do, which are in sync with this, that have come out as a result of our thinking around these aspects of the future relevance?

00:33:53  

Ramanand: Right. So let's start with possibilities over predictions. So, you know, I think we are all aware that the way everyone is going to work and live in the forthcoming few years, is going to be very digital, it's going to be very networked, it's going to be very diverse, you may be working with a wide variety of people across ages, background, sometimes you may not even know their true diversity. Because they're just a handle for you. And so being able to work in an environment like this is something that we've recognized. In fact, before this, we didn't talk so much about the fact that we went remote or we were distributed right from day one. And for us, in fact, it didn't even sound like such a big thing, because it was just a point of view that had organically developed for us over a period of time and felt like that's what the future was going to be like. But today, everyone talks about hybrid work. And I think for us, it was a no-brainer, I think it came long back. So there are different possible ways in which you could practice remote work and we've done our share of working. We have actually all been entirely remote. We work from different cities and continents, on occasion. We've gotten together under the same roof to do a few pomodoros together. So we've taken these different scenarios, what happens if we all need to work together? Can we do it? What happens if we need to meet in a conference room and kind of have that all hands equivalent for Choose To Thinq? So we've always kind of never put ourselves in a box. So these kinds of things have been part of our possibilities over predictions, we never said that the world is going to be remote in a few years, therefore, we should adopt this. We said, “Yeah, this is what we want to try out. Let's try these different possibilities.” One question I actually wanted to ask you, because you in some sense are the first line of contact for people at Choose To Thinq, and you meet a wide variety of people. Is that from when you see that ecosystem under which Choose To Thinq operates, how do you see this first point or the first many aspects of our manifesto reflecting in the choices we made about how to be part of that ecosystem?

00:36:11  

Harish: I think, you know, this is something that one of our clients, friends, well-wishers, KS Prashant also uses a lot, right. I think he uses the term Metaverse or Hyperspace. So I think that is something which we should look at, when we talk about the word ecosystem, it is not just about you as a company, you're always going to be limited by what you can achieve as a company. Right? So we have always tried to take advantage of everyone, anyone and everyone out there in that hyperspace. And look at what is the disproportionate amount of value that we can generate. Right? So they've been doing this, just as taking the example of this decision to go remote, right? Always be remote. If you look at how a traditional organization sees that decision, I really need to have an office space. If not, I need to go and take a coworking space for some people, and, you know, let people go hybrid, which is what most people are thinking of doing right now. But we actually look at all possible partners in our ecosystem, from pubs to cafes, which a lot of startups also do. We also looked at a startup then I think, which doesn't exist anymore, but which used to allow us to rent office spaces, right? So you look at all of these things. So don't restrict yourself to the capability that you as an organization, as a closed unit possesses, but look at the whole ecosystem and look, assume that as your capability. Just thinking like that suddenly changes your horizon, suddenly changes the expanse to which you want to look at, I think that is something which we've been very good at, and been very shameless about as well. That these are all things that are there to be exploited there to be taken. So I think that is something which we have tried to do, and I think going forward for not just us or companies of our size, everyone needs to start thinking about that, right. I mean, some of these things have been timeless, right? I mean, your auto companies have always tried to develop their vendors and try to think about their welfare. This concept of building those vendors, because when they succeed, that's when the larger organization also succeeds. It's the same thing for everyone. Think of all your potential partners who are not working with you right now. But how can you leverage this power? And not just restrict yourself? Don't try to slice it away and say that, yeah, that person, that company, not part of what we're doing. And this is something which we've used in some of our work where we have worked with a lot of freelancers, right? We think of freelancers as companies of one, right? The traditional way of thinking about this is that if I want the content to be created if I want events to be hosted, I need to have this content creator, I need to have these hosts on my rolls. But then just imagine the on the ground situation that you've hired someone. That person doesn't have enough work for the entire duration of the day, they may just get frustrated, right? What am I doing here, and you just try to create work for them, which is not ideally the kind of work they want to do, or what will create value for the company, but you want to keep that person occupied because you're hiring them, and now you think you own 8 hours of their time. So these are the kinds of things where, working with freelancers, being open and transparent with them, this is where we think you can, you know, deliver great value, this something is of interest to you. We've hired freelancers, we've had a very stringent empanelment process with checklists and guidelines, just to make sure that they really love what they're wanting to do. And I've heard this from some of the people that have worked with us that enjoy working with us a lot more than their so-called day job. Some people have left their day jobs because they got a taste of what they always wanted to do, and realized that they can make a career out of it. And some of them are still working with us as partners. But yeah, that's the view that I think we should be taking when we're talking about this whole ecosystem. And again, it's about questioning that traditional thought process, which is where we are saying think of possibilities, rather than going with one prediction. 

00:41:41

Ramanand: Right, just wanted to take off on what you just said. This experimentation of physical spaces and different models of working. We’ve also done that in the digital realm because that is increasingly becoming everyone’s second home. So whether it’s a space to do just engagement or just learning, all these community apps. We just go in, dabble in, we try it internally. So there is that desire to explore these possibilities as soon as they come up. We can see some early adopters in Choose To Thinq employees in their own respective ways. Another thing I realised just as we speak is that words like employees and career is not something that we should be using. We’ve often spoken about this film crew model where people come together for a project and they disband sometimes. What it means is that, yes, when a project ends, you are pitching a project even to your freelancer or your so-called employee, you can’t take them for granted and say we have a relationship where you will expect work from me and I will dump work on you. And that’s how it goes. I almost see it as I need to persuade this person to get interested in this project, I’ve to pitch it to them. The power balance may still be in my favour but I cannot see them and treat them as employees. Similarly, as you said, they like working with us. A lot of people have told us that they like our process of interviewing because there’s a lot of interesting things in it. But instead of a career, we should substitute, they don’t see that they will build a career with us, they know that their future relevance is a lot more secure with us. Or that’s the direction they would like to move in and again, they are using us in the same way that we are using them. I’m using the word ‘using’ in a very non-judgemental sort of way. We are really leveraging the power of the ecosystem and because we are going to live in this network and diverse world, all these are the skills we need. We encourage people to go and try out new things, ask for help, offer help, and all of this was not incentivised earlier. But if you are not going to do this now, you are going to be irrelevant. I think that’s our point of view.

00:44:14

Harish: Yeah, I’ll also ask you about any specific, deliberate thing we do at Choose To Thinq that is aimed at making sure that we are thinking about possibilities over predictions. Is there something that we do?

00:44:31

Ramanand: Yeah, two things. If you see, one, from a business point of view, a wide variety of projects that teach us a lot of things and then we put our muscle behind one of them. Just to give an example, we’ve often done interesting projects. For instance, can you help us reframe our onboarding process? We are not experts necessarily in onboarding but we are experts in thinking afresh. That's what we did for that company. And it came around a time when they were starting to offer remote jobs. From what I hear, that experiment really kickstarted a new way of onboarding. So we do spread our activities over a range of things that can be a strength and a weakness as we discussed earlier in this episode. But internally, once we realized that we need to keep discussing these scenarios, we need to discuss, what if we did not have power? Because we are so entirely dependent on our electricity and the internet. So this scenario is something we shouldn’t take for granted and so over time, we decided that we need to have a systematic way to keep learning and keep putting ourselves in these future scenarios, however trivial they may seem. So we started something called the Weekly Future Ring wherein we asked one question to each other, we took turns in answering, there are often these scenarios which are about one practice at work that we think will become obsolete. You answered something like identification, coming into the organisation and having to show your identity. That is probably different now as you don’t have a physical office to prove your access to things. In fact, we have been running some scenario sessions for companies around hybrid work. Someone said maybe you need to add their vaccination status to be able to enter an office. So scenarios that come from the realm of imagination, it is not so much about getting the answer right, it is about keeping the muscle, if you are in this position what would you do?

00:46:49

Harish: Yeah. I think it is, A, being ready to face these kinds of scenarios and not be surprised or shocked like a deer caught in the headlights. You don’t get frozen because you suddenly are put off by the situation because every day, every week in the normal you are imagining these scenarios. So nothing basically surprises you is the message.

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