Failure is great! - our learnings from our recent Alchemy batch

Recently, we conducted an Alchemy program where the outcomes were not as per our expectation. We scored our lowest ever NPS and participant feedback rating. (NPS was 0 against our average of 50% and rating was 4.1 vs. our average of 4.6). The client was less effusive than our usual clients and our own experience of conducting the program was less than fulfilling.

While we regained perspective that we were comparing against a very high trend and the rating was still higher than our minimum acceptable base (3.5), we took this opportunity to reflect on what we could learn from this experience.

First, a quick overview about Alchemy. Alchemy is a program for personal and professional transformation where participants gain awareness of their hitherto unexamined ways of being. Once aware, they are invited to choose whether they want to continue their existing mindsets and habits or choose differently, based on their personal vision of their lives. Most participants realise that the person they have become is just a function of their unconscious decisions during their formative years, based on what helped them survive. These strategies for survival become our strengths and weaknesses and we are often stuck with them. Once we reclaim authorship of our life and realise that these strengths or weaknesses can limit our progress towards our vision, we can choose differently. Alchemy then goes on to help participants practice new mindsets and habits that can help them move towards their personal visions with velocity.

The program is confrontational and unconventional. It pushes participants to come out of their comfort zones. Having been used to 18-20 years of education that is primarily knowledge transfer and not used to reflection and meta-cognition, participants initially struggle to turn the mirror on themselves. Also, having honed their strategies for survival, they mistake them for who they are and are not comfortable examining them. Very often, the amygdala fires and they see the coach's questions as an attack on their identity or self-perception. The coaches doggedly pursue participants in getting them to take action in their life. All this creates a love-hate relationship between the coaches and participants, where the participants hate the insistence but love the impact it creates in their lives.

We are used to participants resenting and resisting us. We are used to them grudgingly doing their home practice. But one thing that has consistently made it worth it, is that participants make progress. Their leadership capacity improves. They report higher levels of fulfilment in relationships, higher effectiveness at work and higher productivity in life. In this batch, while the resentment and resistance was there, the balancing fulfilment and effectiveness was less than expected!

We promote two fundamental mindsets in Alchemy: One, a Growth Mindset (In any situation, focus on what you can learn) and second, Being the Cause (In any situation, focus on what you can do)

Putting them into practice, this is what we learnt from this experience:
We need to make the program opt-in: We realise that we can only coach those who are willing to be  coached. Coaching is a dyad - its gets done through the pair of a coach and coachee. No coach can outperform his coachee. We found that those who embraced and practiced the program, made progress as per their feedback. Those who resisted and pretended, did not. Next time, we'll conduct an orientation for prospective participants to share 'what to expect' and then invite them to opt-in.

We need to work on Trust while being unreasonable in our expectations from the participants: We make demands on the participants that might appear unreasonable to them, esp in their existing paradigms. Usually, people want to 'understand' something or 'get convinced' before they take action. We ask them to reverse the order and 'give it a go' before evaluating whether it makes senses or not. This required them to trust us - we could have done more to generate this trust.

We need to continuously generate the context of being a coach: It is easy to lapse into our humanity and allow our usual disempowering contexts and identities to take over. Our desire to be liked, our desire to be admired and our desire to be right is part of our survival toolkit. As a coach, we need to continuously stay above these survival strategies and be used by the context of being a coach - being and doing whatever is need for our participants' progress. We need to take us out of the equation. One or two times, I felt we were at the impact of the participants' reaction and this created an unnecessary vicious cycle, where our response further re-inforced their reaction.

We need to up our game further: Every participant found something that they could take away for practice in their life. That being the case, there were a few parts of the program where the participants didn't feel as compelled to take action. We need to prepare alternate 'ways into' the participants that can spur them into action when our existing ways do not cut it.

5 days after the program ended, we're thankful for the experience. Continued success and glowing feedback from previous batches meant that conducting Alchemy for a certain set of people was within us. The feedback and rating from this batch, indicated that conducting it for every profile, situation and context was still outside of us. That's a potential area for growth. Now that we know it, we can choose to grow or not.

In line with our mission of continuously pursuing excellence in developing leaders, we choose to put these learnings into practice and become better in what we do.

Failure is Great!

Helping students understand Science or Maths - the importance of reading comprehension.

Rahul studies at Nyalkaran School in Class 7th. His father is very proud that his child goes to an English Medium school and is doing well. At Nyalkaran, the teacher comes into the class and reads aloud the chapter from the book. She then asks a student to stand up and read aloud a paragraph. The next student then gets to stand up and read aloud the next paragraph. This goes on till all students have read or the chapter is over.

Assuming that being able to read means that students have understood, the teacher then either dictates answers to the book-back questions or writes them down on the blackboard. Rahul copies them down and then commits them to memory. Come the term exams, he mugs up the answers and then goes and answer the questions. More often than not, he gets 70% marks or a B / B+ grade making his parents believe that while their boy is not a topper, he is in the top half of the class and therefore, doing reasonably well.

Give Rahul a book of Class 7th and he would read it with reasonable fluency. Ask him what it means and he draws a blank. Last time, I met Rahul, I asked him to bring his Science book. I opened it to the chapter on Motion and asked him if he had read it in school and completed it. He nodded in the affirmative. I asked him to read it for me. 'Oscillory Motion', he read 'is when an object moves to and fro from a mean position' referring to Oscillatory Motion. I asked him: what does this mean? He looked at me blankly. 'Can you show me oscillatory motion', I asked. Again blank. I said, 'Hindi men samjha do'. Blank, again. 'Nahin aata to koi baat nahi' I said soothingly. 'Nahi aata' he admitted.

I asked him to bring his Maths book and tried the same thing with word problems. No comprehension. His English books and Social Studies books have the same challenge. He can read but doesn't understand. Since he can't understand, he just mugs it up. Commits the answers to his short term memory and then vomits them out during his exam.

The challenge with students such as Rahul is that by memory and sight reading, they are able to recognise letter shapes, break up words and read text. But since they do not have the vocabulary and haven't learnt inferencing, they are unable to make sense of their reading. It is something like we being able to read a French text because we are familiar with the script but can't understand because we are not familiar with the semantics of the language. Reading Fluency is necessary but not a sufficient condition for Reading Comprehension.

Most teachers and educators do not understand this. Even those who know, do not apply it enough in identifying student challenges. Most problems that are seen as IQ problems or 'not good in science', 'not good in Maths' or 'not good in ICT' are actually problems of literacy - specifically of reading comprehension.

Mohit, another Class 6 student, was scratching his head in his class when I visited his school. The teacher had just given a unit test for formative assessment and most students had finished and left while he was still grappling with the questions. The teacher was mouthing soothing homilies such as: 'It is ok Mohit, concentrate'. 'Read the question carefully beta, it is ok, you can answer'. Poor Mohit would just stare harder at the test paper and then pretend to solve the question.

As I got closer to him and looked over his shoulder, I saw that he was merely copying the question to appear to be trying. I got down on my haunches to get to his eye level and asked him: Can you read this question to me? He read: 'The following are the steps in no particular order that one needs to follow, in order to prepare soup. Convert these steps from a bullet point order list into a numbered list in the correct order.'
Below it were written 6 steps like:

• Add ingredients to water
• Chop vegetables
• Stir the mixture
• Add salt and spice to vegetables
• Warm water
• Serve it in bowls

I put my hands over his shoulder and asked: Have you seen this question before?
No, he shook his head.
Do you know what does this question means?
He said: 'The following are the steps in no particular order............' and went on to repeat the question.
I said: Question samajh mein aaya?
He nodded his head in the negative.
I said: Ok, let's break it up. What does convert mean?
Don't know he indicated with a shake of his head.
Convert means change, I said. Does this list have bullet points?
Yes, he said.
So we need to change it. Change it into what, I asked? I pointed towards the phrase 'numbered list'.
He said: Change it into numbered list.

Second, what does correct order mean? Like 1,2,3,4 is correct order. Is 4,2,1,3, correct order?
No, he said.
So correct order means 'things are in the place they should be in'. Now look at this list. Do you know how to make soup?
Yes he said.
So check if this list is in correct order?
He read it. Then questions started tumbling out: What does ingredient mean? What does stir mean? As I explained the meaning, he started to put numbers on the list and slowly he had ranked the list in an order that made sense to him.

Does this look like the correct order of making soup? I goaded him.
Yes, he nodded.
Ok, now what do you have to do?
Write it down? he enquired.
Yeah, go ahead.
He went ahead and wrote down the list in the correct order as per him in a numbered list.

I wasn't keen to correct him on the order, just wanted to make sure he got a fair chance at attempting the question. Robbed of his strategy of mugging up answers to familiar questions, he was struggling. Armed with the ability to understand, he could solve.

If you give the same book back questions, the answers to which you have dictated in your class, don't be surprised if your students score well. And don't act surprised when the same students struggle in an ASSET or an external exams where they are not able to use the strategy of mugging up answers.

Courtesy: teacherpayteachers.com

Most knowledge areas need a language to access them. If the student has not built up the language ability of that Grade level, he will have to resort to mugging up, because the other faculty - of making sense and understanding - is unavailable to him. This is especially true for students whose mother tongue is not English (which is majority of India!). Making learning experiential is another strategy to drive understanding but it cannot completely compensate for literacy gaps.

Do check if your students' literacy levels are at Grade level. We often think of English as a subject and we forget that it is actually a gateway to access other subjects. Without solid reading fluency and comprehension, students will struggle to understand other subjects. Fixing literacy gaps of your students is of paramount importance before you start fixing their Maths, Science or ICT knowledge through remedials or tuitions

If you need help in checking Literacy levels, let me know.

Convocation address at Universal Group of Colleges

My dear friend Aaditya Lohana invited me to preside over the convocation of Graduate and post Graduate students of the group of 5 colleges that he mentors. Even though the occasion fell on our wedding anniversary, Smita sportingly agreed to accompany me. The event had the chaotic energy of youth and the desperate orderliness of experience all enmeshed into a packed hall. I chose to shorten my talk to the students, sensing their restlessness and eagerness to cut to the case. Here goes:

Good Afternoon Everyone!
An interesting thing happened to me when Aaditya called me and invited me to this ceremony. I went back to my convocation, 16 years back at IIM Ahmedabad. I remember where it took place, I remember that my parents had come for the occasion, I remember meeting some of my friends’ parents. I even remember that I was wearing the convocation robes. Beyond that I do not remember anything.
Nothing. I do not remember who gave me my degree. I do not remember who the Main Speaker was, let alone remembering what he said.

So as I stand today here in front of you, I wonder: What can I say that can make a difference in your life, so that 16 years later, you remember me?

Over the last 16 years, I have had the opportunity to interview more than 500 people as CEO of Zee Learn Limited and Managing Director at Leadership Boulevard. And I have noticed 2 things while meeting these eager young people. One, while most have good degrees, degrees do not assure knowledge. Second, while a lot of young people intend to do well, they have not learnt the skills required to lead their life effectively.

So, I want to leave you with 2 things. Just 2 things that I believe, if you imbibe in your life, nothing will come between you and success, whichever way you define success.

First, your learning does not end with getting a degree. In fact, it starts with it. Because your degree gives you the license to go learn from the biggest teacher of all - LIFE. Those of you who will always focus on learning from a situation will continue to grow and lead a happy, successful life. Those who'll focus on how they look in a situation and focus on proving how good they are, will soon find out that when learning stops, growth stops. So my first mantra to you is: Never stop learning. As long as you are alive - for the next 30, 40, 50 years, keep learning and growing.

Second, the answers you get in life depend on the questions you ask. In any situation, always ask what you can do, instead of asking who is to blame or why did this happen to me. Asking 'what I can do', leads to action and action moves you forward. Asking 'who is to blame' leads to people getting defensive and you going on witch hunts - neither moves you forward. Whether it is your country, your company or your family - always focus on what you can do, instead of blaming or pointing fingers.

Dear Students - Today is a great day for you. Let your hair down, celebrate, have fun - you've earned it!

And as you adopt these 2 mindsets, there is nothing that can come in the way of you leading a successful life. And hopefully, 16 years later, you’ll remember this day and you’ll remember me.

Thank you smile emoticon