Consultancy

It is very easy to present yourself as a consultant but very difficult to sell yourself as a consultant. Every individual has a thinking brain which acts according to situation, time, resources, past experiences, educational qualifications, biases and heuristics. Those actions may or may not yield planned positive outcome all the time.

Whenever the outcome is not as planned, then thinking brains sit down to find the answer, which they call brainstorming. And when they fail to find the answer and demand of the expertise is for long period of time, they opt for a new employee, but when the demand is for the short term, then they opt for the services of a consultant. As mentioned in the first line itself, presenting yourself as consultant is very easy but selling yourself as consultant is very difficult. I have broken down the answer of this challenge in five parts:

-If organization perceives the problem as complex, so make it complex for them: If you make the problem easy to understand, then why would someone hire you. Let the problem remain complex for them either resources wise, time wise or knowledge wise.

-Don’t go for discovery journey: C-Suite people don’t enjoy being questioned. They assume that person coming to him/her has already done the research and ready with the answer. This may seem against the established sales norm, which demands us to know the customer’s need, but these customers don’t fit into that category and more so when it is about their business.

-Only you are the right person: Consultancy proposals are sold to C Suite people who are already well informed but have paucity of time to address the challenge. So, discussing numbers with them won’t cut the haze. Present your credentials, talk about the insights and offer the solution.

-C –Suite professionals have complex ‘Status Quo Bias’ – While a C-suite professionals hate status quo bias among his employees, but they like to maintain status quo for themselves. So, it is very important to know as maximum as possible about the person you are going to meet.

-Use loss aversion bias in your favor- Though everyone hates to lose money, but in an organization, a lower level employee will be more bothered about doing his/her part of job than its financial implications. Only C-suite professionals hold control over financial matters and they need to be convinced that any delay in applying the solution will cost the business dearly.

In the time of conflict and fear due covid19 pandemic many people are on edge. They are seeing no light at the end of the tunnel. In this situation, it is well understood that mind goes to travel many places, often unpleasant one. But, that's not how life is to be lived in this difficult situation. Hormones related to stress, cortisol and adrenaline clogs the neural network and slows down the thinking process. Our behavior during conflict, fear and pain is quite obvious, though it is not desirable. 

There are steps to come out of it and they are: 

1) Acceptance: First and foremost action needed is to accept that present situation is not normal and not good. Our mind has many biases and heuristics, optimism and confirmation bias are two of them. If we don't accept the present situation and try to believe something else, then our mind will make us believe so and keep us forcing to confirm our created reality. 

You will ask that why does our mind create a new reality?

Our mind always has a ‘big picture’ of our life. Information arriving through our senses keeps getting merged into our pre- existing memories to confirm and sometime update our belief system about ourselves and the world. In the case of anomalous information which doesn’t fit our big picture, it tries to smooth the discrepancies and anomalies to preserve the coherence of self, our internal narrative and the ‘big picture’. Sometime it outrightly denies the situation, sometime rationalizes, sometime confabulates, sometime intellectualizes, so on and so forth but it does its best to protect the coherence of self and internal narrative. 

2) Live in present: The moment we create a new reality, mind becomes optimistic and starts confirming to this new reality. It automatically shifts the starting point of our journey. If starting point of our journey is not right, then how come end will be right? 

So, being aware of the present and staying in it is extremely important.

3) Mindfulness: There is more than enough written and spoken about mindfulness, so, I won’t go on to elaborate what it is and how it should be done. What I understand for my benefit is that mindfulness is keeping only those information in my mind which is necessary to move forward for my betterment. 

Our mind receives more than two hundred thousand times of information per second which it can process. You can very well imagine what would be its situation in just one day if it doesn’t filter most of the information out it receives. Our mind’s primary job is to protect the body it lives in and everything revolves around this core principle.

While a part of mind keeps doing its work to stop information overload, there has to be conscious effort to push away the information which are stopping the positive growth.

4) Remain alert: It is definite that post Covid19 world will not be the same. Every upheaval shakes up the old world order and creates new. While there are many defined steps which helps us to succeed in life, but one thing which often gets ignored and has rightfully elaborated by Malcolm Gladwell in his bestseller “Outliers” that grabbing the opportunity when it comes up goes a long way in determining the success of a person. So, if you don’t accept the reality, you are not living in present and have not pushed away the information which blocking your growth, how can you remain alert and if you are not alert, then how will you grab the opportunity when it comes knocking your door.

5) Make above four points a automatic habit: Every moment, billions of neurons in our mind connects with each other tens of thousand times, which can be excitatory or inhibitory and on or off, making permutation of all these numbers of possible brain states exceed number of elementary particles in the known universe. So, things are not simple as it seems. 

That’s why, we need to keep repeating the first four points and turn it into an automatic habit; then only, our growth and success will be remain sustainable and consistent.

This ongoing crisis of Covid19 is already taking many jobs beyond the possibility; part of it due to the crisis and part of it due to the unknown fear of financial and economic uncertainty. A business leader or an HR-Head is also a human being and will succumb to his/her memories and heuristics. So, some very talented candidates will also lose the job during this period, as it happened during 2008 US Subprime crisis.

But this time is not the time to sit and curse this challenge but this is the time to focus on your personal brand. As some talented people may lose job during this pandemic covid19 due to the fear of uncertainty, they will be picked up again much sooner than they can expect when economy picks up steam once again. They are just needed to stay focused on building their personal brand and communicating it to the target audience.

Many neuroscience researches says that human brain receives more than 11 million bit data but can process not more than 50 bit per second and that's why, many decisions are made even before blinking the eye. Robert Cialdiani, the bestselling author of “Influence” and “Pre-suation” has rightly said that we "pay" attention of something which is important to us because we trade it off with attention on something else which we don’t find important.

The first process of brand decision involves forming the representations of choice alternatives- that is, brand identification. This entails processing of incoming information, so that different options for choice are identified. At the same time, your customer needs to integrate the information on internal states (candidate requirement to fill the position) with external states (job description and requirements).

Humans are predominantly visual creatures and most of the information we receive is visual. Even if receive the information through other senses, we try to visualize the image of the product. Milosavljevic, Koch and Rangel in their research paper in 2011 had indicated that consumers can identify two different food brands and make their mind about which they prefer in as little as 313 milliseconds or roughly one third of a second. I am not saying that you are a food brand, but what’s wrong in becoming so desirable. Just think over it.

Recent studies in neuroscience indicate the four fundamentals of attention: 1) saliency filters or bottom up features 2) Top-down control 3) competitive visual selection; and 4) Working memory. First one is saliency filters or bottom up features, which means what you have in you to offer. Bottom up or saliency filters automatically select most important information from all the available information. So, if your elevator pitch, salient features of your personal brand is not fitting in with the memory and heuristics of your recruiter, then you will definitely not be picked up despite all your talent when they are in rush. Your cognitive load can’t hold too much of information at one time and so of your recruiter’s. Economy will start picking up the steam sooner than later. Human mind can’t stay in pain for too long; it will fight back to gain control over the situation. And when it will start picking up the steam, your recruiters will be in hurry to fill the position and then your bottom up information should be ready for them to pick you up among the crowd.

How can you do that:

1) Make of list of what you stand for

2) Make a list of your destinations

3) Connect the dots of what you stand for and what where are your destinations

4) Take help of your colleagues who can critically advise you

5) If possible, talk to your boss from either current or previous organizations and discus what you have prepared

6) Create a back story and start communicating it along with your check list on the regular basis with your target audience using social media, messaging apps, direct call and one to one meetings.

7) Another option will be to take help of manpower consultants and have been doing the work of profile creation and personal branding, because they have been working in the thick and thin of recruitment work.

One time final request; don’t waste your time on cursing the pandemic; it is what it is. When it will retreat, it will leave behind a fertile land, on which you can grow the tree of your successful life.

First time I read any book on behavioural economics was “Thinking Fast and Slow” by Nobel award winning Psychologist Daniel Kanheman around six years back and I got blown over by it. Having spent better part of my life in food retail, understanding human behaviour through historical data collected through weekly or monthly sales was quite a task, because the element of biases, heuristics, noise etc. are something I had just assumptions but no authoritarial backing. Many a times, standing on the floor of the store, I could sense the consumer behaviour but could not call it a behavioural pattern of financial decision making due to not being exposed to psychology part of human decision making. Nature of the job was to achieve the sales numbers, so academic aspect of conclusions coming from data never became a topic of discussion among peers and colleagues.

As my curiosity increased in this subject, I pursued many online courses available across different platforms and read many books on it along with neuroeconomics, neuromarketing and neuro-consumer Science. In this pursuit, I recently found a book “Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioural Economics”, written by Richard H. Thaler and published in 2015. Mr. Thaler is known as father of Behavioural Economics and won Nobel Prize for Economics in 2017.

This books describes his journey of exploring, experimenting, understanding, consolidating and presenting the role of different human behaviour behind economic decision making more famously known as “biases and heuristics”, the names given by famous Daniel Kanheman and Amos Tversky.

Written in eight blocks (Beginnings, Mental Accounting, Self-Control, Interlude, Working with Danny, Engaging with the Economics Profession, Finance, Welcome to Chicago, Helping Out) divided in thirty three chapters, this book is a revealation of a completely new dynamics of human financial decision making and revelation to read for anyone who is even not conversant with the idea of either psychology or economics.

From Endowment Effect to The List to Value Theory to The Gauntlet to Bargains and Rip-Offs to Sunk Cost to Buckets and Budgets to The Willpower to The Planner and The Doer to Misbehaving in the Real World to What Seems Fair to Fairness games to end with Save Money Tomorrow, Going Public and Nudging in U.K, this book is the journey of Behavioural Economics with the father of very concept himself.

I simply love the concept of “Endowment Effect”. We overvalue what we have regardless to what is its market value. If we are asked to pay surcharge to facilitate credit card transaction cost, we frown over that, but if that surcharge is included in the product cost, we don’t mind because that’s not obvious to us. While two are one and the same thing, but not getting discount is just a lost opportunity cost for the consumers while paying extra for credit card transaction looks like direct cost. This is not only true for the economic decisions but for ideological view points as well. People value their opinion more over others and they go out in public just to confirm their opinion. “Endowment Effect” coupled with “confirmation bias” becomes “myside bias”, the reason behind big ideological divides.

Mental accounting is another topic which I find fascinating. Recently I bought a laptop for Rs.39.450/- for multitasking of a little lesser known brand. I got a Rs.1500/- instant discount due the tie-up between my credit card issuing bank and seller. Few days later, another Rs.1250/- cash back was credited to my wallet. Along with the features, company offered two years service warranty as against of one year given by other known brands and I got one year Microsoft 365 subscription free as well. I had done good two weeks research before buying the laptop and had seen umpteen videos and read thousands of reviews of different brands before making this decision. Laptop of known brands with similar features and warranty were at more than Rs.65,000/-. So when I made this decision, got this product, set up my device and Microsoft account, I found it very smooth in operation. It proved to be great bargain for me. After that whomsoever I told about the purchase, I not only explained the discount and cash back, but also the cost of one year Microsoft 365 Subscription, cost of 1 TB storage on cloud, and cost of one extra years’ warranty. Before that, I was against the idea of having cloud storage space, because I not only found it costly but leaving the responsibility of my data on someone else. Hard Drive Storage meant complete control over my data to me. But after getting it along with Few days back, I had almost made the decision to buy a laptop for Rs.61,000/- with the same features but somehow I ended up not buying it. So, my satisfaction level from making the purchase decision which I made is like absolute bargain.

This book is full of real life experiments and examples and is a must read for everyone who wants to know the science behind financial decision making.

You can buy the book following this link Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioural Economics