So do YOU have a Toilet at home?!

Well this was what a US Technical manager asked the Indian Program Manager on his first visit to Indian operations. This bouncer came during the team lunch and the whole team didnt knew for a second how to help their program Manager with an answer. Luckily I wasnt part of that Team and the lunch. But by the end of the day almost all in the business unit came to know about it.

The discussion started with a routine overview of the Indian culture, the population, the jugaad innovations and slowly meandered into the grey areas plaguing us. While the Indians were at their vocal best at the start, the tables turned towards the end. The American boss had more points about Indias weaker side than we ever thought. The poverty, population, infrastructure menace and at the end the discussion meandered to largest open toilet in the world, Indian railways. He thought the Toilet always meant open for the vast majority of Indians. That may seem to be ignorance for us but for him the small packet of information modeled his perception and imagery of the entire Indian population. This fueled him to ask about the Program manager sanitary ways too.

The Indian boss even though caught unaware fought back valiantly and ended the discussion about the benefits of water over toilet paper. At the end it was another of that west meets east story gone bad. I thought the US guy might be that racial, ignorant, sarcastic gentleman! But later believed this may be an instance when he just over blew the small bubbles of knowledge and experience he had. The small bubbles of knowledge he had formed a mental model in him.

Amental modelis an explanation of someone'sthoughtprocess about how something works in the real world. It is a representation of the surrounding world, the relationships between its various parts and a person's intuitive perception about his or her own acts and their consequences. Mental models can help shapebehaviorand set an approach to solving problems (akin to a personal algorithm) and doing tasks. Kenneth Craiksuggested in 1943 that the mind constructs "small-scale models" of reality that it uses to anticipate events.

The same mental models work on different ways at all levels. In business scenarios, many a times, the foreign division heads have a unified mental model of Indian Market. They think it as a monolithic market place of 1.2 Bn Population with common taste and flavors and gets perceived us a huge consumerist pie on offer. They pitch their successes in Brazil, Thailand and Philippines and feel the same models can be replanted here. The past experiences, successes, failures and perceptions in other markets create a set behavior and action plan. The company then decides a strategy based on their existing mental models. But the ground reality may often be very different. One of the most glaring example can be seen in the failure of products which did exceedingly well in so called similar markets. I also had been witness to market studies which had proved on hindsight that products which are doing well in other similar countries dont necessarily do well here. The mental models are formed by the lazy extrapolation of our understanding and perceptions of the knowns into the unknowns.

One of the surveys we recently conveyed on Communicative leadership also came out with startling revelations of mental models at work. We had asked respondents to rate which are the most important communication traits needed in a leader and then we asked who fares better in each of the trait; Men or Women. We found that respondents who had worked with only Male leaders overwhelmingly preferred Men over women on most of the traits. But Popularity of men on the traits declined steeply when respondents happened to work under both leaders. This should imply that the mental models were at work at both the places and we tend to take irrational decisions based on it.

All the above three cases served me as classic examples of mental models at play wherein your proximity to a particular environment created mental models, which had a say on your preferences, choices and behavior.