They say it takes different people to make up the world. It is the way people think which makes us unique in our own respect. Whole Brain Thinking is a concept that has been around for years and it focuses on the thinking preferences of people. Applied in the corporate world, it helps to enlighten professionals on the nuances of the brain, to help in better decision making by developing a situational reaction approach based on the use of all four parts of the brain.

In ET this month, we re-visit a theme last featured in November 2011 - 'Whole Brain Thinking'.

On the Podium, Michael Morgan - CEO of Herrmann International Asia tells us about the Whole Brain Thinking model, how it compares to other psychometric instruments and how leaders can gain by enhancing their leadership skills. To enlighten you more about this theme, in the Thinking Aloud segment, Prasad who has worked extensively with this model, shares his thoughts on how organizations will have to think differently in light of the sweeping change that the pandemic continues to bring about.

In the We Recommend section, we review Timothy Ferriss' book – 'Tools of Titans', an inspirational read that looks at the habits inculcated by successful people which led to a life filled with achievements.

In Figures of Speech, we have Vikram's toon's take on what goes inside everyone's mind!

Please also Click Here to check out our Special issue of ET, which is a collation of selected themes that were featured over the years highlighting the changing landscape of the business world. This special edition has been well received and can be Downloaded Here for easy reading and is a collector's item.

As always, we value your opinion, so do let us know how you liked this issue. To read our previous issues, do visit the Resources section on the website or simply Click Here. You can also follow us on Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn - where you can join our community to continue the dialogue with us!

The headlines are pretty dramatic, breathless even as the Indian media describes the tsunami of demand for IT professionals sweeping India today in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic - 'Hiring in India IT companies to triple in 2021-2022 over 2019-2020" or 'The 'Great Resignation' in hiring IT.'

The demand for talent with digital skills in the IT sector has surged as the Indian IT services industry has been riding on the cloud and digital transformation wave accelerated by the pandemic for the last three to four quarters. A quick sector-wise analysis in the IT sector gives us a sense of the surge taking place:

A single large IT company will increase hiring by 84,000 alone in the typical 12 months. Over 1.3 million people are employed in the 1,600 IT Captive centres. Many of these giant captive centres will roughly double their count. The number of captive centres will also increase by 30%, an estimated 175,000 people are employed in the 28 unicorns in India's fast-growing start-up space. The number of employees will only double conservatively with the underway funding as the number of unicorns multiply.

A key driver of this growth is digitalization, as mentioned earlier. Companies are building their digital capabilities at a rapid pace, which is true of traditional, brick and mortar companies across sectors who are doubling their IT employees every year.

"What we have witnessed over the past year is the dawn of the second wave of the digital transformation sweeping every company and every industry," says Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. "Building their digital capability is the new currency driving every organization's resilience and growth.

Organizations large and small are genuinely building the plane as they fly.

In my view, organizations have to contend with three significant changes simultaneously.

1. They are changing their business models to meet the expectations of their customers, or they will go out of business. Think how Licious has upended the poultry and fresh meat business with their guaranteed 2 hour home delivery. Companies will have to focus on customer experience and not just provide new products and services.
2. Organizations have to change the way they work- hybrid primarily. A client of mine told me that they have to be especially sensitive to the needs of working couples who do not have support at home.' We are adapting to their needs,' he said to ensure that they continue to work with us.
3. The way organizations manage talent. The cost of talent has doubled, and your salary is commensurate with your skill and not experience or age. Some initiatives are innovative and thoughtful. TCS, for example, has an initiative called Rebegin - this initiative is open for women professionals from across India who are looking to rebegin their careers after taking a break due to family/health/education/personal reasons. Women candidates with at least two years of continuous IT experience have taken a long hiatus due to family and other personal circumstances.

Fortunately, all the thinking that companies need is within the organization itself. They need to know how to harness the power of the cognitive diversity that they already have.

Organizations are naturally 'Whole Brained', and leaders and teams can learn to be more effective if they understand how the company thinks and how it needs to adapt to the times.

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ET:  What is the Whole Brain Thinking model?

MM:  Everybody thinks differently, but few organizations are able to leverage cognitive diversity as a strategic advantage.

The ways individuals think, guide how they work. The way groups of individuals think guide how the teams they form work. The way groups of teams think and work can make or break the success of the organization.

The success of an initiative depends on the ability of its management teams to drive communication, innovation, and productivity within and across functions. In 40 years of working with Fortune 100 clients, we've found that understanding and applying diversity of thought is the key to strategic success.

The Whole Brain® Model (below) is our time tested framework to decode and harness cognitive diversity of individuals, teams, and organizations.

The Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument® (HBDI®) measures Thinking preferences against the Whole Brain® Model. The HBDI® is the world's leading Thinking Styles assessment tool. It identifies your preferred approach to emotional, analytical, structural and strategic thinking. It also provides individuals with a significantly increased level of personal understanding.

ET:  How did Ned Herrmann develop the HBDI & how does it compare with other psychometric instruments?

MM:  Ned Herrmann, founder of Herrmann International and originator of Whole Brain® Thinking, first pioneered the study of the brain in the field of business while in charge of Management Education at General Electric Corporation's world-class corporate university, Crotonville. He published his initial research as a two-part series in T+D Magazine in 1981-1982 (The Creative Brain, Parts I & II).

His first widely acclaimed book, 'The Creative Brain', traced the scientific and historical roots of his innovative Whole Brain® Thinking approach. In 1995, his ground-breaking 'The Whole Brain® Business Book' (McGraw Hill) created a new benchmark in thinking styles research specifically as it applies to critical business areas such as leadership, productivity, sales and teamwork.

The pioneering work, research and spirit of Ned Herrmann continue to drive the company three decades later. Ned viewed the Whole Brain® Model as a metaphor for an organizing principle of how the brain works, and as clients and practitioners around the world demonstrate every day, the exponential applications of one simple model has created a system that can improve virtually all aspects of individual and organizational performance.

There are plenty of employee assessments and online quizzes out there that will reveal what box, character, style or type you fall into. And they all aim to answer the question: Am I a 'this' or am I a 'that'?

But when it comes to the HBDI®, we talk in terms of thinking preferences. No one is strictly a 'this' or a 'that,' because everyone has access to their Whole Brain®, regardless of what your preferences are. You simply prefer (and in some cases, actively avoid) certain kinds of thinking over others.

So, what exactly do we mean by thinking preference? Well, it might be easier to start by explaining what a preference is not.

ET:  How does the way we think influence the way we behave?

MM:  Thinking preference doesn't equal competence.

People often assume that having a preference for analytical thinking means that they'll breeze through any kind of analytical work. Or that having a preference for relational thinking means you'll be great at working with others.

But having a preference for a certain way of thinking doesn't necessarily mean you're great at all the things associated with it. And by the same token, not having a preference for something doesn't necessarily mean you can't be good at it.

To understand why, just think about a task you don't like doing - a specific aspect of your job, cleaning the house, managing your personal finances. Maybe you even hate doing it. But out of necessity, you've become competent at it.

Plenty of people are highly competent in jobs they really don't like. You might be pretty good at organizing all the logistics of your holiday, not because you like or want to do it, but because you know it has to be done. The task requires a lot of effort, but the prospect of a fun trip motivates you to do it.

On the flipside, plenty of people love to do things that they're not so great at. A lot of tone-deaf people like to sing, but I'm sure a whole lot of people wished they wouldn't.

In the same way, your thinking preferences are simply a reflection of the kind of thinking you're naturally drawn to, not the thinking you're necessarily good at. When you're 'not thinking' about it, it's the thinking you default to.

Here's another reason why it's an oversimplification to say you're a 'this' or 'that' thinker: only 5% of the population in our database of millions of HBDI profiles has a single strong preference.

Most people (92% of our database) have two or three preferences, and even within a single quadrant, differing degrees of preference for that kind of thinking will show up in different ways. Only 3% have a balance of preferences for thinking across all four quadrants.

At work, you can see those thinking preferences show up in the way you're energised by certain activities - the things you find so interesting and so stimulating that you'd choose to do them over any other task. They may not be the easiest for you, but they are always the most satisfying and fulfilling. You don't have to look too hard for motivation because your inner fires are already stoked.

ET:  How does the Whole Brain Thinking Model support individual, team and Leadership development?

MM:  Is there a one-size-fits-all approach to good leadership? What leadership style is the secret sauce to peak efficiency? It's a question we get constantly. If you have any hand in designing leadership development you've probably heard the same question time and time again.

The thing is, there isn't one. Effective leadership isn't uniform, it's personal and individual and the best leaders know this to be true. Trying to force-fit yourself, or any of your team members, into a prescribed mould is a no-win game. Good leaders understand their own style – who they are – and have learned how to leverage it.

So if there's no one type of leader you have to be, what's the key to being successful? No matter what kind of business you're in, being successful requires Whole Brain® Thinking. That same concept applies to leadership. You must understand both how you prefer to think and where your blind spots are so you can fully leverage your mental strengths and stretch outside them when necessary.

Here's the even better news: applying Whole Brain® Thinking doesn't require you to be someone you're not. After all, you have access to your whole brain, not just the thinking styles you prefer the most. Instead, this is about becoming highly skilled as a thinker, allowing yourself to situationally access the different thinking required to handle a given challenge.

This is the essence of leadership agility, particularly in today's knowledge intensive world where challenges are more complex. We must take full advantage of our own diversity of thought as well as the thinking diversity around us.

Shifting thinking to match the needs of a situation is something anyone can learn how to do, and developing that skill should be a chief priority of every modern leadership development program.

So rather than concentrating on the most effective leadership styles, ground your leadership training and development efforts in practical ways to unleash thinking capability.

Once you open leaders up to their full thinking potential and give them experience accessing and applying their own inherent thinking diversity, all of the modes of thinking will become more available to them on a daily basis.

When we give our leaders the power to move between these thinking styles, we give them the power to be their most effective selves.

The idea isn't to change the unchangeable but to help leaders take advantage of the flexibility we all have to become more effective across the range of key leadership issues based on the situation. We know the range is big: strategic thinking, critical thinking, mindful focus, collaboration, empathy, problem solving, intuitive thinking, conceptualising, dealing with ambiguity, visualising, creative processing and more.

When we give our leaders the power to move between these thinking styles, we give them the power to be their most effective selves.

ET:  How would the WBT model help us manage the uncertainty and live with ambiguity.

MM:  In times of uncertainty and ambiguity, we can use the lens of Whole Brain® Thinking to flex our thinking and see things from perspectives we perhaps wouldn't have otherwise.

What is most important is to make sure that your current approach is working for you in the given situation. If not, shifting your thinking can help manage the uncertainty and live with ambiguity.

By understanding our thinking preferences and those of others, we are able to make better sense of situations and progress more quickly towards desired outcomes.

To thrive in the next normal, you may consider who you work with, and work with those who perhaps you may not have initially gravitated towards. Generally speaking, we're more likely to (on first instinct) want to collaborate with those who think similarly to us.

But, while this can be advantageous in some settings or situations, to help manage the uncertainty and live with ambiguity we need to get out of our comfort zone.

The four preferences that everyone has access to all pertain to certain strengths when it comes to work. We can all perform in different roles, even if the role is not a perfect fit with our preferences. Being aware of when we are mentally stretching can help us understand why certain tasks make us feel more fatigued or drained – and it also may help us to know where to get help from for particular tasks.

Using the lens of Whole Brain® Thinking is the perfect way to do this. It is also the secret to adopting an agile and resilient mindset.

Adopting an agile and resilient mindset is easier said than done. But, as with all things in life, growth comes with practice. You can find ways to practice shifting to another quadrant while you're engaged in a challenging activity at work, or at home. By 'stepping into' the thinking style of one of your less-dominant quadrants, you can feel a 'mental stretch'.

You can thrive in the next normal by not only understanding how to get the best from your own thinking, but from understanding how others think and how to engage the right people – we're at our best when we know where to get support.

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American entrepreneur, investor, author, podcaster, and lifestyle guru, Timothy (Tim) Ferriss shares secrets and routines of successful people (Titans). His books gives insights of habits and thoughts of the Titans that will help readers realise that we have it all within us to achieve what we set our minds to. The only difference is how we go about to achieve the level of success.

Comprised of three sections: healthy, wealthy, and wise, each segment is composed of short chapters focused on one of the people interviewed on the Tim Ferriss' podcast. Tools of Titans is a shortened version of Tim's podcast where the author has taken nuggets of knowledge from each interview and organized them loosely based on these three sections. Some notable mentions and takeaways include:

There are many routes to success. The best approach is to pick which tools work for you, then use them to focus. The only consistent point across the book is that the Titans practiced reflection, mindfulness, meditation, or other forms of mental exercises like journaling.

The book is easy to read for those looking for short, digestible ideas. The sheer volume of content might be daunting and every famous personalities' story might not resonate with readers. However, regardless of what the area of interest is, one can cherry-pick names in the book and read their success reasons and actions that bought about it. The book is peppered with plenty of recommendations for things to try. Some exercises are a few minutes, others span quite a bit longer. There is also a chapter on the books most recommended by the interviewees. These include Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu, Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari and The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande.

Overall, Tools of Titan is a unique and engaging book. The perspectives combined with actionable insights makes it extremely practical and useful. Readers will find this as a self-help book and a great resource that imparts nuggets of wisdom, book and article recommendations, and new habits to introduce in life.

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