Category: growth

Dharani, who is a Stemland volunteer her reflection on Stewardship program.

My name is Dharani. I stand for perseverance, courage, and equality for myself and others. This is my first RTL session and I learnt so many tools which lead to a transformation in me. In this session, I got to learn about my Stand and fear, my four profiles, background conversations, and deep listening. It helped me in identify my universal values and my stand. I gained an understanding of my fears and how to overcome them. I acquired knowledge of conquering my background conversations which degrades my performance by implementing a deep listening to situations.

On the first day of the session, I pursued that my universal values lie within me and I must try to figure them out and stand within. I did the instructed exercises in the session which helped me figure out my values and started working with them in my projects.

The next day I read up on the four important profiles – wisdom profile, social profile, personality profile, and professional profile. I became competent in my wisdom profile and realized to respect the four profiles of others by not being biased or being judgemental ensuring diversity.

On the third day of the session, I assimilated to handle my background conversations. Whenever I m into a situation I may get the following background conversations like right /wrong, agreeable or not, sometimes finding a flaw in an issue, thought of not responsible, Us/them, either this or that, this is not enough likewise. They may lead me to prejudices and make a decision accordingly. But I grasped that I should ignore all these and have a deep listening to the situations and make a decision.

On the last day of the session, a movie named 12 Angry men was played and insights were to be made on it. From the movie, I grasped that I should stand with my universal value on how hard the situation may be. I should not be judgemental based on one’s social, professional, and personality profile. If I m preoccupied with background conversations like prejudices it lets me down. So I should have a deep listening to the situation before I make a decision.

Overall, I acquired skills of being a leader and taking leadership by standing with my universal values. Standing with my inner potential guides me to overcome fear and background conversations. Hence I can perform well and groom myself. I felt privileged to attend this session.

~Aravindh & Sunil

Choice architecture is a method to extend multiple choices to individuals and giving them liberty in choosing an option coherently. In Choice architecture, consumer behaviour is taken into consideration while designing the alternatives and represented in a way that individuals select the option that is more aligned to  the provider. In schools, choice architecture is an excellent way to improve students’ physical and mental well being. Healthy habits can be nurtured in children using Choice architecture.

In one of the outreach schools in Auroville,  around 4 in 10 students were anaemic. Students eschewed nutritious snack and preferred tasty snack. In this case, children are often under a familiarity bias. A familiarity bias is when one decides to stay within their comfort zone. In this case, children portray absurdity heuristics; they tend to put away the nutritious food. They didn’t want to consume healthy food separately. To overcome this, the facilitators came up with a brilliant idea to blend drumstick leaves, dates, and peanuts (which are rich in iron) with porridge to keep the taste balanced with nutrition. After that, students preferred this snack and started to consume without any excuses. This nutritious mix meal resulted in a significant improvement in their health. 

The core driver behind this action is that the mere thought of eating food reminds us of how we feel when we eat it. Digestion starts with sight and smell. Instead of giving nutritious food separately, we can blend both nutritional and non-nutritional elements in the lunch meal. Children usually default to choices which are suitable to their taste and tend to take smaller portions that are easy for them to digest. By disguising nutritious food as per their preferred taste and size, we can nudge them to have a healthy meal.

~Punithan & Poovendiran

“ A choice architect has the responsibility for organising the context in which people make decisions” – Richard H. Thaler, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness.

In general, Nudging is a choice architecture which is a positive reinforcement and indirect suggestions to make a choice or course of action. The idea of Nudging is all about applying the concepts of decision making and behavioural economics to yield a better and spontaneous decision, without limiting the choice. Putting it more straightforwardly, Nudging is helping people in making better choices for oneself without restricting their freedom of choice.

You can nudge for GOOD, or you can nudge for EVIL. Nudging not only contributes to the business world but also for the wellness of the society. Nudging helps to influence and direct people in the right way as we discuss two topics and examples here. 

Social Nudging is the concept of positioning our direction of a nudge for a social cause. When you nudge a person, and if his choice contributes something to society, then it falls under this category. Recently, a 90 years old man was in the limelight on social media. The chat waala opens his ‘Bhaba ka Dhaba’ stall early in the morning and closes it by 5:30 in the evening, finishing all his stock. But during this pandemic, he couldn’t make ends meet. A famous food blogger got concerned about the older man’s dire situation. The food blogger recorded a video of the older man (she fondly calls her Uncle Ji) and posted it on her social handle. Fortunately, many people stepped up to show their support for Uncle Ji. Many celebrities also posted on their social handles. We can see both the food blogger and the stars have nudged the society to contribute something for someone’s good. 

Nudging can be a handy tool in teaching — a hard lesson in the right way. A famous incident became viral on social media. As the incident goes, a teacher intentionally wrote a wrong equation on the blackboard. Students started to laugh at the teacher’s mistake. Then, the teacher explained the reason behind it, “You students did not appreciate me when I wrote the correct ones, but you all started to laugh when I made one mistake.” She added “The world is more similar to you; when you do many good things, no one will appreciate you. But when you do one bad thing, people will start to criticise you, and they will forget all the good things you did”. This is behavioural science is related to negativity bias where one tends to have a negativity dominance and tend to emphasise on that. Mistakes are a never-ending part of our life. We should  improve ourselves from those mistakes. The teacher nudged an important message into those students’ minds – to be mindful, determined and confident in their life.