SK – Page 193 – Pertinent Observations

Process

A couple of days back, I was debugging some code. And yes, for those of you who didn’t know, coding is a part of my job. I used to have this theory that whatever job you take, there is some part of it that is going to be boring. Or to put it in the immortal words of a brilliant co-intern at JP Morgan “chootiya kaam”. And in my job, the chootiya part of the kaam is coding. That doesn’t mean that I’m not enjoying it, though. In fact, for the first time in nine years (note that this takes me to a time before I’d started my BTech in Computer Science) I’m enjoying coding.

Coming back, I was debugging my code yesterday. It was one of those impossible bugs. One of those cases where you had no clue why things were going wrong. So I started off by looking at the log files. All clean, and no bugs located. While I was going through them, I got this idea that the strategy sheet might offer some clue as to why things aren’t doing well. Half the problem got diagnosed when I was looking at the strategy sheet. Some problem with cash management.

And when I thought looking at the trades might help. The bug was presently discovered. And then it hit me – that I’d unwittingly followed what seems like a “process”. Everything that I did had been guided by insight and instinct. Yet, the steps that I followed – 1. look at the logs; 2. look at the strategy sheet ; 3. look at the trades – seemed so much a preset process. It seemed to be like one of those things that I’d just ended up reading in some manual and following.

I realize that most “standard processes” that are followed by various people in various places are stuff that were initially not meant to be processes. They were just an imprint of somone’s train of insights. It was as if someone had a series of insights that led to a solution to whta might have been a difficult problem. And then, he realized that this kind of a process could be followed to deal with all such similar problems. And so he wrote down the process in a book and taught a set of people to implement them. The field thus got “fighterized“.

The argument I’m trying to make here is that a large number of so-called “standard processes” are just an imprint of someone’s insight. They just happened to get into place because the inventor noticed this pattern in a bunch of things that he was doing. They need not be the best way of doing what is supposed to be done. Maybe there isn’t even a single best way of doing it that might work every time.

People who are likely to have worked on processes later in their life cycle are likely to have been people who are process-oriented themselves, and given how these kind of people work, it would have been likely that they would have resisted changes that could make the process worse in the short term. They are more likely to have been incremental in their approach. With a succession of such people working on improving the process, the process of refining the process would’ve ended up taking a hill-climbing algorithm and is likely to have ended up in a local maximum.

Once again, the large changes to the process would’ve happened when someone who was willing to take a large step backward worked on them, and it is again likely that such a person would be driven more by insight rather than by process.

My hypothesis is that most processes are likely to have been largely defined by people who are themselves not very process-oriented, and who thus will expect a certain level of insight and discretion on the part of the person implementing the process. And one needs to keep this in mind while following processes. That it would be good if one were to take a critical view of every process being used, and not be afraid to take a backward step or two in process development in order to achieve large-scale improvements.

Arranged Scissors 3 – Due Diligence

One of the most important parts of the arranged marriage process is due diligence. This is done at various levels. First there is the parental due diligence – and the first thing that is done is to check if the counterparty’s parents and other close relatives are financially sound. Then there is a check run on the counterparty’s siblings and cousins – to make sure that moral fibre is of the highest quality. And last but not the least, there is personal DD, which is the most interesting.

Of particular interest is the counterparty’s past affairs. This wasn’t much in the limelight till about 10 years back when there was a case where a girl got her arranged fiance murdered since she wanted to marry her boyfriend. After that, people who had so far been in denial regarding people’s boyfriends and girlfriends woke up to the fact that they needed to check if the other party was single as claimed. Nowadays, people go great lengths in order to check this.

Last month I received a call from my friend who told me that one of his friends was “in the market” and was in the process of checking out an acquaintance of mine. So this friend asked me to do a background check on this acquaintance. And I called up one friend who called up another friend who confirmed that this girl was indeed very “decent” (at least that was the message I got- considering that there were two channels of communication before me, I don’t know what the actual message was) and I propagaed it (I promise I didn’t distort it).

Then, there is this uncle who is well-connected. Ok I’m digressing a bit – this is not about arranged marriage, but since we are on the topic of due diligence, this example deserves merit. So this uncle who is well connected wanted to do a background check on his daughter’s boyfriend. Not knowing any other common link, he did what he knew well – pulled strings. The boy used to work for a fairly large IT company and my uncle managed to get in touch with the boy’s HR director and got confidential character files pulled out in order to confirm that his daughter had indeed chosen a decent guy.

One other reason why due diligence may have in fact become easier is because now people post considerable amount of information online. A combination of orkut, facebook, linked-in, blog and twitter profiles is enough to determine enough about a person’s character, I think. And most people (at least in the market segment that I’m in) will have at least one of these. So all you need to do is to find someone who has access to this person’s orkut/facebook profiles and you are through. In fact, I’m planning to add my facebook, twitter, blog and linkedin links to my email signature when I write “expression of interest”/”expression of contact” mails (more about those mails in another post), thus saving the counterparty valuable time and money she might have otherwise spent on due diligence.

The problem with such widespread due diligence is that you need to keep people who you don’t like in your good books. Becauase due diligence works on a “no second chance” principle. Most people collect data from a number of sources. And if at least one of those sources says “indecent” then jai only. Death only are there for inherently unpopular people like me (i’ve recently discovered that I’m a hard person to like; and it takes people considerable effort to start liking me). The fact that I’ve one time or the other ended up pissing off at least half my extended family makes me wonder if I should exit this market and go back to the old-fashioned way of trying to find someone for myself by myself. That much said, I think I’ve applied enough maska on extended family members who I think are well-connected.

I think if this whole due diligence process gets documented well, then it could make for some interesting social network analysis. How does someone try to find someone who might know you? What is the average number of steps that one needs to follow in order to find someone who knows this counterparty? What kind of people are likely to be more involved in writing due diligence reports – people who are very well connected or the quiet types? Does an increased online presence have any effect on the amount of due diligence that various counterparties do?

I don’t know how one can find good data for this.

Earlier:

Arranged Scissors 1 – The Common Minimum Programme

Arranged Scissors 2

Shivarathri

Today is Shivarathri. It is a holiday for the National Stock Exchange, which has made it an optional holiday for us (there are 10 such days of which we can choose 3). And I’ve chosen to exercise this option today. Sitting at home and battling internal demons. And saying goodbye to winter.

My mother says that the fact that it has become considerably hotter today points to the greatness of God. “It is ordained that on the day of Shivarathri, winter will cry ‘shiva shiva’ and run away, and that it has suddenly become hot today is an indication that God still makes nature obey ‘the laws’ “.

I agree with her argument but not with her conclusion. I say that the fact that winter seems to be on its way out today, on the day of Shivarathri, points to the greatness of the people who made our calendar. That they managed to study the stars accurately, and came up with a sustainable forecast regarding the closing date for winter that is valid even thousands of years hence is a good indication of how brilliant they were.

Like that coffee bite argument used to say, the argument continues.

Today being Shivarathri also means that it should be a night dedicated to the lingam – the most commonly worshipped form of Shiva. I wonder how many people are currently looking at their hands and thinking of a form of Vishnu that is worshipped in Puri.

This morning, my neighbour went to a nearby Shiva temple, to take part in something like “linga abhishekam”. She took along a mixture of milk, ganga jal (water from the Ganga; not H2SO4 of Bhagalpur) and sugar to do the pooja. Later on, my mother was on the phone with her sister, and after a long philosophical discussion they concluded that women doing the “linga abhishekam” is not part of South Indian Brahmin culture.

Blegs and cribs

Given that my pipeline in the arranged scissors project is temporarily empty, I think I should concentrate on other issues. Other real and pressing issues. Speaking of pressing issues, I need to call the dhobi and give my shirts for ironing. I have excellent ironing infrastructure in my house but I think that 2 rupees a shirt is cheaper than 10 minutes a shirt.

My big problem in life currently (and no, it isn’t pressing) is that I’m under a credit crunch. My credit card expired last month and ICICI didn’t send a replacement. Total jai. Six months back, HDFC Bank happened to offer me a “gold card”. I happily told said “i want i want”. They came over and got a few forms filled. Some guy landed up at home to do address verification, found it locked and called me. I was at work and abused him back for arriving at the middle of a weekday without prior intimation. I received a letter from HDFC a few weeks later saying that they found me not creditworthy.

I had gotten my first credit card (the ICICI thing) back when I was a student at IIMB. My father had abused me for it, saying it will trigger bad spending habits. I am happy to note that I did none of it, and have always lived well within my means. It is not the credit that I want. It is the convenience of online transactions. And now it seems I can’t do any of it. Total jai is happening.

The other concern I have is that my passport will be expiring this May. Given that it’s less than six months away, I can’t leave the country now. And I have no clue how to go about renewing it. Anyone who has fundaes about this please let me know. It might help to add here that I have one live visa (a B1/B2 to the US) on it.

The biggest problem that I think is facing me is that I’m facing an overdose of thought. I’m thinking too much. I’m thinking too much for every damn small thing. Driving back from Akshardham last evening, I pulled over several times to refer to the map and chart out my route, only to think a couple of minutes later that I’ve lost my way and repeat the process. And at each step, I’d solve using Dijkstra’s algorithm. Clearly suboptimal. Memoriless systems should not use algorithms that require things to be stored in memory.

Liverpool is playing ManCity as I write this. Normally I don’t not watch a Liverpool game if I can help it, but I found this one too emotionally taxing and switched channels. I was thinking of my funda about how different EPL teams are like different civilizations in Age of Empires, and have relative strengths and weaknesses. Apart from these, each team has a special weapon. For example, when you play Stoke, you need to rejig your defence completely so as to not put the ball out of play in your own half, thanks to their special weapon – the longthrowman Rory Delap. Liverpool’s special weapon could probably Alonso’s long shots though they don’t use it that much. Man U has C Ronaldo. And so forth. Ok I should stop straining my brain further by thinking about this.

I’ve taken tomorrow off. Shivarathri is a trading holiday and thus an optional off for us. I was supposed to do a moviethon with Aadisht but he decided he’s going to wrok so I suppose I’ll chill at home and try chill my nerves. How I’ll manage to do that I don’t know.

Arranged Scissors 2

One of the greatest sins in the normal relationship process is tw0-timing. If your statistically significant other figures out that there is yet another other who might also be statistically significant, she is not going to take things lying down. The most likely scenario will be that the yet another other will indeed become statistically siginficant – since the original SSO puts ditch. It might be a stretch but I’ll anyway say that tw0-timing is probably the worst mistake you can commit in the course of a relationship.

The arranged marriage market puts no such constraints. Even if you are ten-timing, people won’t mind. Especially if you are an NRI. The typical NRI process goes like this. Boy lands and is given a “shortlist” – a sheaf of CVs and photos. During the drive home, the shortlist is made shorter. The next day, “interviews” are arranged with each girl in the shorter list, typically at her house. End of the day, after sampling data from various sources, boy picks the one that he thinks will be likely to be most statistically significant in the long term.He takes her out for lunch the next day, puts a ring on her finger the following day and flies off, promising to return in a few months for the wedding. Occasionally, he claims he can’t get leave from his employers for another year and so puts off thaaLi also before he returns to vilayat. Girl can follow him later. For now she’ll follow him on Twitter (sorry, bad PJ).

Local boys don’t have it that lucky. At least, it is unlikely that they ten-time. There are two quirks of the arranged marriage market which pull in opposite directions when it comes to two-timing. On one hand is discretion. You don’t announce that you are “seeing someone” until it’s all fixed and proposal has been made and accepted. Discretion also means that you don’t want to be caught together in public. It also means that you can’t write funny things on each other’s facebook walls. And it obviously rules out PDA – in fact, all forms of DA are strongly discouraged until the contract has been signed. Heck, my cousin was putting DA during her engagement and that led to much gossip and condemnation. So no DA till marriage.

So yeah – one of the “advantages” of this discretion is that it allows you to two-time. What tugs from the other side is the time to decision. Due diligence in the whole process is outsourced, to the bankers. Typically it is finished even before the parties concerned get a chance to explore each other – and in this, this process differs from the typical M&A process. So now that the due diligence has already been done, bankers prefer that the parties reach a decision quickly.

I don’t know how this happened, but the time to decision is fairly short. In olden days, I’m told that the due diligence was the beginning and end of the deal process. All that the parties had to do was sign. Things slowly improved – to showing photos, to being shown glimpses, to being allowed to talk for two minutes. I don’t know where things stand in terms of the general market, but I’ve been trying to insist on a proper blading process to allow enough time for tiki-taka.

Ok here is the grand unification for this post. The time to decision is a function of discretion and ability to two-time. Given the discretion that has normally been practised (i suppose this came about because societies were tightly knit and small and things would become awkward for all parties involved if each expression of interest were made public), the cost of two-timing became quite low. Thus, in order to make sure that the counterparty is not two-timing their kid, parents started demanding that decisions be made early. This cut both ways – the counterparty’s parents also wanted to make sure their kid wasn’t being two-timed. From the point of view of bankers, the short time-to-deal was an absolute win.

From the point of views of the interested parties, all it did was to increase the incentive for Common Minimum Programmes. Time allotted is generally too short to properly check out the counterparty, and you need to prioritise. You want to check for obvious mistakes. In the short time, you want to make sure that the counterparty is not an obvious misfit. Realizing that you will never have that time to figure out propely if a prospective counterparty has those “spikes”, you settle for someone who “clears the basic cutoffs”.

You thus get yourself a common minimum programme spouse.

Earlier in the series:

Arranged Scissors 1 – The Common Minimum Programme

Random sleepy thoughts

ok i’m sleepy. i thought i need to “capture my thoughts”. i’ll write whatever comes to my mind. it may not make sense. it may not be grammatical. spellings may not be correct. don’t bother reading it unless you are willing to put a lot of fight. and i’m not going to hit hte backspace key during the course of htis exercise. i begin.

so yesterday i wrote this blog post. about my cribbing. i wrote about the other me. and the other ohter me. actually i wonder if i atually ended up writing about what i think is the real me. maybe htere is no real me. maybe i exist only as the ohter and the yet anohter. actually what mean is that i’m talking about the other me and the yet another me, and this has nothing to do with people from IIT madras who were named such by us (there was this, that, oc, bichu, the other, the yet another, tycho,const).

this mornign i woke up, like Abou Ben Adhem (whose tribe may increase). I woke up in a deep dream of peace. i noticed that for the first time ever i wasn’t playing myself in my dream. i remember one set in the dram. it was the basement of a mall. a very well lit basiement. and i’d gonet herre by car and wanted to pakr there. i remember parking my car there.

then there was an aerial battle. like those that you see in james bond moveis. i don’t know if i was involved ub t i saw a first person shooter account of the attle. finally the villain of th piece turend out to be one of the guys how was supposed t o be investingating. quite standard again i guess. for james bond ypes.

today i visited the akshardham temple. what i was fascinated by was their ability to monetize everything. photography is banned inside – they don’t even allwo you to take in phones – and they make quite a packet selling “official photos”. one thing you will notice outside most indian temples is the slew of “souvenir shops”. the akshardham temple has insourced that also. the temple runs the shop and it’s priced very reasonably. i have a feeling that the tamil nadu government was inspiredc by this temple when it took the decision to internalize liquor distribution .

the need ofr hte kansaa society was felt at the temple. despite the signboards saying don’t speak. maintain silecne and all such all over the campus, there were noisy kids running around. making a noise. making a mockery of the keep silence boards. quite a pity.

by the way it’s an excellent temple. a real work of art. they should have tourist guides (insiders of course) explaining the significance of the carvingts to people . it si quite comical to see the figure of a swami as the presiding “deity” and “normal gods” being relegated to the sidelines (literally).

i got lost in the city of delih at least 10 times today. took a wrong turn at least 6 times. the other occasions i was on the right track but still i assumed that i wasn’t on the right track. kept feeling lost. and bles the Eicher Delhi Map. i got caught in two bad traffic jams. these delhi drivers are crazy. they don’t know the channel coding theorem of information theory – one of whose variants states that you can send a bit across securely and safely IFF the speed at which you send the bit is less than the speed of the channel. or some such.

i think the same applies to traffic, and bangalore drivers sure know it. if it’s a bad road you drive at 1 kmph. if it’s a better road then 5 kmph. and if it’ss an exctremly big nad nice road, then 15 kmph. no more. and these delhi guys. even in the gullis it’s at least 20 kmph. too quick. and i don’t like these high beam ligts beaming into my rearview mirrors. i go mad when i see those. i lose it. it’s a miracle that i drove back without any accident. maybe it’s because i reinstalled that little ganesha idol in my car today – it had bene missing for voer six months now.

speaking of ganesha idols, i got another today. bought a new one. this was at the akshardham souvenir shop. it is an idol of ganesha sitting on a swing. very strong it is, and a nice addition to my collection. i’m so glad because of that.

ok i’m really rampbling now so i suppose i’ll stop. good night

Cribbing

When this blog was young, I used to crib a lot. Ok let me correct that. When my livejournal, which is the predecessor of this blog, was young, I used to crib a lot. At least half my posts were “crib posts”. They would go on the lines of “oh i’m feeling so crappy. everything’s awful with the world”. I’d occasionally get comments. They’d either be of the “yeah you’ve done wrong” variety or “ok i empathise” type. Most such comments didn’t get any posts at all. Sorry, I meant that most such posts didn’t get any comments at all.

I decided to obey the market and moved away from crib posts. i still do crib once in a while, and use this blog as a personal rant, i don’t crib here as much as I used to. This “adjustment to the needs of the market” has had its own problem. It sometimes makes yo ugo to the other extreme. Where you are just not able to crib at all. You feel guilty about cribbing. Everytime you crib, you think yo uare bothering someone and so you should stop. You stop.

Cribbing is an art. Not everyone is a master of cribbing. The biggest problem with the lack of ability to crib is what I call as the “two-person theory”. It is something like each of us is a superposition of several people. And at each point in time, we “collapse” to one of those people. All of us live in the form of a dynamic equilibrium as me. We share a hard disk, but we don’t share memory. And usually, there is no coexistence. Ok I suppose the name two-person theory is some kind of a misnomer. It is actually the trivial case where you are made of a superposition of just two people.

When you are low, you want to crib. You want to pour out all your woes to the world. You want to cry. You want to be cared for. You want to be cuddled. But you can’t speak. You don’t have the confidence to speak. You just don’t feel like speaking. Speaking is an effort. And you end up not cribbing, though you really wanted to crib.

You recover. And you are now not who you were when you were low. You are in a different state (no, this is not like going from Delhi to Haryana). You are able to communicate now. You remember that you needed to crib. That much has been coded into the hard disk. However, the details of that were left in the memory of the other you. You don’t know what to crib about. You don’t understand the other yourself. You trivialize your body-sharer. You decide you are better off not cribbing. And you are happy that you didn’t feel. Each time you think about it, you feel happeier that you didn’t crib; until you want to crib again, and are too low to communicate.

Now you blame the other you for not speaking out for you. Effectively you blame yourself. You feed in into the downward spiral. You want to crib even more now. And you can’t communicate. You wait till you get better. And then you wait till you get worse. You cycle. You oscillate.

One of you is dumb and cna’t communicate. The other of you can’t understand the other of you. This other doesn’t want to speak for the other other. One of the others is unable to communicate. And like the mythical Bherunda birds (also the state bird of Karnataka) one of the other consumes poison, taking the other other down with him.

The Enhanced DTPH Theory

Dil To Pagal Hai (DTPH) was a nice movie. I really enjoyed it when I first saw it some eleven years ago. The only problem was the message it imprinted on my 15-year-old mind: someone, somewhere is made for you. It ended up completely messing me up for the next 3-4 years. I took it at face value. Every time I met a new girl, I would start asking the question “is she the someone, somewhere who is made for me?”. I would be lucky if the answer was an immediate no.

As I had explained in a blog post almost three years ago, these kind of questions never give “yes” as an answer. They either say “no” or they say “maybe”. And the maybes are a problem, since a few years down the line they might be converted to a “no”. They will never turn into a “yes”, mind you, and if you are forced to make a decision, you’ll have to make do with the number of occurrences of maybe and the confidence bounds that it produces. So the maybes were a problem for me 10 years ago. I didn’t know how to handle them. And in the one case where the answer consistently came out to be “maybe” (even when i ask the question now, it comes out to be “maybe”), I royally messed up the blade. Disaster was an overstatement.

Now that the digression is done, DTPH similarly messed up thousands of young minds all over the country. It didn’t even spare the married. Everyone started asking themselves the question “is this the someone somewhere that is made for me?” I think Yash Chopra (he directed it, didn’t he?) should shoulder a large part of the blame for the spurt in suicides in the late 90s.

The theory I’m going to state now was first stated by Neha a couple of years back. Back then, I’d thought I need to blog it, since she wasn’t blogging then. She has started blogging recently, but still I think I’ll write about this. As you might have figured out from the title, I call this the Enhanced DTPH Theory. It is quite ironical that this is coming from the fairly irreligious me, since it somewhat endorses creationism. I know the inherent contradictions here, but I think I should write it anyway.

The theory states that there are several people, in several places, who are “made for you” (if you are religious) or are “inherently compatible with you” (if you are not). The key is in finding at least one of them and making things work.

I think this is easier on people’s minds. The constant quest to find “the best partner” should be laid to rest, I think, mainly because it is unlikely that you’ll find a “dominating partner” (someone who is better, in your eyes, than everyone else that you could’ve gotten married to). Instead, what you will get is what I can call as a “dominating set” – a set of people who are collectively dominating over the rest of the population but cannot really be compared to each other.

Each person has his/her own different evaluation criteria. And based on that, each person has his/her own dominating set. And it is this dominating set that is the “several people who are made for you”. I suppose you are getting the drift. I know this is a bit confusing.

Then, you need to understand that the universe doesn’t obey the Hall’s Marriage Theorem. This is trivial to prove since the total number of men exceeds the total number of women. Actually, as a corollary to this, we can establish that the original DTPH theory is false, unless of course it assumes that the population of gays is significantly higher than the population of lesbians, or if it takes into account animal sex.

Some hand-waving here, but my next hypothesis is that Hall’s Theorem doesn’t hold for local smaller populations also. I’ll probably try give an explanation of this in a subsequent post (else there would be no reason for women to remain single).

Tailpiece: The cost of not marrying the “right person” is significantly lower than the cost of marrying the wrong person.

PS: I also acknowledge Baada’s contribution to the development of this theory.

Work

Work is not just something you do for money. Yes, what you do working from seven (in the morning) to eleven in the night counts as work. But that is not the only thing that counts as work.

Broadly defined, work is anything that you need to do at a particular given time. It doesn’t need to necessarily be unpleasant. It doesn’t need to reward you financially or otherwise. It is just something that needs to be done. It is a responsibility. It is something that you have taken ownership of. And by definition, it is unpleasant.

For example, if I have promised my mother that I’ll go out an buy vegetables this evening, that is work. If I have promised a friend that I’ll meet her for tea this evening between six and seven, that is ALSO work. Because now you know what you are going to do between six and seven in the evening today, and you can’t do anything else at that time. That part of your schedule is effectively fixed, and everything else needs to work around that.

The importance of uncertainty in life, I think, is grossly underestimated. When uncertainty is in the hands of others, it is uncertainty for you. It is inherently unpleasant. Suppose you have committted that you will do something “immediately after someone does something else”, then absolute jai. You not only have “work” to do, you are also uncertain as to when you’ll have to do that work. You will need to block a large part of your time for that, and that is inherently NED-causing.

On the other hand, when the uncertainty is in your hands, it results in “flexibility”. Suddenly, when you have a set of things to do that only need to be “collectively done” before a certain time, and the time window in question is large enough, it is not so much of work anymore. Some of the tasks maybe unpleasant, but given that you now have the choice of WHEN to do it, it is so much more pleasant.

A few takeaways from this theory:

Occasionally, when I crib to people that life has become boring and predictable, their immediate response is to ask me to take up a new hobby. Typically this is something where I’ll need to interact wit h other people – such as music classes, or dramatics, or whatever. And when you take up something where you need to coordinate with others, it becomes work.
If you make a mental decision to play cricket between six and seven in the evening every day, soon it’ll become work, irrespective of how exciting it might be. Because it gets entrenched into your (already tight) schedule. If you have the option of playing cricket every evening between six and seven, then it is fine, since it doesn’t impose a schedule
The more important thing is about work at work. All management gurus you talk to talk about team dynamics, and team play, and coordination, and focus. What they dont’ realize is that all these increases the quantum of work at work. When the interaction between team members is large, and frequent, then you have several, and frequent, “deliverables”. Which creates more “work” on top of the work that you need to do.
On the other hand, if it is a loosely held team, that interacts infrequently, and which is structured such that each person has a clearly defined piece of work and inputs and outputs, then each member of the team has so much more flexibility. It is so much less “work”.
Coming to focus, when people say you need to show focus and you need to concentrate on the one thing that you are doing, they are once again increasing your “work”. Since you need to focus on that one thing, you have zero flexibility. And that is again more “work”. A better situation is where you are balancing several things at the same time, and that gives you so much more flexibility. And when you have several things on your plate, you can put structured procrastination.
So the important thing to remember while designing a team project is to keep things flexible, and reduce frequency of interaction. Give uncerrtainty into the hands of the workers; I’m sure they’ll enjoy it. The amount of work that is there to be done cannot be reduced, but the amount of “work” that needs to be done can, and should be.

Uncertainty, flexibility, option value are all things that are in general underestimated. People assume that we live in a deterministic world. They assume that everyone else needs to do things in a deterministic fashion. And this assumption has a serious negative impact on all our lives. Yes, you might recall that the ongoing financial crisis has been caused to to understimation of uncertainty. That is just the tip of the iceberg.

Arranged Scissors 1 – The Common Minimum Programme

Now that I’m in the arranged marriage market, I’ll probably do a series on that. I think there has been this book that some female has written about it, but I haven’t read it. I periodically plan to write about this market, and its quirks, comparing it to the “normal louvvu market”. I’ll try my best to keep the identities of those I’m interacting with in the market secret – if not for anything else, because there is a good chance that they might be reading this.

A lot of people shudder at the thought of arranged mariage. They think it’s some kind of a failure. They say that it is a compromise. Some of them enter the market only grudgingly. If not anything else, presence in the arranged marriage market is an admission of failure to find a long-term partner without bankers’ support. Some people tend to take that personally. They think that they are failures in life because they had to request their parents to find them a partner in life.

Two years back, my good friend L Balaji (no, not the cricketer) came up with the hypothesis of a “common minimum programme job”, borrowing the phrase that our politicians are most likely to use when they form a coalition government, which is getting increasingly common nowadays. He defines a CMP job as one which “clears all cutoffs, but doesn’t perform spectacularly according to any criterion”. A CMP job offers you decent pay, keeps you in a decent city, gives you a good work-life balance, decent colleagues, etc. But you cannot really expect to get too much kick out of the job. You may not love the job, but it offers you enough to not get pained.

I think the traditional problem with the arranged marriage market is that people assume that people are in the market to find CMP spouses. Someone who looks “decent enough”, is “smart enough”, is “nice enough”, etc. Traditionally it seems like the evaluation in the arranged marriage market is a series of tickoffs – looks good? check. Can talk grammatical English? Check. I good to talk to? Check. And so forth. So what one ends up with is someone who clears all criteria, and not necessarily someone spectacular. You basicallly try to find someone you can share a house with until you are sixty four, and little else. Even that one major cutoff, I think, sometimes is given short shrift.

This boiling down of the market to CMPNess is responsible for the “compromise” label that the arranged marriage market attracts. And amazingly, a lot of people (who are lucky enough to have found someone better than CMP in the market) start talking about how one needs “to adjust”, “to compromise” etc. Definitely not the kind of stuff that the young person fresh into the market would love to hear. In fact, I think these CMP people are what gives arranged marriage a bad name.

Thinking about it, I think the CMP nature of the market doesn’t have much to do with the people who ended up choosing CMPs, or who ended up as CMPs (note that one can be both). It has structural origins. The problem, I think, lies with the structure of the market, and that all the CMP people have simply adapted to this particular market structure.

When you don’t like a set of rules, there are two ways to deal with it, or maybe three (depending upon whether you count like a mathematician or like a social scientist). First is to adapt yourself to the rules, basically to compromise. Then, you can allow the rules to stay in place, and you can work around them. Find loopholes and exploit them. This is what lawyers excel at. The final option is to bend the rules.

In my next post on this topic, I will talk about the structure of the arranged marriage market, and try to explain why it differs from the normal blading model.