As a digital native, I get consumed by the enormous subscribed content every day, instead of me consuming the content. It happens when I fall into the trap of reading recklessly whatever comes in front of me in the form of news links, blogs, and videos on Facebook, Twitter, Medium, Quora, LinkedIn or even Whatsapp. It took a lot of time for me to figure out that this kind of reading is not helping me.
After consuming bite-sized portions of large content, I lose full-context, and it actually skews my understanding of things. It is like binge-watching the movie on YouTube. We love the fun of it, but we utterly lose the context. To solve problems, we need contextual awareness. Content which gives you instant kick or a rush of dopamine is most sought after, but what gives full context is boring or challenging. So fewer people seek it. Going deeper into any real issue needs context digging. Instead of the random content choosing me, I took a conscious approach to read the content I choose. Content more by choice and less by chance is leading to better context.
It is like eating a mango – feeling the mango to know how ripe it is, peeling the skin with a knife, slicing the mango into pieces and biting it, feeling the juicy fibrous fruit in your mouth, tasting it and enjoying the process – instead of showing a picture of a mango and asking you to imagine how it is.
The multi-dimensional awareness of the context can make leaders understand the problem and come up with solutions.
During a recent chat with a high energy chartered accountant turned management consultant based in Mumbai, who is advising a huge telecom tower company in India, he said that he climbed telecom towers, wearing full gear, to understand how their 2000 plus junior engineers feel every day at work, making him an overnight superstar in the company. Nobody in the leadership team did something like that before. I asked him, “Was it a matter of courage or something else?”, he said, “It is to empathize with the 90% of the workforce of the company and solve problems on the field better. Now I know the context better.” Instead of talking to some people on the field, he chose to feel what they feel and how they do it every day.