Human adversity and Start up adveristies

Humans endure trauma, stress, accidents and adversities in different ways. Some cope up with great intensity and some succumb. From a Psychology perspective these are all "challenges" that a person faces when an adversity hits them. Research shows that the ability to cope up from these adversities depends on various factors including genetic makeup of the person. The rising above the challenges reveal a person's hidden abilities. Majority of the times the adversities changes 'self concept'. None can understand what makes us endure and what we are capable of enduring. The second class of benefit concerns relationships and the third common benefit is that the trauma changes priorities and philosophies toward the present and toward people.(1)

Drawing parallel to the psychoanalysis of human trauma and adversities to corporates, corporates are not as non-individualistic as we expect them and as they are portrayed legally. Promoters have a great say in the way they run the organisation. The culture and personal traits of individual promoters have a great bearing on the culture that a corporate inculcates. Many corporates, especially when they are young as start ups and are growing face with good number of adverse situations. These adverse situations are related to the acceptance of the product, selling processes, marketing effort, challenges with people, accounting methodologies adopted and so on. The key lies in the way the man at the helm of the affairs sits down and addresses these issues paves the way the corporate copes up with such situations. Some promoters take the bull by the horns as they clearly see that the issue can be fixed only by them and spend enough time in changing the course of the corporate to come out of the situation. 

Every organisation worth its name would have had a phase where they face these adversities. The adversities and challenges once they are endured and overcome make a strong organisation. People in the organisation proudly talk of how they came out of the situation.

I remember reading the interview of Bharti Mittal some years back. At that time he said that the biggest challenge they saw that was coming was the launch of Reliance Telecom. Reliance with its deep pockets and marketing effort captured the imagination of the people and market share. Airtel was afraid of de-growth as it is yet to be present nationally and was only present in pockets in various states. Once they saw through the phase of launch by Reliance, they were able to redraw their strategy and come back strongly. It was Mr.Mittal’s personal grit and determination that saw the organisation through the adversity. 

There are good number of start ups where the promoters had a tough past. Some promoters went through rough patches in the previous businesses and scraped through and in some cases promoters have lost everything and started all over again and in some cases promoters made some money by selling the earlier business after challenging years of running the business. In all the cases, they exhibit fair amount of confidence and are extremely optimistic of making it big. This attitude is what makes them cross the hurdles and face challenges with determination. This endurance makes them look positive side of the situation and rebuild.

In Indian context the post traumatic growth applicable to individuals is applicable to all organisations except for public sector companies. In these companies no individual can command and create a culture as much in privately held companies, thus making them succumb to the adversities than overcoming them in spite of the back up from the Government ownership.

Why some children are particularly vulnerable to adversity? Genes guide brain development throughout childhood, but that development is also affected by environmental context, and overall safety versus threat. Good parenting can help tune up the attachment system to make the child more adventurous; yet even beyond such effects, if the child’s environment feels safe and controllable, the child will develop a more positive affective style, and will be less anxious as an adult. But is the environment offers daily uncontrollable threats, the child’s brain will be altered, set to be less trusting and more vigilant.(2)

As I was chatting with few of the seed funding companies in a conference, one of the statements made by them caught my attention. He said he would like to bet on young team. It went against my intuition. When I dug deep, I realized that there is something called “memory bump”, an autobiographical memory, which is a recall of memory of a person between the ages of fifteen and twenty five, is more prevalent in the age groups beyond thirty than the younger ones. Younger teams take more risks, show more agility, fall back less on experience and more on intuition and learn their way out of problems quickly.

More the cycles a startup goes through the make-measure-learn, the more it is experienced to handle any adversities and correct the course of action or overcome a hurdle. Therefore, constant evaluation of the external environment and letting the team exposed to the facts is the best method to ready people in the organisation for the challenges to come. So from a suspecting mindset the organisation will successfully move towards sure footed actions as they would evaluate before they start coming to conclusions. A sense of less trusting and more vigilant behaviour among the team down the organisation structure is helpful in one way or the other as the organisation is made sure footed by weeding out various issues right from the ground level. 

It is the endurance of tough situations of the leadership team that make the culture of the organisation which in turn is capable of enduring changing and troubled situations. Such companies are more capable of enduring and coming out of tougher situations they face in the journey than the promoters who faced lesser challenges.