Continuing on my Patna rhetoric is this one more entry. I know a lot of my freinds and readers must be amazed as to whats the big deal about Patna ? well its not so much about patna as it is about myself. This is the year of the realisation and as i have written in an earlier post that for me this means "to bring into real" or to "bring into concrete existence". This sets up my visit to patna as unique as it saw me see an initiative on the ground that i have been closely associated with. Not one but two. Actually three.
Kaushalya foundation started by Kaushal seeks to work with the vegetable vendors and producers. Dr. Ravi Chandra set up the Bihar Develpoment Trust along with Dev Kumar Dubey in Bhagalpur and basically works with microfinance and micro enterprise. Sidharth Jaiswal has set up with his brother Rishi, a workshop and is setting up a business to train farmers for organic agriculture. Together amidst them they give me a wide vareity. One had its crux in the supply-chain logistics and the other in the cost effective systems to maintain consistency and yet the third one is a technology and knowledge based approach to production. Two have been set up by IIMA alumni and other two are IRMA alumni .
All three need to work with the rural and the underprivileged populace of Bihar and all three rely on churning the local economy out of its slumber and start rotating capital. That Survival alone is next to impossible in Bihar leads us to realise that a group is essential to sustain and thats what the thier multitude helps us in . they can be a group with their individual identities and yet all work for the common communities of the downtrodden and the rural serving their different needs.
To the extent of nature of activity their problems and woes are similar and unique. A generation has passed in Bihar when there has been no significant opportunity to work and that has rendered us a young generation that has never seen work happening and the desire and motivation to work for a cause is lacking often. This poses the biggest threat to entrepreneurship in Bihar - the lack of human resources. While there might not be a dearth of Manpower but there is definitely a lack of human resources. In short it means there is potential in manpower but they do not know how to realise it.. they are raw material and not yet resources that can be used to deliver productivity.
There is a missing link of refining the raw materials to make them resources that can drive production and productivity. Most funding agencies and HR professionals will jump on this and come out with a skill training module for the same. To me there is a deeper understanding thats needed here. When i have not seen something in my life and i also have my strong impressions i end up having a belief or an attitude towards the phenomenon in question. If this logic seems right to you then it should be logical to conclude that what we need is something that we can call as "attitude training".
what is an attitude training?
an attitude training is a instruction that seeks to make you learn new beliefs and hence it sets you on the road to develop new attitude and often this involves challenging your existing attitude/s. An attitude training will go beyond giving you a skill as it will alter the approach you take to a phenomenon.
thus a training which trains you to a new attitude is what we call as an attitude training. However it might be deeper than that. changing an attitude often does not involve just training at the attitude level but needs to go deeper. As one HR tool suggests that human behaviour arises out of attitudes which arise out of beliefs and they in turn arise out of values. some people have debated whether beliefs arise out of values or vice versa. whatever maybe the agreement on the same, we know for sure that one of the ways to change attitude is to change the belief systems. in order to change the belief systems we need to challenge the existeing belief systems as they have been in a state for decades together hence they are not easy to change.
so we need a module that challenges existing notions and open up people to challenge thier own beliefs and then give other beliefs a chance and then give them the inputs to choose the set of beliefs that will govern thier future and not what has governed thier past. once this is accomplished the attitude change will follow. one of the best examples of belief changing modules that i have seen is the "Shodhyatra" conducted by Prof. Anil Gupta of IIMA. it has a strong module of challening ones physcial limits which enable one to challenge their belief systems. however the calibre needed to carry the discussions beyodn that is very high and it is a difficult task to accomplish and probably the defence forces are one organisation which have been able to change attitudes of youth who enroll.
so the serach for an attitude training module is on and we need to figure out one soon. advice and feedback on the same is solicited to help BIHAR.
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