How completeness is a human element that adds value to your business.

1. By: Saurabh S Sardesai
Website: www.starvaluemodel.com
Value in Entireness
An everyday concept
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2. In this article we introduce a new term called value of entireness. It is a term coined to signify a
particular aspect of our human thinking and behavior, and that is seeking completeness in what we
perceive or seeking a closure eventually to everything we see, experience as events, interact with or
perceive via our senses. Every human does that and most don't realise what they are doing because this
feeling comes from deep within our subconscious mind. So the concept itself is already in place in our
brains, we have just given it a name and some theoretical shape so that we explicitly recognize it. In
this article we will try and explore this value of entireness, and see how business and individuals can
benefit from something they already indulge in.
It is a predatory sense because every living being imagines himself to be a complete thing or a
conclusive thing that exists. Like, for example, we perceive our human body to be a complete thing that
does whatever is necessary for us to live or exist. Coming back to why and where this feeling exists in
us, actually this exists in all animals as well, for example cats or horses or dogs. It is one of the
predatory sense that all animals have. And it comes from the fact that every organism views himself as
a complete thing. And this feeling of completeness results in the animal also trying to find
completeness or closure in things that he perceives. It is important to understand here what the terms
closure or completeness mean. Closure or completeness does not have to seen or perceived. The
realisation or the thought of a complete state has to occur in the brain. That is what it means, a state of
closure or a state of completeness. And it does not have to happen as soon as we perceive something. It
depends on what that something is.
Take example of a tiger in a jungle. If he sees the head and one leg of a goat then he immediately
recognizes it, that it is an object of prey, that he eats. But with just that thought, will the tiger stop
thinking? Well no, his thought process will lead him to eventually think of a complete body of a goat,
because his experience has told him that the head he has seen belongs to a goat, and the leg he has seen
belongs to a goat. The word 'belongs' assumes significance in this case because the head or leg by itself
don't mean much to a tiger who is used to hunting entire goats. So the tigers brain will form a picture of
an entire goat, and that is where the tiger will think - “Yes it is the head of a goat and the legs also are
that of a goat, so the other body parts must be nearby, maybe some one has intruded in my territory!”
We humans experience these type of feelings on umpteen occasions and we don’t necessarily realise
them. We search for that completeness in others, especially in other events and objects that come into
our perception. We try to see that every event is eventually closed in some way. And we do that by
classifying that even as one time event, n times repeating event or a continuous, recurring event. This
classification is an attempt by us to give some closure to that event.
So to define value in entireness – “It is conscious the attempt by a person to give a picture of
completeness or closure to something that he/she observes or experiences through his sensory
apparatus.”
It is like this - “Yes I know that meeting, it happens every Friday”. So where is the closure? Well unless
you want to discuss about that event further (in which case the act of stopping that discussion is a
closure to that event), by classifying the event based on what you feel are facts, you have given it a
closure, because then in your brain you know what you need to know about the event. Try imagining a
meeting without any closure parameter, how funny it would be? Lets say it is a daily event for ABC
group members. But wait, does that satisfy you? You need parameters besides 'daily' to satisfy you.
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3. Why? Because sub consciously you are trying to give the meeting information presented to you some
closure or completeness, in a way that you want. So you ask more questions, do we meet on holidays as
well? Is this meeting going on for ever, or is just for this annual corporate calendar? Once you get the
information you want, that event has achieved completeness in your brain. And in this case the
completeness is the fact that everything you wanted to know about the meeting, and everything you
ought to know about the meeting as a ABC group member, you now know.
Now let me tell you the evolutionary biological and specifically neurological reason behind this feeling
of completeness. Every animal lives within an environment where there are other animals, trees,
inanimate objects etc. Same for humans as well, so lets continue with animals. In the given
environment every animal has survival instinct given to him by nature and evolution. As a part of this
survival instinct, the organism tires to make heads and tails out of what he perceives in his
environment. For mammals this means seeing or smelling something, hearing a sound etc. There is a
limit to what the brain of that animal can decode and present to him, based on the intelligence and
neural processing capability of that animal species. For example elephants are generally more
important and can process more information in their brain than, say dogs. And humans can process
more and are more intelligent than elephants, and so it goes. We humans are the most intelligent species
on earth, but still can we 'see' individual atoms and molecules in what we see, for example, a tree. No
our brain is accustomed to seeing them as objects. A tree is an object, we don't see molecules within
that tree, our senses have not been that refined yet. So you understand that there is an upper limit to
how much information an animals brain can process. And that limit automatically sets a closure or
completeness barrier beyond which we need not or do not worry about something. We don’t worry
about individual atoms and molecules present in a tree. Our brain has achieved a measure of
completeness as soon as it classifies the object, seen by us, as a tree. And when it classifies an object, it
sends us sensory signal that results in us seeing the tree. Thus mostly humans achieve a sense of
closure in what they perceive at an object level. We don’t worry about atoms and molecules because for
our existence, knowing that the object is a tree is sufficient.
So lets look at the example of two statements below:
1. Look, here are a set of tyres, two rows of seats, a steering wheel, gear box, brakes, mirror,
wipers, 4 doors, metal tank, some petrol smell emanating, some grease smell emanating etc. at
some place.
2. Look there is a car, with a set of tyres, a steering wheel, seats, car radio, wipers, engine, glass
panes etc. There is petrol and grease smell hanging in the air.
Let me stop here and go a bit deeper. Remember your two statements you just read above.
Now what are the pictures formed in your brain from statements I and II?
Obviously the second statement makes better sense. And if that is what happened to you in your brain
then you think like majority people do. The simple reason why you thought that the second statement is
better is because it ash a certain completeness in it that is missing in the first statement. It comes from
deep within our sub conscious mind where we try and attach a logical interpretation to what we see.
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4. Both statements describe a car but try thinking or reading these two statements as many times as you
which, the second statement will always sound better because, you guessed it, the second statement
carries with it the Value of Entireness or the advantage of being a statement that gives closure or
completeness to your experience or perception of something. We will come to the corporate utility of
this value later in our article. For now lets move on with the two statements we read earlier.
If you see some automobile parts lying around what do you immediately think? You think that some car
is being taken apart for repairs and all these car parts will be put back into to the car to make it running
again.
Both statements are about the same object, and both the cars will be driven once they are capable of
being driven. But then both statements don't sound identical to each other, the first one sounds a bit
hollow after you read the second statement. The prime reason is that you as a thinking, animate object,
go for the best alternative that explains your sensory perception to you. And from the evolution
perspective, this is done so because you must have maximum time to react to your sensory inputs when
you perceive something around you. Again it is a predatory sense is within all of us. We as intelligent
beings have a tendency to from opinions or meaning out of what our sensory apparatus receives as
inputs from the environment. To ensure that we recognize something correctly and in time, or brains
always try to logically put together various pieces which we observe as a complete thing, in our case a
complete picture of a car or automobile in general, as in Statement 2.
And for exactly the same reason, we attach a lot of importance in our lives to accuracy, completeness,
entirety etc. We always seek closure to events and things that we are connected to. If you give birth to a
baby then automatically you divide the baby's life into early infancy, infancy, pre school, primary
school, college, post graduate education, independent and standing on his/her own feet etc. These are
your attempts to generate value in entireness by giving closure to various stages of your child's life.
What is the picture formed in your brain? Well it is not just picture but a complete thought process that
begins in your brain. And it will stop based on your interest in that object or thing in reference. If you
are passing by on the street and you see car parts lying around inside a compound, by the time you get
on to the bus you may even forget about it. But if you are planning to buy a car and see some car
parked somewhere of the same model, maybe you will remember about it till you buy the car.
Our desire to see things as a logical object group and means we attach a lot of importance to the
hidden, intrinsic value in entireness. Wholesomeness, completeness are some of the qualities we
cherish as intelligent, smart beings. But since this is a sub conscious mechanism, we do not realise
when see or perceive something, that we are looking to see a complete thing and that we value that
logical closure to our perception very much. And from that importance comes the intrinsic value of a
'big picture' Individual parts of the same big picture cannot generate the same value even if added
together. For example, the way the Statements I and II we read above are constructed, from value of
entireness perspective the second statement will always be better. Now the concept is clear to you.
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5. Now coming to your business or organisation. The same principle of value of entireness applies there
as well. The concept is simple in fact, your business as one complete entity has more value than
individual parts of the business presented together. Semantics limit me to some extent here. But this
concept needs a little more understanding and hence lets resort to visualization again. Imagine your
business as the one thing or entity that does whatever it is supposed to do. And then view your business
as a collection of various business units or product lines or department and then in the second
visualization pout all the pieces together to make it one picture. You will once again realise that the first
visualization was a better one. Because it was done faster than the second one and is more appealing
and satisfying to you as an explanation of your perception. Again here it is evolution rewarding you for
seeking that value of entireness. So this value is felt and experienced and can be explained in many
different ways and means.
To say it in a better way, let me put it a bit more lucidly here. The context here is about companies in a
particular sector.
Statement III – Business XYZ is an organisation that does things 1,2 and 3.
Statement IV – These are things 1, 2 and 3 and they are done by Business XYZ.
The first statement is a better one is what majority of you will say. That is the value intrinsically that
every business carries with itself. Project yourself as one unit, and not just a collection of product lines
or geographically diverse sister companies. That is also the malaise affecting multinationals today.
They rely so much on brand value that they do not bother about projecting themselves as one being
unit. My experience tells me this. Remember value of entireness is completely different from brand
value. Brand value might stay or collapse, but value in entireness is a human concept and it is still
evolving within us, because we as humans are still evolving at all levels. So value of entireness will
always be there and felt by you and me. So this value must be used as the glue that binds your business
together and stops it from being viewed merely as a collection of various sub entities. You lose out on a
lot of potential because of projecting your company as a collection rather than as one complete entity. If
you are a multinational and do everything under the roof, then market yourself that way rather talking
about pharma separately, cosmetics separately and food products separately. These might be separate
companies in their own respect, but still, you must have that overarching complete or big picture
hanging on the wall when you talk about your collection of companies. Because otherwise you are not
delivering the value of entireness that your business carries with it. That glue that stops from you losing
your unique complete identity must be preserved and nurtured within an organization.
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Incomplete.
[The rest of the article will appear in the Star Value Engine newsletter for the month of May, 2013]
Please note that the terms “Let Me Do (LMD) framework”, “Value in Entireness”, “Self Supportive Architecture”,
“Intelligent Service Agents” and 'Intelligent Agent Service' are proprietary and copyrighted terms belonging to Star Value
Consulting Services and may not be used without proper authorization by us.
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6. This article and all its content are the sole copyright of Star Value Consulting Services and this content may not
be copied or distributed without the explicit approval of Star Value Consulting Services.
Article cont
So use the glue well because the moment that glue wears off, your individuality and completeness as a
business are lost. To sustain that glue your business core and supporting parts need to function as one
single unit and support each other. Smells of our star value engine model, right? Well we are not far off
from that except that this paper is about value of entireness and using star value model to recognize and
use that value is a topic for some other discussion.
Most of us experience value of entireness in our daily lives and we may not consciously realise it. I just
explained the reasons behind it to you. This concept of value of entireness is applicable, just like our
star model, in any situation or environment, in real life or imaginary situations.
The next logical question is where is this value and how do we tap it. How can one identify it, interpret
it and measure it? The answers are simple. You should not deliberately look for it. Just remember the
concept, that is all. Deliberately looking for it means you are trying to apply a certain consciousness to
what is a sub conscious function of your brain,. It will lead to bias and constraining of your perceptions
in more ways than you can imagine. So don’t tell your customers that your delivering excellent value of
entireness. It will back fire. This is more of a mental thing within organizations than something that has
to be publicized or sold to the market. That will happen automatically if you have real value of
entireness with you. That is where terminologies come to help and Value In Entireness is a terminology
that you can use to speak about this value. And then you can make it a core part of your value mapping
exercise, you can use the star model to identify and measure it, and you can do lots more with it. But
remember this value cannot be manufactured by process improvement or by brands image
restructuring, as examples. It is intrinsic value, coming from deep within and it must be discovered,
tapped and funneled appropriately. Make this value obvious to people as a part of the overall analysis
framework or project that you are doing. This value of entireness must happen or be perceived in a
natural, business as usual way. That is the nature of it.
We will now see why the value cannot be manufactured. Let us go back to the two statements about the
car that we earlier made. One describes its various parts first and the second one describes a car and
then its various parts. If you try to from any complete or big picture from the first part you will not go
very far. Your brain will probably reject it. Why does our brain reject it? Because we have evolutionary
traits in us and we have grown up learning to derive meanings from what we see and what we
experience. As a one year old child you are taught names of various object around you, so that by the
time you are about three years old, you can recognize the objects around you. So from childhood we
have been searching for that complete picture. But coming back to the car, the first statement projects
the picture as a sum or collection of its various parts and out thought process is directed and becomes
biased in that direction (the word bias here is used without any negative connotations). We lose that
feeling of completeness or entireness value after seeing the individual car parts in statement I. When
you see statement II it starts off by presenting a complete picture to you, when it mentions the word car,
which is a complete object for you. Hence in statement I, while we know it is a car, the entireness
feeling is missing and for obvious reasons, just mentioned. The second statement does not pose any
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7. issues to us since at the outset we see completeness in it. So you would be more interested in the
second picture then (unless you are a spare parts dealer!) and to snatch that point home on the corporate
front, people are always interested in businesses that project themselves as complete things in whatever
they do. And that way the value of entireness that they carry with them cascades down to the street
level, and consumers appreciate it.
Our effort to make head or tail of what are presented to us as product and services leads us to seek the
value of entireness in our lives as well. And businesses that can project and sustain that picture win in
the market place. Thus businesses, industries and market places are no different when it comes to
entireness value. If the consumer wants to buy a car, he will buy a complete car right? He will not buy
doors separately, tyres separately, engine separately, will he? No need to say why? That is the world
order, a completely assembled car has more value than just separate parts displayed together. The
missing part of value is not the value that an assembly mechanic adds to the assembled car. No, that is
just a process or functional thing. The ultimate objective of that assembly is to seek the value of a
complete car, the value of entireness or the closure of something. Here the closure is that the car has
been assembled, and delivered to the customer, there by generating a sale and profit. The profit figures
go to the balance sheet and there is a logical closure to that particular car here. Once sold it is with the
consumer and if it stays defect free, then the business can forget about it. Most businesses operate and
flourish because of value of entireness and the smart ones use it effectively to extract the maximum out
of their business. We deal with this topic on may of our consulting assignments, one thing we never do
is to deliberately search for it. If it is there then we see it as a part of our consulting assignment. If it is
not there, we know its missing. But beyond that we don't deliberately fiddle around with this concept.
But then we are consultants and we don’t let go if any concepts, including our own, so easily. So here is
what we do as a consulting unit. We help companies understand the value of entireness as a concept
and as a thing that exists in your business. We then provide them with directions as to how to make sure
your business is at a big picture level sufficiently mature and self sustaining, and based on principles of
value of entireness, we try and encourage businesses to make their core competencies as complete or
big picture like, as possible. But we do not make any road maps or templates for 'discovering value of
entireness' and the two main reasons are as follows: One, this concept is sub conscious level concept of
the human brain and second, companies must discover it as a part of their business as usual rather than
arming yourself with a template and then going hunting for it.
Every business exists because of value of entireness. Every business finds sustenance and growth in
placing emphasis on value of entireness. It is where one can find your identity or individuality in spite
of all the diversity that your business may contain. Our logical brains try to find meaning in what we
see and industries, economies, consumer markets are organizations are no different from anyone in this
respect..Consumers also appreciate and act based on the value of entireness and you as a business must
cater to your consumer base.
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