Raw Zone

What do I call a thing like moving from Mumbai to Bhilwara? Or, from Communications to Hospital Management? Just trying to articulate this move. Stepping outside the comfort zone seems like a good description. Or flip it and shorten it, and capture the essence of a place like Bhilwara (as seen from the eyes of a person who has experienced Mumbai). And I call it Raw Zone.

Raw Zone = Out of/Outside Comfort Zone, which leads me to ask what is it that we call a Comfort Zone?

Wikipedia says:
The comfort zone refers to the set of environments and behaviours with which somebody is comfortable, without creating a sense of risk. A comfort zone is a type of mental conditioning that causes a person to create and operate mental boundaries. Such boundaries create an unfounded sense of security. Like inertia, a person who has established a comfort zone in a particular axis of his or her life, will tend to stay within that zone without stepping outside of it.

Alasdair A.K. White, a British Management Theorist, has to say something about comfort zone and performance management. He and John Fairhurst formulated the White-Fairhurst Performance Hypothesis which states that “all performance will initially trend towards a steady state, particularly after a period of performance uplift, and that steady state will then develop a downward curve leading to a significant performance decline”.

They gave a model called TPR Life-cycle Model. TPR = Transforming, Performing, Reforming. It looks like this:



White argues that what is important now is to determine trend-change points on the performance curve so that the most appropriate performance management actions can be applied. Guess this is my trend-change point!

Not that I knew all of this. Was just trying to explain the decision to myself and Google and Wikipedia just made it easy. Important discovery for me.

In the subsequent posts, I'll go beyond this theory. Actually into the Raw Zone!