Session Title
Mastering the Ambiguity - Back to Basics
Abstract
For those of you who enjoy long distance driving, think about the evening prior to the drive. You get the car or bike checked for battery, brakes, tyres etc, you make sure you have fuel and you have information about the route, gas stations, food stops or other facilities on the way. Of course, now you have google maps! You feel the excitement, the anticipation of the joys to be discovered along the way. You can barely sleep, but you do, because you don't want to fall asleep on the wheel. If you are a very careful person, you may have also bought insurance, checked your repair kit and kept an extra shirt, in case you spill coffee. This happy anticipation is what we program ourselves for. Most of us, most of the time. It gets coded in us when we do these drives with our parents and grandparents as children or as young adults and we imbibe that ability to enjoy, as well as the details of preparation and navigation.
Now imagine waking up at 2 am with a phone call informing you that your best friend is stranded in a snow storm in a place you have never been to and you need to go and rescue her. Your car is at the service station, but you can quickly borrow a friend's car. You need to leave NOW. The road has fog, the car starts after a couple of attempts and your google maps works, but you are not sure if it will still work once you are off the highway and onto the dirt track.
Shinjini brings up these two examples to focus on the feeling. The feeling of dealing with ambiguity. Not mastering. There are people who would be masters of the second situation. Let's say professional drivers, or rescuers, or fire brigade personnel. But she is talking about herself. A normal professional, a mother, a woman who plays many roles and realizes, with humility, that the world and its future are more complex and more ambiguous than it seemed at first and yet, wants to be a part of it. To be on the journey. Not to master it, but to enjoy it and make progress. So, humility is at the top in my toolkit to deal with ambiguity. There are others, and they have to do with going back to basics. Relying on the power to listen, to find the right cohort, to bring diversity of perspectives and resilience, to think on one's feet, to believe in serendipity, and to reinvent. Shinjini will talk about some of these in her as she takes you through her career journey that was like the planned road trips and the start of her entrepreneurial journey with Salt, which is all about the excitement of navigating through ambiguity.
Bio
Shinjini joined the Reserve bank of India in 1990 with an unusual educational background in English Literature and journalism. In her seventeen years at the central bank, She handled diverse portfolios and took a two year sabbatical to acquire M.A. in Public Policy at the UT-Austin, Texas, USA (1999-2001). She left RBI in 2007 to join Bank of America Merrill Lynch as Country Compliance Officer (2007-2010) and then moved on to PricewaterhouseCoopers as Director/partner-Banking and Capital Markets (2010-16). Shinjini headed Paytm Payments Bank briefly before accepting the position of Country Business Manager for Citibank’s Consumer Bank in India in 2017. She has just retired from Citi to set up Salt (www.salt.one) , a Startup in the space of women, money and choices.