I know where I am, but this is not how it should be!

Déjà-vu is among the most popular French words imported to English and means ‘already seen or experienced’. It is a kind of feeling experienced, when you are in a place or situation where you haven’t consciously been before, but you have a strong feel that you have been. Déjà-vu is more a phenomenon of the subconscious mind, usually attributed to dreams and the picture that they leave behind. As opposed to the popularity of Déjà-vu, more so after the Hollywood movie released in 2006, starring Denzel Washington, its literary mirror-image, Vu- jade is much less known, though technically speaking, is a far more common, probable and detrimental phenomenon.

Consider for a moment than you are attending an interview for a marketing job, with a panel well known for its core marketing questions and all of a sudden, the interviewers start throwing questions at you on cosmology or oceanography or some obscure and totally unrelated field, the feeling that you have that point can be described as a mild version of Vu-jade. In layman’s language, one may end up asking himself, ‘What the hell is going on and what do I do now?’ The very fact that you are thrown off the feet would seriously impair your chances of answering those questions, even if you have sufficient knowledge about the topics.

Vu-jade is a feeling of ‘I have never been here before or I know where I am, but this is not how it should be’. This is a trait inherent to the human mind. Humans are more or less seasoned to adapt to various circumstances, any unexpected or unreasonable deviation from this seasoning cannot be easily surmounted by the human mind. When a person is informed about a particular incident, and is given a clear picture of how things should and should not work, it is natural for her to adapt herself to the image she already has in mind. The moment things start working against this presumed interpretation, all senses fall apart. You have no one to turn to, no idea what to do and is in a disastrous state of emotional chaos and self destruction. Celebrated organizational theorist, Karl. E. Weick explains this phenomenon and how detrimental it could be for an organization or an individual, with the example of the Mann Gulch fire disaster. This was published in the Administrative Science Quarterly in 1993 and was widely read and acclaimed. The Mann Gulch fire disaster occurred in the year 1949, when a group of fire fighters were dislodged over the Mann Gulch area, where a lightening had sparked off a forest fire. Things started going wrong from the beginning itself, as the single radio that the team had was pulverized before the operation even started. The fire, which was initially considered to be a 10:00 fire, meaning it could be fixed before 10:00 AM the next morning, was much more aggressive and severe than was estimated. This ultimately turned to a death trap, killing 13 men, who surprisingly had means at hand to save themselves. Weick attributes the failure and the apparent death of the men to collapse of sense making, and the feeling was Vu-Jade was among the major contributors to this. Then men were dysfunctional as firefighters once all their perceptions about the fire ended up being wrong, they could not negotiate with their comprehensions and what they were seeing around and were blind and oblivious to the feasible solutions that could have saved their lives.

The human mind takes more than what we can possibly imagine in adapting to a situation it is not familiar with, particularly when another deeper picture is already embedded in it. Organization breaks, its members no longer trust each other and end up being irrational in their thoughts and actions and all hell breaks loose, thanks to Vu-jade.

In the management field, there is a huge and unlimited scope for Vu-jade. The more the uncertain and complex the environment becomes, the more are the avenues for the ‘Where am I?’ feeling. Resisting this becomes a necessary and sufficient condition for organizational stability and flexibility, both. The knowledge of the possibility of this uncertainty is the first step towards combating this omnipresent abnormality. When one is in a frame of mind to expect and accept beyond what is known, seen or experienced, very few things can surprise him. Wide experience, wisdom and a strong leadership always help. Respect for each other, the willingness to work together and the ability to think out of the box are among the other major contributors to get over or get used to the sense of Vu-jade.

So the next time you find the string of your expectations and assumptions broken, you can safely conclude that you are stepping into the quagmire of Vu-jade, and unlike his distanced brother Déjà-vu, this one is not really friendly or exciting, and if not looked out for, can beat the senses and the sense-making process in you!