Monday, May 11, 2015

SOP

What do you make out when you hear SOP i.e. Standard Operating Procedures or as per military it is Standing Operating Procedures?

Any normal Joe will think that SOP is just term to be used in corporate scenarios.

Think harder. Most of the problems in our lives is because of non-adherence of SOPs.

Let’s take today’s incident where a traffic cop is hitting a lady with a brick or the Uber cab case in Delhi.

In the first case the traffic cop did not bother to follow the SOP of dealing with a citizen and also the citizen did not follow the SOP of dealing with a corrupt cop and the in second case the traffic department did not bother to do the due diligence before issuing the permit and also taking care of the issue of woman safety.

In both the cases there is a SOP to be followed which was not,which led to the incident.

What is SOP? These are directives defining the actions to be taken upon the occurrence of specific events. It is a set of rule written or otherwise which needs to be followed in our daily lives.

Now let’s see what is our attitude towards SOP like a safety fire drill in offices. Most of the time we do it grudgingly. If someone is asked what we will do in case of fire break, we will be caught unawares.

A simple a case of eating ice cream beyond limit is again an act of non-adherence of SOP which leads to the throat problem and may cause loss of opportunities.

A blatant non-adherence of SOP of speaking on mobile phone while driving which is being done by the illiterates as well the uber class.

One more much abused case of non-adherence of SOP is smoking which causes cancer still we hardly think before lighting the next one.

Rather than trying to change the entire world if each one of just follows the SOPs in our lives it will be certainly a better place to live in.

Shall I call SOP as Save Our Planet?