How did it end ?

​The end is important. Get it right. 
 
Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel prize winning behavioral economist, proposed a theory that an event is not usually judged by the entirety of the experience but disproportionately by how it ends (‘When More Pain Is Preferred to Less: Adding a Better End’). 
 
He provided multiple evidence to demonstrate this effect. In one such experiment, participants had one hand immersed in ice water at a temperature that causes moderate pain. The first trial lasted 60 seconds. The second trial lasted longer - 90 seconds, however in the last 30 seconds  of this trial, the water was slowly warmed by 1 degree (better but still painful). For the third trial, they were allowed to choose which of the first two trials was less disagreeable, and repeat that one. People were more willing to repeat the second trial, despite a 30 second longer exposure to uncomfortable temperatures. Kahneman et al. concluded that "subjects chose the long trial simply because they liked the memory of it better than the alternative, or disliked it a little less because of the way it had ended”.
   
Why does this happen ? That’s because the ‘remembering’ self  (the  one that recounts the experience and summarizes it for you) seems to be dominant Vs the ‘experiencing’ self  (the one that is in the moment undergoing the experience). It’s the ‘remembering’ self that governs making future choices, evaluating the overall quality of an event that you’ve undergone  and the satisfaction and dissatisfaction one experiences. 
  
With the Covid crisis, and the millions of job losses, it would befit organizations and leaders to make an earnest attempt to make these  ‘endings’ with their employees humane, empathetic, with a tangible show of gratitude, acknowledging the pain of a job loss, while offering the possibility of continued connections in the future, versus making these endings robotic, abrupt, devoid of any emotions, stripped of any real conversations or possibilities of continued connections and conversations, as seems to be the case in many instances.
 
Endings are key. What happens during these moments of ‘endings’ impacts our remembering selves and the story we tell ourselves.  The very least that organizations, leaders, & team members can do is to get the ending right; and if they can’t change the outcomes, they can at least make the ending less negative. 
 
Afterall, the memory is all people get to keep.