I retired as a consultant in 2008 when I was invited by the then Prime Minister to serve as a Member of the Planning Commission. I resigned as a Member in 2014 when the government changed. Later that year, in November, I received a request from some young Indians to help them with something unusual.
They called themselves GAP—Global Action against Poverty. They had an idea for an unusual meeting in the Sabarmati Ashram on 12 March 2015. It was the anniversary of the day Mahatma Gandhi had begun the long Dandi March from the ashram to pick up a lump of salt from the sea. Thousands of people had joined him as he marched on to claim back from the foreign rulers the people’s rights to produce their own salt.
The GAP team had invited Professor Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the Grameen Bank and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize; Elabhen Bhat, founder of the remarkable SEWA organization in India; Bill Drayton, founder of the Asoka Foundation and seven other remarkable persons to the meeting at Sabarmati. The GAP team was proposing to invite 200 others who, like themselves, were already making some efforts to reduce poverty in their surroundings. These changemakers wanted to have more impact, but did not know how.
The GAP team asked me to curate the meeting and extract the ‘secret ingredient’ these remarkable persons knew and pass it on to the 200 changemakers looking for it. Their aim was to produce better empowered and wiser changemakers who would leave the ashram with clear action plans about how they could bring about a change in the world.
Changing the world is not an engineering exercise, I told them. It cannot be reduced to a series of pre-determined mechanical steps. There is an inner journey, within the changemaker, that must be undertaken too. Persons who change the world are like fireflies with an inner light. They are life-long learners, I suggested, as Mahatma Gandhi was.
The changemakers must be prepared to extract the secret ingredient not only from the great leaders they would meet in the ashram but from within themselves too. They should introspect: what drives them to change the world and what would they need to learn to have more impact in it? I outlined their journey plans; they would be along three tracks: actions, creating new partnerships and learning.
The Inner journeys we undertake and plans we make
Mahatma Gandhi was the greatest leader of the last century. He epitomised the truest definition of a leader, which is, “He (or she) who takes the first steps towards that which he or she deeply cares about, in ways that others would wish to follow”. A leader has a deep caring for a cause and a goal. A leader has the will to be the first to take risky steps towards that goal. Those who wait for others to step out first and show that the path is entirely safe before they step out themselves are not leaders: they are followers. Leaders inspire others to follow them.
Real leaders do not need money to pay others to follow them; nor sticks to threaten them if they do not follow; and often do not have positions of authority from which they can compel others to obey. Indeed, Mahatma Gandhi had none of these: the stick in his hand in many portraits and tabloids of the Dandi March, such as the famous one near Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi, was to support his own old body, not to threaten anyone. Yet millions followed him because he cared for them: his cause was their cause too.
Leaders dream of a future they want to create. They set goals that appear impossible at the outset, even to themselves.
“The Gods put dreams in the hearts of men—dreams, desires, aspirations that are often much bigger than they are. The greatness of a man corresponds to that painful discrepancy between the goal he sets for himself and the strength nature granted him when he came into the world,” said a young 16-year old Alexander to his tutor and biographer, Eumenes. Alexander dreamed of reaching India, to him the richest place on earth. He fulfilled his dream, for which he had to defeat the mighty Persian empire and the elephant mounted mighty armies of Porus, and all this before he was thirty years old.
Alexander felt the painful discrepancy between the goal he set himself and his ability to realise it. To realise his goal, he had to develop his own capabilities.
The title of Mahatma Gandhi’s autobiography, ‘My Experiments with Truth’, also expresses the essence of a leader’s journey to his goal: a continuous development of the leader’s own capabilities. Leaders are not born with the capabilities they need to reach their goals. Yet, they do not take the easy way, which is to set goals within their means and capabilities: they develop their own capabilities to reach the goals they deeply care for.
‘Projects’ that change the condition of the world are personal journeys of leaders. They have ‘outcomes’ that can be measured, such as the numbers of children who are no longer malnourished, the number of families who are no longer destitute, the numbers of people who no longer cringe in the face of oppression. On their way to produce these outcomes, they must pass many visible milestones, such as the enrolment of sufficient numbers of volunteers, the creation of a new organization, sufficient funds in its account, permission to use a new technology, etc. These are conventional metrics for any project.
However, journeys to change the condition of the world are not so mechanical and so simple. They are difficult because they invariably deal with systemic issues, which are not well understood. Many forces working together create systemic conditions such as poverty or exclusion of people from the rights that others enjoy. Therefore successful projects to change such systemic conditions must work with several partners, with their own competences and specific causes they are pursuing. Poor collaboration is one of the principal causes of failures of well-intentioned, and even very well resourced projects aiming to change systemic conditions.
Working together with partners is necessary, but it is not easy. Egos come in the way. Expectations of each other are not clear. Trust is often low. Coalitions of partners must be built systematically so that the goal can be reached, and the painful discrepancy between any one partner’s capability and the overall project’s goal is bridgeable. Building coalitions is not easy. So it is often avoided. But it must be done. Therefore the ‘project plan’ must have a plan for building coalitions and strengthening them too. Moreover, improving the ability to build coalitions should be a part of the capacity building and learning plan of the leader whenever the objective of a project is to change systemic conditions.
Plans to progress along three rails simultaneously
In summary, Projects to change systemic conditions, such as poverty, must move along three rails simultaneously.
The first is the rail of Learning. What is the knowledge one needs to achieve one’s goals and does not yet have? What are capabilities one needs and does not have? How will this knowledge be obtained and how will the capabilities be acquired? Here too, there must be a plan and progress must be measured.
The second is the rail of Collaboration with the involvement of others and strengthening partnerships with them. Goals should be set along this rail too, and progress measured.
The third is the rail of Action, with measurable indicators of the progress of the action.
It is often said that one manages what one measures. Insufficient progress along the rails of Collaboration and Learning will stall the progress along the rail of Action. Therefore there must be milestones and measures for managing progress along all three rails.
A Project Plan: A Story Written Backwards
A successful ‘project’, which produces (and may even exceed) the outcomes that were desired at the outset, is a journey along three tracks as mentioned before. Critical developments must happen along the way before the outcome can be obtained: actions taken; collaborations made and strengthened; knowledge acquired, capabilities developed. There is an order in which they must happen: some things must have happened before so that others could happen after that.
Working backwards from the final outcome, one can envisage what must have happened just before that for the final outcome to have become possible. And, for that preceding step to have been possible, something must have happened before it. And so on, backwards, one can imagine the critical junctures along a story of success. Just as a plan to reach the summit of a Himalayan mountain must imagine where one must be on the day before the final push. And then plan where one must be the day before one can reach that final camp. And so, plan a route to the bottom of the mountain from where one will start the journey up, with the intermediate camps envisaged on the way to the top.
The intermediate camps, i.e. the intermediate achievements, in the projects that participants in GAP will envisage, will be of various types: collaborations formed, money raised, knowledge learned, volunteers enrolled, experiments made, actions taken, etc. They can be laid along a time-line in the structure of a credible story. This story that you will envisage will be your project plan, and your map to guide you along your way.
Your story—your plan—will be a journey into the unknown. You will have not been on this journey before and no one else will have been precisely on your path. As you take steps along your path, you may realise that you should make corrections in your plan. You must be a good learner, to learn and determine what next and how, always keeping your end goal in mind.
My plan
I asked the GAP team to prepare themselves for the meeting. I requested them to think about their own journeys, their own plans and, as their first learning step, to share their stories with each other and with me.
One of them asked me about my plans. What did I want to do, now that I was out of the hurly-burly of working within the government? What did I want to learn? Would I learn to play golf now that I would have time for it? It made me think.
Here is the plan I submitted to the GAP team.
My favourite carol is the Little Drummer Boy. He says he has no wealth to offer the Lord Jesus. All he has is his drum, which he will play for the baby Jesus. His offering is the ‘rump-a-rum-pump’ of his drum, which he will play at his very best for the Lord.
I began to read the Bhagavada Gita when I was a teen-ager, almost sixty years ago. I have been fixed since then on lines in the Second chapter, to which I return again and again. ‘You only have a right to the work, and not to the fruits thereof.’ The Gita preaches detachment from the fruits. What are the fruits of the work? The obvious interpretation of the fruits are the benefits for oneself. What about the achievement of the goal? Is it not a fruit of the work? Should not one seek the goal or should one strive only to do good work and do it well? Is this the meaning of the ‘right to the work’, which is all that one must have?
I have asked myself many times in my life, when I have paused to reflect, what is the work that I aspire to do well? The answer has come, softly first and louder now, that I want to help others to work with others so that they can produce the results they want.
I want to play the drum. Provide the rhythm in the background that enables others to coordinate their music. And I want to play it well.
The percussionist—the drummer or tabla player—is not the player of the melody, or the singer of the song. When many instruments are playing and many voices are singing, the percussion enables them to play and sing in unison.
My aspiration now is to be a better drummer, and a better human being.
My action plan is to assist people who want a drummer. How should a drummer measure his success? By the large numbers of concerts he has played in? Or the quality of the concerts even if they were very few? At this stage in my life, when time will become scarcer, as it inevitably must, it is quality not quantity that I aspire for.
My collaboration plan is to be selective about who I engage with. I must be selective because time is scarce, and there is none to waste. I must engage with those who really want a drummer: not because it is customary to have one but because they know that without a drummer they cannot achieve what they want to.
My learning plan is to learn to restrain myself from wasting my time on what is popular, and what gives passing fame. To learn to say ‘No’ to the greed to have more popularity, more approbation, more followers.
A story from Chris Bonnington’s compilation of stories of great adventurers and sportsmen that I read, 35 years ago, when I was struggling with the lines from the Second chapter of the Gita (which I still am) continues to haunt me. It is an account of a round-the-world solo yacht race.
The winner, way ahead of the others, had rounded the tip of South America from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean. As he was sailing up towards London, towards the finish, he heard on his radio of the preparations for his reception. The Queen would come, and the media of course in droves. He thought about it. Was this why he was racing—the fruits of success? Or was it for good sailing at his best? He turned his boat around, to sail down the Atlantic and around the Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean, to complete another solo circumnavigation of the earth!
I must be better. I must learn the dynamics within ensembles of players and singers—what makes it difficult for them to coordinate and what would enable them to play better together to produce music that will uplift the world. My learning plan is to learn to play the drum better.
I end with lines from Robert Frost’s ‘Two Tramps at Mud-Time’.
“But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future’s sakes.”
JOURNEYS OF LEARNING AND CHANGE
Arun Maira
I retired as a consultant in 2008 when I was invited by the then Prime Minister to serve as a Member of the Planning Commission. I resigned as a Member in 2014 when the government changed. Later that year, in November, I received a request from some young Indians to help them with something unusual.
They called themselves GAP—Global Action against Poverty. They had an idea for an unusual meeting in the Sabarmati Ashram on 12 March 2015. It was the anniversary of the day Mahatma Gandhi had begun the long Dandi March from the ashram to pick up a lump of salt from the sea. Thousands of people had joined him as he marched on to claim back from the foreign rulers the people’s rights to produce their own salt.
The GAP team had invited Professor Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the Grameen Bank and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize; Elabhen Bhat, founder of the remarkable SEWA organization in India; Bill Drayton, founder of the Asoka Foundation and seven other remarkable persons to the meeting at Sabarmati. The GAP team was proposing to invite 200 others who, like themselves, were already making some efforts to reduce poverty in their surroundings. These changemakers wanted to have more impact, but did not know how.
The GAP team asked me to curate the meeting and extract the ‘secret ingredient’ these remarkable persons knew and pass it on to the 200 changemakers looking for it. Their aim was to produce better empowered and wiser changemakers who would leave the ashram with clear action plans about how they could bring about a change in the world.
Changing the world is not an engineering exercise, I told them. It cannot be reduced to a series of pre-determined mechanical steps. There is an inner journey, within the changemaker, that must be undertaken too. Persons who change the world are like fireflies with an inner light. They are life-long learners, I suggested, as Mahatma Gandhi was.
The changemakers must be prepared to extract the secret ingredient not only from the great leaders they would meet in the ashram but from within themselves too. They should introspect: what drives them to change the world and what would they need to learn to have more impact in it? I outlined their journey plans; they would be along three tracks: actions, creating new partnerships and learning.
The Inner journeys we undertake and plans we make
Mahatma Gandhi was the greatest leader of the last century. He epitomised the truest definition of a leader, which is, “He (or she) who takes the first steps towards that which he or she deeply cares about, in ways that others would wish to follow”. A leader has a deep caring for a cause and a goal. A leader has the will to be the first to take risky steps towards that goal. Those who wait for others to step out first and show that the path is entirely safe before they step out themselves are not leaders: they are followers. Leaders inspire others to follow them.
Real leaders do not need money to pay others to follow them; nor sticks to threaten them if they do not follow; and often do not have positions of authority from which they can compel others to obey. Indeed, Mahatma Gandhi had none of these: the stick in his hand in many portraits and tabloids of the Dandi March, such as the famous one near Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi, was to support his own old body, not to threaten anyone. Yet millions followed him because he cared for them: his cause was their cause too.
Leaders dream of a future they want to create. They set goals that appear impossible at the outset, even to themselves.
“The Gods put dreams in the hearts of men—dreams, desires, aspirations that are often much bigger than they are. The greatness of a man corresponds to that painful discrepancy between the goal he sets for himself and the strength nature granted him when he came into the world,” said a young 16-year old Alexander to his tutor and biographer, Eumenes. Alexander dreamed of reaching India, to him the richest place on earth. He fulfilled his dream, for which he had to defeat the mighty Persian empire and the elephant mounted mighty armies of Porus, and all this before he was thirty years old.
Alexander felt the painful discrepancy between the goal he set himself and his ability to realise it. To realise his goal, he had to develop his own capabilities.
The title of Mahatma Gandhi’s autobiography, ‘My Experiments with Truth’, also expresses the essence of a leader’s journey to his goal: a continuous development of the leader’s own capabilities. Leaders are not born with the capabilities they need to reach their goals. Yet, they do not take the easy way, which is to set goals within their means and capabilities: they develop their own capabilities to reach the goals they deeply care for.
‘Projects’ that change the condition of the world are personal journeys of leaders. They have ‘outcomes’ that can be measured, such as the numbers of children who are no longer malnourished, the number of families who are no longer destitute, the numbers of people who no longer cringe in the face of oppression. On their way to produce these outcomes, they must pass many visible milestones, such as the enrolment of sufficient numbers of volunteers, the creation of a new organization, sufficient funds in its account, permission to use a new technology, etc. These are conventional metrics for any project.
However, journeys to change the condition of the world are not so mechanical and so simple. They are difficult because they invariably deal with systemic issues, which are not well understood. Many forces working together create systemic conditions such as poverty or exclusion of people from the rights that others enjoy. Therefore successful projects to change such systemic conditions must work with several partners, with their own competences and specific causes they are pursuing. Poor collaboration is one of the principal causes of failures of well-intentioned, and even very well resourced projects aiming to change systemic conditions.
Working together with partners is necessary, but it is not easy. Egos come in the way. Expectations of each other are not clear. Trust is often low. Coalitions of partners must be built systematically so that the goal can be reached, and the painful discrepancy between any one partner’s capability and the overall project’s goal is bridgeable. Building coalitions is not easy. So it is often avoided. But it must be done. Therefore the ‘project plan’ must have a plan for building coalitions and strengthening them too. Moreover, improving the ability to build coalitions should be a part of the capacity building and learning plan of the leader whenever the objective of a project is to change systemic conditions.
Plans to progress along three rails simultaneously
In summary, Projects to change systemic conditions, such as poverty, must move along three rails simultaneously.
The first is the rail of Learning. What is the knowledge one needs to achieve one’s goals and does not yet have? What are capabilities one needs and does not have? How will this knowledge be obtained and how will the capabilities be acquired? Here too, there must be a plan and progress must be measured.
The second is the rail of Collaboration with the involvement of others and strengthening partnerships with them. Goals should be set along this rail too, and progress measured.
The third is the rail of Action, with measurable indicators of the progress of the action.
It is often said that one manages what one measures. Insufficient progress along the rails of Collaboration and Learning will stall the progress along the rail of Action. Therefore there must be milestones and measures for managing progress along all three rails.
A Project Plan: A Story Written Backwards
A successful ‘project’, which produces (and may even exceed) the outcomes that were desired at the outset, is a journey along three tracks as mentioned before. Critical developments must happen along the way before the outcome can be obtained: actions taken; collaborations made and strengthened; knowledge acquired, capabilities developed. There is an order in which they must happen: some things must have happened before so that others could happen after that.
Working backwards from the final outcome, one can envisage what must have happened just before that for the final outcome to have become possible. And, for that preceding step to have been possible, something must have happened before it. And so on, backwards, one can imagine the critical junctures along a story of success. Just as a plan to reach the summit of a Himalayan mountain must imagine where one must be on the day before the final push. And then plan where one must be the day before one can reach that final camp. And so, plan a route to the bottom of the mountain from where one will start the journey up, with the intermediate camps envisaged on the way to the top.
The intermediate camps, i.e. the intermediate achievements, in the projects that participants in GAP will envisage, will be of various types: collaborations formed, money raised, knowledge learned, volunteers enrolled, experiments made, actions taken, etc. They can be laid along a time-line in the structure of a credible story. This story that you will envisage will be your project plan, and your map to guide you along your way.
Your story—your plan—will be a journey into the unknown. You will have not been on this journey before and no one else will have been precisely on your path. As you take steps along your path, you may realise that you should make corrections in your plan. You must be a good learner, to learn and determine what next and how, always keeping your end goal in mind.
My plan
I asked the GAP team to prepare themselves for the meeting. I requested them to think about their own journeys, their own plans and, as their first learning step, to share their stories with each other and with me.
One of them asked me about my plans. What did I want to do, now that I was out of the hurly-burly of working within the government? What did I want to learn? Would I learn to play golf now that I would have time for it? It made me think.
Here is the plan I submitted to the GAP team.
My favourite carol is the Little Drummer Boy. He says he has no wealth to offer the Lord Jesus. All he has is his drum, which he will play for the baby Jesus. His offering is the ‘rump-a-rum-pump’ of his drum, which he will play at his very best for the Lord.
I began to read the Bhagavada Gita when I was a teen-ager, almost sixty years ago. I have been fixed since then on lines in the Second chapter, to which I return again and again. ‘You only have a right to the work, and not to the fruits thereof.’ The Gita preaches detachment from the fruits. What are the fruits of the work? The obvious interpretation of the fruits are the benefits for oneself. What about the achievement of the goal? Is it not a fruit of the work? Should not one seek the goal or should one strive only to do good work and do it well? Is this the meaning of the ‘right to the work’, which is all that one must have?
I have asked myself many times in my life, when I have paused to reflect, what is the work that I aspire to do well? The answer has come, softly first and louder now, that I want to help others to work with others so that they can produce the results they want.
I want to play the drum. Provide the rhythm in the background that enables others to coordinate their music. And I want to play it well.
The percussionist—the drummer or tabla player—is not the player of the melody, or the singer of the song. When many instruments are playing and many voices are singing, the percussion enables them to play and sing in unison.
My aspiration now is to be a better drummer, and a better human being.
My action plan is to assist people who want a drummer. How should a drummer measure his success? By the large numbers of concerts he has played in? Or the quality of the concerts even if they were very few? At this stage in my life, when time will become scarcer, as it inevitably must, it is quality not quantity that I aspire for.
My collaboration plan is to be selective about who I engage with. I must be selective because time is scarce, and there is none to waste. I must engage with those who really want a drummer: not because it is customary to have one but because they know that without a drummer they cannot achieve what they want to.
My learning plan is to learn to restrain myself from wasting my time on what is popular, and what gives passing fame. To learn to say ‘No’ to the greed to have more popularity, more approbation, more followers.
A story from Chris Bonnington’s compilation of stories of great adventurers and sportsmen that I read, 35 years ago, when I was struggling with the lines from the Second chapter of the Gita (which I still am) continues to haunt me. It is an account of a round-the-world solo yacht race.
The winner, way ahead of the others, had rounded the tip of South America from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean. As he was sailing up towards London, towards the finish, he heard on his radio of the preparations for his reception. The Queen would come, and the media of course in droves. He thought about it. Was this why he was racing—the fruits of success? Or was it for good sailing at his best? He turned his boat around, to sail down the Atlantic and around the Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean, to complete another solo circumnavigation of the earth!
I must be better. I must learn the dynamics within ensembles of players and singers—what makes it difficult for them to coordinate and what would enable them to play better together to produce music that will uplift the world. My learning plan is to learn to play the drum better.
I end with lines from Robert Frost’s ‘Two Tramps at Mud-Time’.
“But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future’s sakes.”