Spinning a new world, post-Covid, that is better for everyone

While the pandemic has hit public health, economy and every other aspect of human life, it has also impacted on the larger and minor aspects of governance at all levels- from the political leadership and policy making at the top, to implementation at the State and grassroots level. The Covid crisis has compelled us to think of the need for better governance.  

Madras Management Association (MMA) in collaboration with Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung (KAS) presented a live talk through webinar on the theme, “Covid and ‘New Normal’ in Governance” by Mr Arun Maira, Thought Leader, Author, former Member of Planning Commission of India and former India Chairman of Boston Consulting Group on Monday, 10 August 2020.

Excerpts from the talk: 

The Jolly Good Bus Ride

For the last 15 to 20 years, we in India were travelling along happily, growing in the fastest growing, free market democracy in the world. Our growth rates were just short of China's but ahead of all other large countries of the world. Many of us were within this bus of growth. We had safety belts inside the bus which was moving faster, sometimes slower but nonetheless moving well.  

We inside the bus were doing well and enjoying the ride. We were even being served French wine and Swiss cheese. Then the bus had to suddenly stop as Covid came. We were surprised to see people falling off the bus, onto the streets around us; the people who've been clinging on to the bus riding on the roof of the bus, in the open, sun and rain, clinging on to this bus of economic growth. We weren't even aware of them. We were celebrating the good ride and comfort of the growth of our economy. 

Two Meters on the Dashboard

What we inside the bus and people in the government driving the bus were looking at were two instruments on the control panel. One of them was the GDP meter. We wanted it to keep rising from one trillion dollar to two trillion dollars and make it five trillion dollars by pressing the accelerator. 

The other instrument that some of us looked at was, what I call the RPM meter -the Stock Market meter which showed us how the stock market was going up and down as we pressed the accelerator, like an RPM meter does, to help us make judgments about what to do with the money that we could invest in stock market investments.  

Using these two meters that show how well the stock market and GDP are doing, we thought that that we had understood how everyone was doing.  May be, it was some indication about how the people in the bus were doing but not about the vast majority of our country who were not in this bus. They fell off the bus when the economic growth story stopped.

When I was in the Planning Commission as a member, we invited organizations- think tanks around the world to help us consider how well India was doing with respect to not just the economic growth, but also the care of the environment as well as the inclusion of the billion people of India in the economic growth. Scientifically, this was called the SEDA framework -the Sustainable Economic Development Assessment framework. It pointed out that India was doing the worst amongst all ASEAN countries, BRICs countries, and all the other countries in the Indian sub-continentto. 

For every unit of growth, we were destroying the environment more and we were creating less jobs and growth of incomes than even Nepal and Bangladesh and certainly much less than many other countries that we like to compare ourselves with.

17 SDGs to be Tracked

We have to rethink as to how we govern social and economic systems not just in India, but the whole world.  The sustainable development goals (SDGs) have shown the world a few years ago that we need to pay attention to 17 instruments – not just the GDP or the Stock Market instrument.  

It's very difficult to pay attention to 17 instruments at one time. This is the challenge that we have of global governance today. The Covid crisis has also shown us what is wrong with our present government and expert-led models of improving systems. 

We are at this moment paying a lot of attention, as we need to, to prevent the medical problem from becoming worse and to finding solutions to the medical problem, one of which is physical distancing to prevent the spread of the pandemic. That is the right solution that our doctors have pointed out to us. 

The consequence of this good, firmly implemented solution in countries has been that other systems have been breaking down. The people while being prevented from dying from Covid, are in our country dying due to other illnesses, for which they cannot get treatment since all the resources have been diverted towards the care of people infected with Covid. By the stoppage of the economy, people are even beginning to die out of starvation because they don't have income to buy the food. Solutions, therefore, must look at all aspects of a system.

Secondly, we must also look at the future consequences of our actions taken today. Reducing the prevention of spread of the disease has caused schools to be shut down. For the last one week, all over the world, there are big alarm bells ringing about the effect of interrupting children's education and how that is going to impact their lives in the future. So crisis solutions in one part of the system can damage other parts of the system. It can also damage the future health of the whole system and this is the challenge we have in management. 

Need to Unfocus

We are used to managing by focusing and dealing with the problem very efficiently, but we need to unfocus. We need to look at many things together. As humanity, we don't know at the moment how to govern complex systems. 

Einstein said very famously that when one is confronted with a crisis—an  insoluble big problem--to continue to try to solve it by pressing harder on the very method which might have caused the problem is madness. When we think about what we need in the future, let’s not keep thinking of just government. We have to think of governance.

What we see now is evidence of the clash of the scientific way of thinking and the natural way of being. We've been seeing for the last 30 years or more how we have been destroying Nature, imposing our scientific solutions on to it. 

More and More about Less and Less

Science is a way of thinking. Nature is a way of being.  Scientific thinking breaks reality into parts. Nature brings things together to create life. The European Enlightenment- the first enlightenment in the 17th century -  broke knowledge into parts, into silos, specialized disciplines, in which one got to know more and more about less and less.

Since Newton's time, within Physics, which is a broad discipline, 30 to 40 specializations have been developed. Then we have Biology and Chemistry, each broken up into parts. In the Social Sciences, even within Economics we have so many schools, and there are so many other social sciences. We are getting better and better at knowing more and more about less and less.

Narrow Domestic Walls

To use the expression of Rabindranath Tagore, a poet and a philosopher who was the first Indian to win the Nobel Prize, we could be ‘breaking up the world into fragments by narrow domestic walls,’ by our thinking and actions.  The walls have come up not only between people in societies but for the last two centuries, between scientific disciplines too.  

Nature brings people and things together and thus creates life.  We need a new enlightenment, because we suffer not only from the Covid crisis but ecological and civilisational crises. We need to come, as Tagore also said, to a situation ‘where the clear stream of reason flows and it is not lost in the dreary desert sand of dead habits’ and outdated thoughts.  

One of the first well-known examples that scientific management of nature would produce great results was the introduction of scientific management of forestry in Germany where the same type of trees were planted in equal distances in rows. We could apply scientific methods to improving that particular type of tree and count them easily by walking along them.

We introduced into Nature, management methods of improving productivity. Nature's forests survive because they have variety in them- different types of trees, bushes and grasses. They work together and sustain the whole forest like the Amazon forest which is not managed by scientific ways of Man. It is managed by the real, natural ways of Nature. 

With scientific agriculture, we plant one type of crop in a big field, use machines and appropriate fertilizers and pesticides for that crop to improve productivity.  But as we have learnt in our own country, with wheat and paddy, by using uniform crop practices we destroy the soil underneath; we change even the local climates in parts of our country. So the scientific approach about doing the same thing in a large scale with standardization kills the beauty of complex systems and the way they sustain themselves. 

Scientific population management is about taking the best man and the best woman and let them to co-create; take the children they produce and put them into special nurseries where they are fed the best food, so they will grow into superior men and superior women. This method of spreading what we consider the best and forget the rest destroys civilization and Nature too. 

Change the Paradigm 

We have to change this paradigm. We have to change from the Machine way of organizing which is overpowering Nature to nature's way of organizing itself and apply nature's way to the way we organize our own society. We have to change from man's way of thinking, which has been overpowering woman's way of thinking for centuries now.

We have to change from trying to impose formal methods like management systems to overpower the organic informal systems with which people create  livelihoods and manage their own communities. This is a crisis we have in India right now, where, we denigrate the large informal sector that we have and stigmatize it. We look down upon it even though that sector has, in it, a great resilience. People with very little resource and support from the formal system sustain themselves in the informal sector.  

Local than Global 

Even before Covid, globalization was breaking up. There was a reaction from countries to the global systems of trade management because people within their countries were losing jobs and their incomes were being destroyed for the benefit of allowing trade of goods and money to flow around the world. 

Of course, more recently, geopolitical tensions have been breaking up the global order. In Covid, the physical realities have broken down the flows of products around the global supply chains. This is not going to change in a hurry. We have to stop now and think more of the local, rather than global solutions. This is the realization that we have come to in the world today seeing the complex problems of inequity of social systems, destruction of soil and forest, water contamination and so on. 

We can’t have solutions for water contamination or forests which apply in the same way across the world.  All the systems come together locally and create a local reality. So if you have to solve and improve on all the indicators of the SDGs, then the people of Kerala must find their solutions for their society, their environment and their health systems as they are now doing. The people of Tamil Nadu must find their own. The situation of Kerala cannot be the solution for Himachal Pradesh, Nagaland or the desert lands in the Thar Desert. 

It comes again to our misconceived approach for managing large complex systems with strong central governments and large scale, centralised, private sector and NGO organizations. They take the power away from the people; we must object to them on both, scientific, as well as ethical grounds.  We need local system solutions, developed and implemented by communities, to global systemic problems of health, livelihoods and care of the environment.  

We must change the theory of change. We should not be looking to scale up a standard solution everywhere, but we should scale up the ability of people everywhere to find their own solutions in their own communities. This was Gandhiji's way of giving freedom to the people, to make people the masters of their own lives, their own communities and their own solutions.

When the Capital Migrates

So here we are- the people in the bus and many people outside the bus. Many of us, who were inside the bus, were the beneficiaries of the form of globalization prevalent at the turn of the millenium, in which those who had Capital could invest their Capital wherever they wanted to in the world and increase their own Returns on that Capital further. Thus, by this system of free flow of capital, the freedom for migrant Capital, and the wealth of those who had wealth, has been increasing faster and faster. Therefore, the distance between those who have wealth and those who can only work and get income from work, has increased so high in the last 30 years. Probably 50 people in the world today own as much wealth as half of humanity. This is unsustainable and unethical.  

Globalization has been making life easier for migrant capital to go wherever it liked.  But we've been making it very hard for migrant workers who cannot even find a home anywhere. 

We need new forms of business enterprises. As teachers of management and managers, we must develop enterprises in which workers will create the wealth for themselves and not, by their work, create wealth only for remote investors, many of whom don't even know where their wealth is being invested. For them, the enterprise is a just a stock market ticker. What the condition is of the people who work there is not of much concern to them. 

The Symbol: Spinning Wheel 

I come to Gandhiji again. His Charkha, the Spinning Wheel, was a symbol. It was a vision of Enterprises by the people, producing things for the people, and which were also owned by the people. We need deep democracy which is government by the people, of the people and for the people. 

We have a conceptual crisis in how to govern complex and dynamic social systems. Again, to quote Einstein, ‘we can't keep applying the same institutional ideas and hope to solve the civilization and ecological problems that we don't know how to solve today.’ We create more problems by keeping on applying our present ways of getting things done. We need to rethink how we manage and govern business enterprises as well as cities and countries. 

Let me summarize in 5 points.

1.  What we measure is what we manage:

As managers, we know that what we measure is what we manage. The Boards of companies have been keeping their eyes too much on profits and shareholder value, the two indicators on the dashboard. They need to put more indicators in governance for assessing the impact of the businesses on all stakeholders and environment and look at them every day, just like they look at the profit and share price.  

The governments also need to keep their eye not just on GDP, but on the well-being of all citizens, as well as Nature that sustains us all. They need to have many indicators on the scorecard in their front. In our persistence to become a 5 trillion dollar economy, let us just pause before we press the accelerator, get our instrument panel right, and then choose which way we want to steer. 

2.  Systems Thinking: Unfocus

Systems thinking requires us to unfocus, to see the whole forest and not just count the trees. We have to see the relationships between parts of the systems. 

3.  Listen to Different People 

We must listen to people who are not like us. We just listen more and more to people who talk our language and who think like us. We have webinars and seminars with them. On social media, we are compelled to be with people like us. The algorithms force us to be with them.

We are not listening. We don’t listen even to people who follow a different stream of science. We weren't even sensing that there were people who weren't living life like us, to whom our indicators of the stock market or the GDP or whatever else we thought as important, was perhaps of no consequence to them. Let's get out of the bus, be with them and listen to them.

4.  Change the Theory of Change

Rather than prescribing one-size-fit-for-all, standardised solutions, we need local system solutions to global systemic problems, to address the Sustainable Development Goals – the SDGs and Covid related problems. Change must be bottom up and not top down.

5.  Gandhiji's Principle of Anantodaya

We have to think of the poorest person first and maybe only the poorest person, when we devise new governance and policy solutions. Think of what effect would our policy have on that person's life?

People are not mere numbers; Economists put people into their equations as numbers. People are human beings. Poor people are not a burden to be tolerated by us - the elite. They are human beings; they have agency; they are the other source of energy and solutions that the world needs. 

These are my five requests for changing our fundamental ways of thinking, so as to create a new normal in governance. The new normal is going to be very different from what we have considered as normal ways of managing and governing so far.