Can we mask the elephant too?

Rangarajan, Mahesh had my admiration when he with exceptional calm would strive through disparate data and detail on politics around election news. His grip on constituency peculiarities morphed into the tenacious hold caste, community and suffrage had on India. His masterly poise had a problem as far as I was concerned decades ago. It would be difficult to discern whence he emerged and where he would disappear into. Last evening, seeing him in the flesh at Mother Tekla auditorium was a gift from the multi-faceted Giri of the Azim Premji University. Of course, the diligent contact Sudheesh Venkatesh, Chief People Officer of the Azim Premji Foundation has with fellow professionals helps make known the Public Lecture Series from the university in Bangalore.

Mahesh Rangarajan 

Mahesh had transformed into being a scholar of environmental history. Giri met him at a panel just weeks before in 2018 itself, when the intent to invite Mahesh became firm. Mahesh is now a consummate connector of dots, perhaps enjoying the possibilities of hope, rather than wallowing in the throes of despair on our environmental horizons. And that to me was the wonder with which I left the forum yesterday. As Dean of academic affairs for the Asoka University, his students are likely to extend beyond the rolls of the institution now. There are dots I found connecting for myself as a consequence of the stimulating flow of facts from Mahesh.  The levity with which Mahesh unfolded global ecological imprints across timelines, made me wonder if at some point, he was mere consumer of the more delightful datum in its form, than the activist conscience-keeper given the intensity, nay adverse severity of man’s relationship with nature. The talk was aptly labelled as “At Nature’s Edge – History and the Ecological Present”.

So, let me briefly state the points around the dots of my experience.

1.       Daniel Goleman in his book Ecological Intelligence (the less popular of his books on Intelligence), had mapped for us that only collectively could we reverse the damage we have inflicted on our environment. Our hardwired brains cannot quickly fathom how our olfactory senses, our visual perceptors and the like could have given us pre-historic advantages, but its only our neocortex that can engage with requisite reasoning to confront the challenges of our environment.

2.       Harari, Yuval, also a historian, presages the wheat crop as being more robust than the complex human in its inheritance of the planet. 

Yuval N Harari

Counter-intuitive and brilliant, his inductive reasoning into the future, as in books like Homo Deux can ring alarms on the reasoning we posses in our times. We are going to be socially challenged.

3.       Walter Mischel, who died last week had shown us through his marshmallow experiment, that those taken in by instant gratification are less likely to be resilient into purposeful futures.

Social Psychology is no pushover, and irrespective of cultural nuances, the capacity to collectively defer consumerist trends that threaten our environment needs to survive beyond the radical transparency required of an ecologically sensitive world.

4.       Chindia Rising was a book that the master of management thinking Jagdish Sheth had brought on barely after another brilliant offering on human fallibilities. His book on the self-destructive habits of good companies contain tell-tale signs of hubris and compulsive gratifications that leaders in firms succumb to in the absence of sentient organization design.

Dr Jagdish Sheth

The Chindia Rising book outlined forward looking dangers to world economies, and how both China and India face a common challenge in the environment. Mahesh Rangarajan deftly passed a profundity in governance priorities when he asked the audience to indulge in proximate enquiry on the internet, regarding China’s engagement with the environment. He divulged the name of a book critically acclaimed the world over.

Don’t cry Tai Lake is the hint. The plot is contextualized with the tease of mystery and sombre realism. Excerpted from the Washington Post here “Don’t Cry, Tai Lake” begins when Zhao declines a vacation at the Wuxi Cadre Recreation Center, a luxury resort for senior party officials, and sends Chen in his place. The resort is not far from Shanghai and overlooks the huge, once gorgeous Tai Lake. Now the lake is ringed by factories and severely polluted by toxic wastes. That fact, denied by the party faithful and regretted by Chen and a few environmentalists, is the crux of the novel — and Tai Lake is the author’s symbol of the widespread pollution throughout China.”. Qiu Xiaolong the author lives in Missouri, USA. Wikipedia states of him ”All his books feature Chief Inspector Chen Cao, a poetry-quoting cop with integrity, and his sidekick Detective Yu. But the main concern in the books is modern China itself. Each book features quotes from ancient and modern poets, Confucius, insights into Chinese cuisine, architecture, history, politics, herbology and philosophy as well as criminal procedure”.

5.       The teleological view to change is also to trace the evolution of Purpose hierarchies that human beings held across historical context.

Earlier eras afforded more direct connect with nature. E.g. Royal tastes for species like the Elephant are typical of South and South East Asia, and thus its survival as a species is geographically peculiar. In China however, as Mahesh revealed, elephants were vanquished to make way for rice-fields, with the animal often eaten than reared. Purpose being embodied with intent, man’s relationship with nature is complexly intertwined with man’s reasoning of social organization. Oversimplified association with roles and entitlements may deter the cause of the planet itself. On the other hand, perceptive acuity and courageous leadership could redeem co-evolutionary existence. As how President Kennedy arrested his sway on his rocking chair to listen to Arthur Schlesinger on how nuclear weapons meant that every living being had rare elements in the body, including the President’s children playing on the White House lawns. Nuclear disarmament since then is a matter of conscience, save the purpose to which our species will collectively organize. Historically though, it is only colonization that took the tomato, the potato and such from one continent to another. Similarly trees not native to its host location can trace human agents. Bengaluru, for example, has also seen a change in the flora it hosts across centuries, thanks to human intervention.

6.       Agency and Intervention are often seen as opposite poles, when in fact, they need not be. Misplaced dialectics may imply that a synthesis between advocating for ecological sensitivity and intervening in the ecology is in the offing.

Van de Ven & Poole model depiction (1995)

While advocates of confrontational activism may argue for development over green determinism, advocates of green conservation may be seen as status quo pacifists or as obstructions to progress itself. Collective action between academics, citizen groups and government leadership require more complex coordination for sure. Whether we evolve hereon or not is as much in question as in a ‘when’ question, as much as in an ‘if’ question of if we choose to evolve at all.

All said and done, less than two hundred people graced the occasion, in Bangalore, despite advance communication and consistent reminding. Not an easy choice for many. Truth has fewer alternatives in this respect.

Media's Era and a few challenges

Noam Chomsky’s most choice critique of the US presidential process in 2016 is the lack of effective priorities. Two stand out for him – global warming and nuclear arms. What is it about us as a species that eclipses what is important from what titillates or provides false cover for our realities? Perhaps it is the way content is pushed over electronic media.

Ashis Nandy may be considered as a well referred curator of India’s social dynamics. He responds to a question in a recent interview thus : “All developing societies, including China, have now acc­epted that they are backward. Our future is exactly the same as the future of all standardised nation-states. It is a new vision for them as well, except that their vision is 300 years old. We have now joined the bandwagon. India, therefore, doesn’t have a distinctive future.”

Such is the conditioning that can occur over decades of patterned information processing. However, evenso, cracks in patterns provide us clues to what we may have been or might choose to become. I spotted at least two recently.

The Ratnagiri Abode of King Thibaw

One was from Singapore’s ChannelNews Asia, that featured King Thibaw’s exile in 1885. Few would even link the histories between India and Myanmar in this manner, leave alone that between Buddhism and it’s spread from India. That the documentary could access through dogged enquiry living progeny of the characters from history is testimony to human investment in curiosity. As someone living in India, it astonished me to know that such a forlorn promontory lay unsung and neglected atop a Ratnagiri mound, as if the occurrence were unremarkable. British manipulation during their colonial period may perhaps have even more evidence than this documentary contained.

Myanmar's last Royal Family that was exiled to India

It is the contemporary somnambulance of 'free' India, that strikes me even more. Free from the British, but enslaved to economic paradigms indeed. To be sure, I revisited the Singapore based Channel to check if that quality and character for codification of cultural heritage were mere happenstance. Lo and behold, I find a spirited journalist exploring Sikhism’s influence through Amritsar’s history, in a variation of documentary style. Such consistency in curation on a news channel is surely a credit worthy feature. I have yet to see contemporary depictions of India made in India. So perhaps, my eyes and senses mediated through them are prejudiced through Singaporean newsbytes. After all, the template of governance in Singapore is exactly the substance and forerunner of Ashis Nandy’s ‘standardized nation-state’.

The Tasmanian Tiger with Canine like head

TV5 Monde is a French channel I peruse to ensure my knowledge of the French language does not rust. From its culinary shows, quiz formats, brilliant movies to its quaintly depictions of French territories like Guadeloupe, it represents a cultivated aesthetic, specific to its culture. However, it’s contemporariness was what caught me in it’s embrace of the global warming theme. What would a Frenchman do in the land of erstwhile British prisoners? That’s right, French investigators setting up equipment to scale the height of the slow growing high quality logwoods have a lot to do with the clash between climate, ecology and human economic activity. French polyvalence and multi-dimensionality comes through in this feature. It depicts generations of Tasmanian inhabitants, as well as lumberjack technology evolution. 

The endangered Tasmanian Swift Parrot

While on the one hand, the camera accompanies scientists from Hobart's university studying surviving birds species like the swift parrot, it reminds us that the Tasmanian devil lost its place in mainland Australia. Similarly, it reminds us of the extinction of marsupials like the Thylacine. It’s realistic depiction of ‘corporatization’ of forest wealth shines through, in the otherwise templated beauty of Australia’s untamed nature. 

While the documentary accommodates space for the social evil of lobbying in parliamentary systems, (with no less than the Australian Prime Minister saying that conservation had gone too far) it amplifies the maxim, that the map is not the territory. It’s sober reminder comes from depicting art in a fitting tribute on sculptor Greg Duncan’s 100 meter wall. UNESCO got into the picture lately, and declared acres under a sanctuary, where no human should enter. Through lives of lumbermen, the documentary however, makes it clear that even well intended global compacts like the UNESCO may get the picture wrong, and that it is the intersection between humans and forest systems that needs intervention.

Phase transition - Learning and Development myths that may die soon

Don Tapscott, famed authority of the net era economy made some startling observations. The prospect of Facebook’s demise or Google’s fading out may seem remote today. However, when he treats industry data in longitudinal time analysis, he interprets it through institutional ecology, a paradigm that sociologists have used to explain industry behaviors.

When he alerts us to the crunch of talent required to make the next wave in technology, he is also implying a maxim that we have failed to recognise. CEOs and their executive teams have a larger than life influence on their corporations than they actually do.

Communities in organisations are the basic unit of sense making and action today. This is accentuated by the information that technology relays itself at break-neck speed. But our necks support more than information. We seem to miss that perception on the highways and lowlands of our neural pathways.

It is the myths of learning and development teams and their leaders that needs visit. Some myths that come to my mind include the following.

1.       Development will occur in steps of a learning ladder. Producing leaders at each step of the ladder is vital to an organisation’s longevity. Leader development and leadership development are the same.

2.       The environment inside the company can be tamed through propaganda as like in pasteurized learning, with every power constituency represented on the pulpit.

3.       The business environment outside the company influences employee behaviors less than leadership calls for action within.

4.       Ambiguity and complexity can be simulated in structured experiences at off-sites in ways that will visit the learner, even if remotely. A best practice is wisdom in motion. Like a list of 10 learning formulae.

5.       Volatility and uncertainty have a shape and form that learning and development teams have figured out in advance for leaders to aim at in break-out groups. A next practice is the product of reduced anxiety. 

6.       Training for skills and knowledge will ensure behaviors of value year on year.

7.       Perspective and Insight have no value in facilitation, especially because the solution that emerges is not with the facilitator.

8.       Mind-set is the employee’s problem, and a developmental lab the corporation’s solution.

9.       Expertise and example are with the technologically savvy.

10.   Behavior is not caused by organisational structure, process or design.

The above ten on my mind, for now. Where should I introspect the most to keep learning for effectiveness?