“Beg to differ”

Some of my friends are pilots. One of them once explained to me an interesting point of view. According to him, planes are primarily designed to fly and not to land as most of the time it is up in the air and flying. Therefore, landing can be seen as a managed crash. That is why more accidents have happened during landings and take-off than during cruise.

In a similar fashion, most large organisations particularly bureaucracies, are designed to maintain status quo. One of the primary considerations of such design is to have policies, procedures, rules and conventions that are not adventurous and try to prevent misuse and misappropriations. Such excessively straight-jacketed organisations limit opportunities for human innovation and initiative. Adding on to this is the status quo bias (1) which is inherent in most human beings, and this encourages these organisations to resist change intensely.

For these reasons, transformation that is a game changer becomes a difficult challenge to pull through. However, occasionally when we get a leader (or a team) who wants to make things happen and who has the courage to manoeuvre around the hurdles that is an inherent characteristic of bureaucracies (whether public or private sector), then we witness transformations in its true sense.

Whenever such a combination of stars comes together, we should work in overdrive and try to achieve a level which is irrevocable. If we manage to reach this level, we can be reasonably confident that the transformation will be long lasting if not permanent. This is because even to screw -up something there has to be people with courage and initiative.

One of the conflicts that we often face, especially in social/ public leadership, is the choice we are forced to make between the leaders who deliver and the leaders who are good an honest. This is because the probability of the good and honest leader being a courageous leader who delivers is often not so high. The good often get caught within the technicalities and interpretation and focus only on doing things right and not doing the right things.

I am sure all of us will have number examples on this to share. One of the incidents narrated by Capt Gopinath in his biography stands as an excellent example and is entertaining by being so ludicrous.

When he first acquired fixed wing aircrafts for Air Deccan, he and his senior colleagues went with their family to take possession of the aircraft. Their first port of call in India was Mumbai. He was proceeding from Mumbai to Bengaluru next day morning. His aircraft was allowed to park in a far end of the airport and none of the passengers and pilots were allowed to come in to terminal as the customs formalities of clearing the aircraft was to take place in Bengaluru. The aircraft had no fully functional toilets and all the passengers including women and children and the pilots had to go behind the bushes in the airport to answer to the call of nature. This was in spite pleading to allow ladies to use at least the toilets in the terminal.

So much for doing things right. On the other hand the greedy and selfish leaders may put their might behind honourable causes (if you present the right incentive to them) at least because it offers them good public relations. The information available in public domain about what happened in case of IPL is an interesting case in point.

So the second best choice for the society is to have a few of such elements playing some key roles. If we also have a process in place to contain and discipline such innovations we may be better off than merely having leaders who just try to maintain status quo.

Is this the challenge of democracy?

"The status quo is the only solution that cannot be vetoed," Clark Kerr