On "Tolerating" Tolerance

While the Nation celebrates Gandhi Jayanti, this cartoon clip by Gado dated 27-9-2012 [source: https://www.nytsyn.com/cartoons/cartoons?channel_id=159] says it all.

Here is an article titled “ReplacingKeynes with Gandhi” by Rajni Bakshi, Gandhi Peace Fellow, Gateway House. [Also published in the Guest Column of Economic Times dated 2October 2012]. An excerpt: “Gandhi’s little-known work on what it means to be truly civilized may be crucial to the future of our species. There seems to be an absence of a moral framework – dharma or telos (Greek for “purpose”) - that serves as the basis of our pursuit of wealth & pleasure. Can such a framework guide us through contemporary economic and identity-related conflicts?”

Note the word accredited in the above clip, which has also been published in the Economic Times dated 29 Sep 2012 under the apt header “HE POPS UP AGAIN| Does he have a home in India either?” India is now passing through a phase where individual freedom and autonomy of free thinking individuals is at stake. Here is another excerpt from a recent editorial titled “Develop Zero Tolerance for All Kinds of Intolerance” [The New Indian Express dated 27 Sep 2012]: “A national-level study has found that intolerance has been growing, alas, in all walks of life. The ‘other’ is something that is detested.”

While tolerating the intolerant has been the virtue of the tolerant, it is a sad commentary of our times to see the intolerant claiming to “tolerate” the tolerant. An adapted version of the above cartoon by Gado is shown below. It happened during a presentation on 28 Sep 2012 titled “Performance Management Systems under e-Surveillance of Classrooms”.

[NB: Resemblance to any person living or dead is purely by coincidence. The figure of the Mahatma of course has been immortalized].

It is time now for all accredited bodies in India to do some serious introspection.

I end this post by reminding the readers of Rabindranath Tagore’s poem

Where The Mind is Without Fear:

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;

Where knowledge is free;

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;

Where words come out from the depth of truth;

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;

Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action--

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
                                                                      -Rabindranath Tagore  

Good teaching-learning processes evolve where the mind is without fear.

Bohm dialogue and design thinking

Thanks to one of my colleagues, I came across this article titled “Awakening our collaborative spirit” --by Michael Michalko,  July 17, 2012 [print-version]. Yes…it is indeed a good piece on David Bohm’s observations and is very much relevant even to the present context in most organizations (see the clip).

As some others have observed:

“Bohm dialogue is an integral process of design and design thinking.”

The Indian education system needs to open up for encouraging dialogue on design thinking. Challenging the status quo with a new thought has a crucial role in enhancing creativity and fostering innovation. Indian education system needs to create structures for supporting design as a process. [Note: The "fragments" in the quote below can be seen as the "disciplinary silos" in our education system.]

Quoting David Bohm (Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 1980; source: wikiquotes);

The notion that all these fragments are separately existent is evidently an illusion, and this illusion cannot do other than lead to endless conflict and confusion. Indeed, the attempt to live according to the notion that the fragments are really separate is, in essence, what has led to the growing series of extremely urgent crises that is confronting us today. Thus, as is now well known, this way of life has brought about pollution, destruction of the balance of nature, over-population, world-wide economic and political disorder and the creation of an overall environment that is neither physically nor mentally healthy for most of the people who live in it. Individually there has developed a widespread feeling of helplessness and despair, in the face of what seems to be an overwhelming mass of disparate social forces, going beyond the control and even the comprehension of the human beings who are caught up in it.

Design Thinking @SAP – Lessons for India

Hasso Plattner, cofounder of SAP AG, has made remarkable contributions in helping organizations adopt design thinking. As mentioned earlier in this blog post titled “Reengineering Indian Academic Processes ”, he also cofounded the Institute of Design at Stanford (with Professor Robert I. Sutton, Professor of Management Science and Engineering).

These are commendable industry-institute initiatives meant to foster epistemological pluralism. Indian Institutes, on the other hand, prefer to work within their own narrow disciplinary domains. Most of them are grappling to develop a shared understanding of the design thinking principles. Policy initiatives in India, therefore, do not get the necessary stimulus and Indian education and business continue to lag behind with a huge design deficit [see India Inc’s Design Deficit].

Indian organizations, like the rest of the world, need to design for the triple bottom line – people (society), planet (environment) and profit (business). Further, India has its own developmental challenges and has undertaken various inclusive growth initiatives. Hence, there is an urgent need to embrace the conflicts imposed by these initiatives {see “going to the gemba” {see HBR Jan 2004}.

Design thinking promotes a culture with a design attitude to solve problems (however wicked they may be) with purposive application of creativity throughout the process of innovation. Here are excerpts from the paper titled “How tangible is your strategy? How design thinking can turn your strategy into reality” by Matthew Holloway [in the Journal of Business Strategy, Vol. 30, No. 2/3 2009 pp. 50-56]

• ‘‘ What if you could express your strategy not as numbers or frameworks or even a rhetorical narrative, but as something concrete? What if your strategy took shape as a prototype that shows your organization what success will look like when you have delivered against your goals? ’’
• ‘‘ The design thinking approach also encourages teams to create ‘project war rooms’ and to work visually using pictures, diagrams, sketches, video clips, photographs, and artifacts collected from their research. ’’

Related blogs:

Promoting Design Thinking in Indian Professional Higher Education

Other posts under design thinking

Design thinking and appreciative inquiry...

In a recent Appreciative Inquiry workshop we were co-creating dreams for a transformed future. After going through the workshop, my attention was drawn to this cartoon clip.

While this may make some wince, I would like to put it in perspective. Please click one of my earlier blog posts titled “Bubbles of positivism”

The above clip and the blog post are meant to remind us of the ground reality while dreaming for a better future. As already expressed in the AI workshop, here is a quote from the book titled The Design of Business - Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage by Roger Martin:  “Design thinking focuses on accelerating the pace at which knowledge advances from mystery (an unexplainable problem) to heuristic (a rule of thumb that guides us toward a solution) to algorithm (a replicable success formula).”

Hence, while appreciative inquiry embraces the world as a mystery by not dwelling on problems, design thinking is not averse to the mystery even if it is an unsolved problem (read nightmares, wicked problems etc.). It aims to find creative ideas to overcome problems and exploit opportunities. It holds design as a purposive application of creativity throughout the process of innovation (where innovation involves the successful application of new ideas in the form of improved products, processes and services). Thus, design, like appreciative inquiry, aims to see the world as it could be, and not as it is.

Bottom line: Organizations need to exploit the transformative power of design thinking through appreciative inquiry.

Related references: 

• Avital, M., Boland, R.J. and Cooperrider D.L. (Eds.) Designing Information and Organizations with a Positive Lens: Advances in Appreciative Inquiry (Volume 2), Elsevier Science, Oxford, 2008.
• Boland, R.J. and Collopy, F. (Eds.) Managing as Designing, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 2004.
• Bruce, M. and Bessant, J. (Eds.) Design in Business-Strategic Innovation through Design, Prentice Hall, 2002

Design Deficit in India

“Design thinking is not part of the Indian business psyche”……as rightly observed by Kamya Jaiswal in this ET cover story titled “India Inc’s Design Deficit” [The Economic Times on Sunday, 6 May 2012].

Some excerpts [blogger comments]:

“Design thinking is not limited to a culture or particular product or service category. It is a set of principles that can be used very broadly, need to be understood, and can be learned by managers all over the world”….Stefan Thomke, William Barclay Harding Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School.

“Where art meets engineering, where form sharpens function, where beauty adds to the bottomline – therein lies the great weakness of Indian business.” ...[Note: This is partly a fall out of our education system that promotes silos.]

“….Technology convergence has made disruptive design a norm and digitisation has shrunk the time to market of new ideas.”

“….As the creative goal posts keep moving forward, Indian businesses can………decide to build design capabilities of the future. This doesn't only mean setting up design labs but also collaborating with academia. The well-worn cliche of a creative eco system must be brought to life.”

“….Finally, our engineers and managers must learn to imagine.”

Here is where Indian Educators need to come up with models to overcome the design deficit. As noted above, our weaknesses lie at the interfaces (or the boundaries). We need to build bridges to foster multidisciplinary interactions between areas, departments and schools. Engineers and managers need to be encouraged to look beyond narrow domains of specializations. 

Related blogs:

• Promoting Design Thinking in Indian Professional Higher Education
• Other posts under design thinking