Arun Maira: Breaking Free From The Laws of Machines

Arun Maira is a member of the Planning Commission chaired by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. In this ministerial level position, he is responsible for shaping policies and programmes around industrialisation, urbanisation and tourism. Prior to this assignment, he was chairman of the Boston Consulting Group in India. He has also served on the boards of several large Indian conglomerates like Tata, Birla, Godrej, Hero and Mahindra.

Maira is the author of several books that include ‘Shaping the Future’, ‘Remaking India’ and ‘Transforming Capitalism’.

Carbon spewed into the atmosphere by mankind’s economic progress is threatening Armageddon. On the ground and beneath it, water is running out. Child malnutrition in India persists at 45 percent in spite of faster growth of GDP. Humanity is crawling to achieve the Millennium Development Goals for improving the world for everyone. What is common to all these challenges? It is the inability of people to work together for outcomes that matter to everyone. National interests prevent an equitable agreement to mitigate climate change. People grabbing water for themselves creates an alarming ‘tragedy of the commons’. Silos around many government agencies and around well endowed programmes disable collaboration among them and the systemic improvements necessary to improve well-being of children. In addition, an ‘I am alright Jack’ attitude dampens commitment to the Millennium Development Goals. Sadly, in Rabindranath Tagore’s words, the world is broken into fragments by narrow domestic walls. The one big idea to change the world for the better would be a way for people to work together effectively to produce an outcome that is good for everyone.

Somehow, this isn’t easy. In fact, the very ideas that have contributed to humanity’s remarkable progress over the past three centuries are the ones that may be disabling humanity now. The 17th Century Enlightenment created a scientific revolution that produced machines and industry and, with those, great improvements in productivity and economic growth. That growth machine has eaten away into the earth’s ability to sustain itself. Moreover, mainstream economics, in its attempt to become a ‘scientific’ discipline with the mathematical rigour of physics, over-simplified the concept of man to a simple, rational and self-interested being pursuing easily measurable monetary wealth rather than other emotional cares that cannot be measured.

Whereas science may be a cause of the problem, an apparent contradiction between two fundamental laws of science is also providing insights into the solution. The Second Law of Thermodynamics, that every engineer knows well, says that the entropy of complex systems will inevitably increase over time. In other words, the system’s capability will deteriorate. However, a more recent law, from evolutionary biology, says that the capability of complex systems evolves and improves over time.

Engineering concepts guide not only machine designers, but also organisation designers. Thus organisations are ‘engineered’ and ‘reengineered’, and ‘levers’ are put in place for their masters to make the machine work and the organisation to perform. Over time, energy dissipates, and the engineers are called in again — outside experts who know the blueprint and can fix the machine. In this concept of organisation, the constituents of the organisation cannot be expected to make and follow their own rules and to discipline themselves. And in this concept, a boss on top with authority over the rest is necessary to put discipline into them.

In contrast, consider a rich tropical forest, humming with myriad forms of life supporting each other. Who is in charge? There is a mystery of organisation in these forests. Complex self-adaptive systems, like the tropical forest, are organised according to the laws of evolutionary biology, and not the laws of machines. The first Enlightenment made Man believe that he and his machines could master Nature.

The second Enlightenment will come about with Man learning from Nature, and realising that he is a part of it, not the master of it. Nature is complex. But it is not chaotic. Nor is it mechanical. Within it lies an ability to produce innovations and to adapt and evolve. There is much concern, even among scientists and economists, that the destruction of complex, self-adaptive forests by man’s machines, and man’s ways of economic development, will push the future of our civilisation irrevocably over the brink.

In the architecture of complex self-adaptive systems lie clues to the design of organisations in which the constituents work together to create a whole from which they all benefit. The Internet functions without an over-bearing boss. In fact, it is not clear who is the boss of that ever enriching World-Wide Web. Global credit card networks, involving thousands of financial institutions, millions of independent merchants, and billions of customers around the world, benefit all their participants. How Visa, the first and largest of these networks was created is described beautifully by its founder, Dee Hock, in his book One from Many. Elinor Ostrom, who won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2009, describes a way of organising not based on hierarchies or markets — the two alternatives proposed by the other Economics Nobel Laureate in 2009, Oliver Williamson. Her book, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, analyses several examples of communities managing shared water resources, fisheries and forests.

The organisation architecture of these networks follows the principles of complex self-adaptive systems. One of these principles is to create and maintain permeable boundaries within the system and with the world around it. The Second Law of Thermodynamics mentioned earlier, states that ‘in a closed system, the entropy will inexorably increase’. Since systems in nature must be connected with other parts of their ecosystem, the two fundamental laws of science cited before are thus reconciled. However, there must be some boundaries, albeit appropriately permeable. Open them completely, and the system can become unstable and chaotic, as the recent contagion in global financial markets showed. Those countries, like India, that had judiciously permeable boundaries remained vibrant. (On the other hand, North Korea and Myanmar, with closed boundaries, are in economic stasis.) For interested readers, I have explained all four principles — permeable boundaries, minimal critical rules, flexible resources, and aligned aspirations, in my book, Shaping the Future: Aspirational Leadership in India and Beyond.

An idea that will change the world for the better for everyone is a new architecture of organisation learned from nature and other complex self-adaptive systems. With this architecture, we will get better governance and more co-operation across boundaries. Working together, many organisations may improve the condition of India’s children. And, working together, humanity may accelerate its progress to the Millennium Development Goals, and even mitigate climate change.