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The bhavishya lab: The Silent emergency

The Indian experiment is still in its early stages, and its outcome may well turn out to be the most significant of them all, partly because of its sheer human scale, and partly because of its location, a substantial bridgehead of effervescent liberty on the Asian continent.

— Sunil Khilani

The Indian experiment in democracy is the largest in the world. A billion people and counting means that Indian challenges are staggering in sheer human scale. It is hard to get beyond the numbers. Forty-seven percent of India’s 414 million children under the age of six have some form of malnutrition.

My participation in the Food Lab led me to the next lab we undertook, the Bhavishya Alliance, focused on child malnutrition in India. We described the challenge as follows:

Malnutrition is a complex issue to tackle because it’s a multifactoral phenomenon. Because there is no one single cause, the factors that effect the situation are diverse and difficult to tackle in parallel.… The situation is seemingly intractable, partly due to the increase in the absolute number of children being born, partly due to the complex nature of the change required at multiple levels (from the mother through to governmental institutions) and finally as a consequence of the size and diversity of India’s population and geography.

Part of me was obviously excited about the work and wanted to plunge in. Another part of me saw this as an intervention very different from the Sustainable Food Lab and wanted to have nothing to do with it. The scope of the Food Lab was global, and there were no beneficiaries being directly targeted. Bhavishya, meaning future in Sanskrit, was a stark contrast. It ended up, after much debate, being focused on one state in India, Maharashtra, with a population of 80 million, and its key beneficiaries were to be children under the age of six suffering from malnutrition.

These strategic decisions of scope and focus put Bhavishya squarely in the space of international development. With my background, having partly grown up in India and all four of my grandparents being originally Indian, I had a strange insider-outsider understanding of the context. Unlike the Food Lab, where I had entered with little understanding of the nature of the challenges, I had a much deeper understanding of the waters we were about to enter into. I knew they were deep enough to drown in.

A significant part of my discomfort was that the whole initiative originated outside India. The key funder and driver behind Bhavishya was Unilever, and in particular, Tex Gunning, who was Dutch. Tex and Joseph Jaworski (one of the other founders of Generon Consulting) had together dreamed up a major intervention in the area of child malnutrition.¹

The very idea of an initiative cooked up at a conference in Finland by a Dutch man (Tex) and Texan (Joseph), involving no Indians, funded by one of the largest multinational corporations in the world, was problematic from multiple angles. And it was giving me sleepless nights.

A few weeks after arriving in India, I passed through Surat, in Gujarat. Even at midnight, the brightly lit central train station was a crazed, frantic mass of people: food vendors, passengers sleeping on the floor of the station, and dogs trotting around merrily scavenging. Outside, multiple lanes of nonstop traffic whooshed around, honking, braking hard, and in perpetual motion. It felt like being on the edge of a tidal wave of people, cars, and blinding lights.

As I walked into the station, I heard a shout and turned to see a grown man with red eyes lunge at a young boy, aged maybe nine or ten, dressed in shorts and a dirty T-shirt. The boy, clearly startled, lurched backward but not fast enough to avoid a hard, booming punch to the chest. His eyes opened wide in shock and surprise, as he clutched his chest and stumbled back, trying to stay on his feet. He turned and ran as the man lumbered halfheartedly after him, swearing that he would kill him. The man stopped after a few steps and caught me staring at him, my mouth open. He looked down sullenly and shuffled off.

Over coffee, I recounted to my Indian colleague what I had seen. She shrugged and told me to get over it, that it wasn’t possible to intervene in every little act of violence I witnessed. For me, the experience gave rise to a multitude of questions. At first, I found myself wondering why I hadn’t intervened, why I hadn’t said something. Then I wondered at the violence that I kept witnessing in Indian society. Did the little boy run off and find a still littler boy to take it out on? Was there really wisdom to “getting used to it”? I remembered a line I had read somewhere: “We have been defeated twice. We no longer protest, not even inwardly.”

My ambivalence toward the effort plagued me. My reluctance stemmed from my complicated relationship with India, which I could not reconcile. On the one hand, I loved it—its people, its food, and its vastness. On the other hand, I struggled mightily against manifestations of India that just seemed unbelievably cruel and how bystanders just shrugged. I often felt I was fighting the tide in India.

THE BHAVISHYA ALLIANCE

From the initial conception in early 2003 to the launch of the lab in 2006 was three years of hard work. During this time a vast array of strategic options were explored: where exactly the lab would take place and how long it would run for. In-depth research on child malnutrition was conducted.

In the year before the lab, we began working with a partner organization, the Synergos Institute, and put our collective shoulders to the wheel in order to prepare. The work ranged from high-level negotiations with the government and key champions to designing a new workshop space from scratch that would fit one hundred people. We interviewed potential staff members, contracted delivery partners, and set up the necessary legal structures.

Almost one hundred painstaking in-person interviews were conducted in India, with stakeholders across the board, in a number of different states. These interviews allowed us to get a very broad understanding of what was happening and, most critically, who was up for doing what. All major decisions were informed by the interviews, including the decision of which state the lab would focus on and which organizations and individuals were invited to participate. The most time-consuming parts were mapping out the field of stakeholders and then negotiating participation with over fifty organizations—some of which joined the lab, but some did not.

The strategic response marshaled against the challenge of child malnutrition in India eventually brought together almost thirty organizations as part of the lab team and another thirty-odd organizations as champions and supporters. Whereas with the Food Lab, we had run a somewhat leisurely process over two years, the feedback had been that this was too long. This time we were looking at a six-month process, which was later shortened to an intense three-month process.

Participants were seconded to the lab, with three weeks on and one week off for three months. We designed the lab in ten modules of a week each. These modules included a launch week; community learning journeys, in which the lab team traveled in six sub-teams to the five target districts, where they undertook disciplined observation of the system from the perspectives of frontline actors and of communities, parents, and children; a nature retreat in a remote wilderness location in Uttaranchal, in order to reflect individually and collectively on what they were being called to do and where they were to focus their energies; and then three weeks of prototyping initiatives.

For a long time, figuring out how to involve the government of India was a puzzle. Then we met V. Ramani, the director general of the Rajmata Jijau Mother-Child Health and Nutrition Mission, the state-level apparatus responsible for the issue of child malnutrition in Maharashtra. Ramani was a senior Indian civil servant who reported to the Minister for Women and Child Development. The goals of the lab and the mission aligned almost perfectly. Ramani immediately understood the lab’s potential and arranged for a number of participants from a diverse range of government organizations to participate.

There were key differences between participants in the Food Lab and Bhavishya. Whereas the Food Lab team was composed of peers, there was vast diversity among the Bhavishya participants. They ranged from someone recently granted a PhD in nutrition to a senior government grandee on the verge of retirement.

MK Sharmer, one of the champions of the lab from Hindustan Lever, explained to us what the lab means for India: “We are engaged in a truly historic endeavour within the Indian context.” Sharmer stated that in sixty years, “India has never attempted to address a social challenge of this magnitude utilizing a tri-sector partnership as a primary problem-solving methodology.”²

We hired a number of Indian facilitators to join the core team a few weeks before the lab started. The secretariat was almost half the size of the core lab team, so when the full contingent of champions was there, we sometimes had over one hundred people in the room.

THE MOON SHOT

By the time Bhavishya launched on April 10, 2006, in Aurangabad, I had undergone a two-year crash course in the complexity of the global food system through my involvement in the Food Lab. I arrived brimming with anxiety. While many of its parameters had been fixed before I joined the team, there were still many decisions to be made. Although the Generon team had all kinds of experience, I was the only person on the team with any experience in grassroots development. I was also the only one on the international team who knew India (as much as India can be known) and who could speak one of its major languages. Yet I was still the most junior member of the team in a system that was quite hierarchical.

As we formally opened the proceedings, one of the conversations. I had with my colleagues was about how much of a honeymoon phase we would have with the participants before they felt comfortable enough to challenge the process. We thought maybe we’d get a week. As it turned out, challenges started surfacing within twenty-four hours. They were to continue over the next three months, growing in frequency and ferocity as time passed.

We decided to build a group yoga exercise into our day. We dutifully checked, and one of our Indian facilitators assured us that it was completely fine. What could be more Indian than yoga?

On the second day, one of the participants asked to speak to me. We found a quiet corner. He explained to me that he was Christian and felt extremely uncomfortable practicing yoga with the whole group. So I asked the participant what his concerns were.

The participant explained that one of the facilitators, the same one who had assured us it was fine, had prior to the exercise sung a bhajan, which is a Hindu religious song. He was concerned that he was taking part in a Hindu religious exercise, and that made him feel uncomfortable. I was somewhat dumbfounded but could see his point. I assured him that we were not asking him to participate in a religious ceremony and that many people all over the world do yoga that are not Hindu. I said I’d raise it with the team and get back to him. When I did, the Indians, all of whom were Hindu, basically told me to tell him to get over it.

I scratched my head over this little problem. While it was hardly serious, the whole point of the energy practice was to help align the Lab Team as a whole. If one person sat out on day two, how many more would object and demand to sit out? Being religious, I could sympathize and couldn’t see myself telling him to get over it.

Despite finding a copy of Yoga for Christians online, we couldn’t convince the team member to participate, so we dropped the yoga. Instead, team members decided that they would start each day by singing, in true Indian fashion with huge feeling, a popular national rendition of “We Shall Overcome.”

For the second week, we split the group into six sub-teams and took them to live in communities that were suffering from malnutrition. I took one group to a small village called Narmada Nagar, which I had visited previously as part of the pre-launch prep. The village was relatively new and housed refugees from areas flooded by the controversial Narmada Dam. Despite huge grassroots support, the fight against the big dam was lost. These people, with their malnourished children, were just one effect of that.

Initially, a number of the participants complained about having to sleep in a village. Some of the government participants said that they had been to thousands of villages. Some of them were concerned about having to sleep outside. One of them had a little temper tantrum when he discovered we would be eating the same way the villagers ate. They had one meal a day. He tried to convince me to drive the jeep four hours to the nearest town so that he could get breakfast.

Eventually though, everyone settled down. People were sleeping better than they had in a long time, as the night air was cool and fresh. The villagers were very hospitable and friendly. It was hard not to relax and discuss what we were trying to do in such surroundings.

We quickly discovered the real nature of the challenge. The night before we arrived, a child had died from a snakebite. He had gone out with his father to irrigate the crops in the middle of the night. In the dark he got bitten and died. We wondered why they were irrigating the fields at night. It turned out they got only a few hours of electricity every twenty-four hours, and it was in the middle of the night, so that is when they had to pump water into the fields.

The next day we were also shown a modern clinic in the village. Someone asked what was in the white cupboard. “Ah, that cupboard holds antidotes to snake bite venom” was the response. We couldn’t understand why a child had died when snakebite kits were less than a hundred meters from his house. Apparently the doctor had left, locking up the place, and no one knew where he was. As we walked out of the clinic, we noticed that all the outside lights were broken, and shards of glass lay on the dust around the clinic. We found out that people had been stoning the clinic and smashing all the lights whenever new ones were put in. These were some of the paradoxes we confronted from our first-person experience with the system.

Then one night before bed, one of the participants who worked for a bank told me the story of how she was recruited to the lab. Her boss had called her to tell her about this opportunity and asked if she was interested. She said no, but her boss told her to think about it. She did. When her boss called again, she reaffirmed the no, saying she was much too busy to take three months out and she felt it would harm her career. Her boss went silent for a minute and then told her if she wanted to keep her job, she had to sign up. So she signed up.

I nearly fell off my string-bed. Part of me couldn’t believe my ears. Another part of me was unsurprised. In my experience, Indian organizations were run on rigid hierarchical lines. Our process required people to be self-selected and willingly undertake the process. Later on, I learned that all of our government participants had simply been given marching orders to turn up to the lab via a diktat from above. Some were not even told how long they would be gone for.

The dynamics within the lab were challenging. It was very difficult to discern where people were coming from. The lab team, in many ways, was stuck between the secretariat—who was running the process—and the champions. In the Food Lab, the participants had all been senior figures in their own organizations and outnumbered the champions; in Bhavishya, the situation was dramatically different. There were more champions than participants, and a number of people who turned up to champion meetings had no representation in the lab team.

In the third week of the lab, participants presented early ideas for initiatives to a large and somewhat rowdy group of champions, who followed up with negative reactions, critiques, and a lack of inquiry. To be fair to them, there was a conversation that needed to happen that did not—a conversation about what the champions thought of the lab itself. Instead, they were invited to comment on ideas that the participants came up with. This meant that their overall reactions to the lab so far were channeled through comments made about what the participants were doing. In other words, far from being the supportive champions who were helpful to the lab team, they were critics, playing an attacking role. The lab team was extremely upset with the champions, with us, and with themselves. This dynamic was to continue unabated throughout the life of the lab.

Another reason for this dynamic was that many lab team members were hierarchically junior and working not in management or strategic roles but in frontline roles. As far as innovation was concerned, this was great, as they brought in a practical understanding of the challenges on the ground. However, in a society where organizational culture is deeply hierarchical, this was problematic. The innovation process, in other words, was profoundly and deeply distorted by opaque political processes. In the official learning history for the lab, we analyzed this dynamic by looking at hidden transcripts, or essential conversations that people deemed too risky to have in public.³ The power dynamics within the lab swung wildly. It is hard to appreciate how debilitating this was until one experienced it personally.

MOVEMENT REQUIRES FRICTION

A wheel turns because of its encounter with the surface of a road; spinning in the air it goes no where. Rubbing two sticks together produces heat and light; one stick alone is just a stick. As a metaphorical image, friction reminds us that heterogeneous and unequal encounters can lead to new arrangements of culture and power.

—Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection

As part of my secretariat duties, I produced a report on our visit to Narmada Nager. In it was buried a comment that was interpreted as accusing the government participants of sleeping on the job. The report was an amalgamation of several sets of notes, and for a while, I didn’t know who had written the comment. Between the time that report was circulated and I got the original notes back, the lab team had become a bit of a lynch mob.

The lab team demanded that we “hand over” the author of the offending comment so that he or she could be “dealt with.” When we discussed the issue, all the participants from the government sat together in a block facing the rest of the group. At their head was the most senior government figure. He called upon people in his group to speak and shushed them when he thought they had said enough. It felt like a court.

With the discovery a few weeks later that I was the author of the offending comment, a half-hearted effort was made to punish me. I was persona non grata for a week, to the point where my ability to perform my role was being compromised. In response, my colleagues, Adam and Joe, stepped in and flatly declared their support for me. After some feedback and complaining, I was “rehabilitated.”

Gomathy, our learning historian, remarked in a team debrief on how Adam and Joe had stepped up for me. Then she pointed out the same thing had happened to her, but none of us had stepped up for her. She had effectively been ignored by much of the lab team for weeks because of a comment she made about gender. It was a deeply sobering moment—one of many home truths.

At this point we had returned from a weeklong nature retreat in the Himalayas where participants had clarified their commitments and also come up with the initiatives they wanted to pilot. A number of sub-teams were formed. We began the process of testing and prototyping their ideas.

The nature of the prototyping process, when done well, makes it a very different approach from a planning process, one that causes real cognitive dissonance in planning-oriented cultures. As we headed into the final crunch point of the lab—the final presentations to a sub-set of champions called a venture committee—prototyping devolved into classic planning.

Due to a lack of clarity about roles and power dynamics, we did not stop to agree on the prototypes with the ultimate clients—the champions. We made several attempts to get buy-in from champions, but in our rush, we did not craft a tightly contracted agreement, which made our attempts seem more like consultation. In other words, champions were happy to verbally give input, but that didn’t mean they agreed. And it certainly did not mean they had devolved authority. We inadvertently slid into a headlong planning process in order to have something impressive to present to the venture committee in the final week of the lab.

As a result, the champions and the venture committee once again trashed the initiatives that the lab team members had worked so hard to come up with. This gave the lab a feeling of being doomed. What happened in practice was that we had set up a perfect opportunity for the champions to take back control of the lab. They took that opportunity with both hands. From being led by the lab team, the Alliance went through a painful inflection point where champions took over both ownership and control after three months of playing a peripheral, consultative role.

While this was upsetting at the time, it was far from a failure. The lab painfully reconfigured to align with the reality of power dynamics and went on to be successful.

During the weeks when we were at the office—a massive space donated and custom-renovated for us by Unilever in Navi Mumbai—we developed a pattern. The core team all lived in four apartments a short drive from the office. Initially we all had breakfast together and piled into two cars. We arrived at the office at least an hour before all the participants and had team meetings, reviewing aspects of the design and the schedule, before we formally started the day. After all the facilitating sessions, we returned to the library to debrief. Then we all piled back into the two cars to return to our apartments and have dinner together. The next day we did it all again.

In time, this pattern put a massive amount of strain on all of us. We were easily working twelve hours a day, sometimes longer if you factored in breakfast and dinner when we talked about the lab. My colleague, Joe McCarron, and I, who were sharing one of the apartments, decided to stop going to team breakfasts. Instead, we did yoga and ate breakfast on our own. In the evenings, we sometimes eschewed dinner with the team and, feeling slightly brain-dead, watched MTV instead. However, as the lab progressed, everyone got more and more tired.

It’s hard to have perspective when you’re exhausted. That was part of the challenge. We had inadvertently designed a brutal process, characterized by extreme power dynamics. Reflecting on this now, it seems obvious that the more pressure we put on ourselves, the more we fell back on an unreflective habitus, those ways of working that we were most used to.

The image that came to me when thinking about the lab was that of strapping a rocket to a car and lighting the fuse. A fuse had been lit underneath us, and we were burning jet fuel at a prodigious rate, zooming along this pre-plotted trajectory in a small, closed space. While in theory we could change the basic parameters of our journey, in practice we could not. Too many people were involved, too much money had been spent, and it had to get done—and of course the fuse had been lit and we were burning fuel.

FAIL EARLY, FAIL OFTEN

With the Bhavishya Lab, we had inadvertently set up an encounter that was heterogeneous and unequal. It brought together participants—maybe as many as half against their will—into an alien process, where huge demands were put on them. Among the participants themselves were huge differences in experience, in understanding, in status, and more. Many had never been asked to play such a strategic role before. Between the participants and the champions, yet another vast gulf of difference existed.

Despite all this, the lab produced far-reaching results (elaborated on in the next chapter) for a comparatively modest investment. A comment on an official evaluation read, “The Change Lab is a giant step forward in the context of applying new social technology to produce radical changes in addressing a historical, social and mammoth issue of malnutrition in India. The teething problems would hopefully be overcome and several Change Labs will take the change process ahead.”⁴

More often than not, there was a smell of burning tires in the air, as we traveled dizzyingly fast over terrain that was very rocky. Friction is a prerequisite for both movement and speed, as anyone who has tried driving a car over ice knows. Occasionally we’d hit a flat, smooth surface where we cruised for a while, but inevitably we would career into more difficult, crazy, cratered landscapes.

We never suffered a lack of friction from spinning our wheels or from groupthink, which is the situation that results from homogenous groups where everyone thinks the same. Almost every step we took was contested in some way. Someone was always trying to grab the wheel. Friction drove the lab at crazy speeds.

My colleague Adam wrote of the lab, “One of the members of the Alliance staff said to me two years later, ‘The Champions said that they wanted us to achieve breakthrough innovations, but time and again they prevented us from deviating from the usual way of doing things. They were like the owners of an ocean-going boat that are not willing to let it get out of sight of the shore.’”⁵

Regardless of the many mistakes we made and all the things we would now do differently, the fact is that the Bhavishya Alliance went on for six more years and spun out many, many different innovative programs and initiatives. Our mistakes sometimes make it hard to acknowledge the good work that so many people did, the courage and the love that poured into trying to make the whole experience work. The smell of burning rubber, however, is still strong even six years later.

BUSINESS AS USUAL AND ITS RADICAL REFUSALS

The Generon Team left India just as the first monsoons were sweeping across Mumbai. The year before, almost a thousand people had drowned due to flooding. A flood warning went out as we were wrapping up the final debrief with the secretariat. We were advised to get to the airport as soon as possible; otherwise there was a real risk we would be trapped for days.

The drivers were worried because our route back to the apartments took us past the ocean, and the roads were at high risk from flash flooding. There was an air of panic. People were jumping into cars and speeding off. Gomathy got left behind, but she managed to get a cab. Part of the land in front of the building we were working in had collapsed due to the rains, which had now been falling for three days without pause.

An hour later, racing the floods, we were back at our apartments. We packed up all our belongings in twenty minutes, loaded back into the cars, and headed for a hotel right next to the airport. That final frenzied car ride through the rain-sodden streets of Navi Mumbai represented the end of our four-year Bhavishya adventure.

For much of my work during the Sustainable Food Lab, the Bhavishya Lab, and other labs, I took a highly critical, somewhat bad-tempered approach to what we were doing. I was in constant low-level struggles to change what I deemed to be problematic. Much of my time was spent in the weeds of details. Partly as a result of this and partly as a result of the organizational culture I was operating in, I emerged from four years of working with Generon exhausted. But strangely enough, I was more hopeful than ever. What was going on here?

After some pondering and stepping back from my experiences with these first-generation social labs, I had a light-bulb explosion of an insight. What was I being critical of? The fact that I was being critical, that I was squabbling and fighting over details (and annoying a lot of people) meant something very important—there was actually something to improve upon, something worth fighting for—a foundation for a new way of addressing stuck social issues. Not only that, but the improvements I was imagining were clearly coming from some idea of what could be, that is, a vision for social labs.

The questions I left India with were very different from those I had when I left the Sustainable Food Lab. While exhausted, burned out, and disappointed, I took some comfort from the words of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing: “Instead of starting with the dichotomy between global force and local response, these methods show the importance of contingent and botched encounters in shaping both business-as-usual and its radical refusals.”⁶