Isn’t it time to explore self-governance? Lessons from Chennai
Over the last few days, Chennai witnessed unprecedented rains that brought everyone and everything to ‘literally’ their knees, sorry, hips. What was heartening was the fact that the citizens showed their resilience and compassion by helping one another in countless ways. Social media was used so creatively to help the people who are affected by the floods. Chennai people proved that self-governance is possible and if people are provided with the right tools and technology, this could become mainstream.
A few examples of how people creatively helped each other —
1. People setting up control rooms to co-ordinate the relief efforts and centralizing all the information
2. People posting message that they can accommodate 4–5 people in their home, in case, someone was stuck nearby in the floods.
3. People raising money online, sharing receipts and pictures of the things that they purchased and sending the relief materials to Chennai
4. Someone posting an idea that all wi-fi routers carry ‘Chennai’ as the login and password so that the city can be one large hotspot that anyone can use to contact relatives, seek help or mobilize help.
5. People also were quickly learning along the way that some of the information they share could be wrong and so, they call to verify whether a particular message is true or not and then using #verified
To top it all, the most beautiful aspect that I witnessed was the ‘wisdom of crowds’ and how it self organized effectively by learning, adjusting and solving problems. For example, one person posted that a software company has arranged buses to take citizens out of Chennai. Another person called the company, verified that the news was wrong and quickly alerted everyone. Within 30 mins, those posts didn’t exist anymore. It was crowd theory at its best.
On the other hand, the government machinery was totally ineffective as they neither had the means nor the experience to co-ordinate anything as the disaster was unprecedented. The bottom up approach to tackling the disaster simply eliminated the need for a top down intervention and in the process, it even provided an opportunity to the citizens to demonstrate their creativity, compassion and helped them to come close to each other.
All around us, we can see that truly complex systems thrive without hierarchy. Market economies, traffic systems, the human brain, and natural eco-systems are all highly complex, non-linear, adaptive systems that operate without hierarchy. We have seen in our cities how crowds self organize whenever there is a traffic jam and in fact, we need to do a research to get data points between outcomes when systems are in place(for example, traffic signals) versus places where systems are not in place(for example, 64 year old Mr.Ramprasad who helps to regulate traffic in his neighbourhood near IIM Bangalore)
I was reminded of Educational researcher Dr. Sugata Mitra’s “Hole in the Wall” experiments that demonstrated that, in the absence of supervision or formal teaching, children can teach themselves and each other, if they’re motivated by curiosity and peer interest. There was this beautiful example I saw a correlation of these experiments to the Chennai situation where it is proven that ‘People can govern themselves’ if they have the right tools and technology. After all, a government is a process created by people to govern themselves. Below is a transcript from his famous TED talk —
Can Tamil-speaking children in a south Indian village learn the biotechnology of DNA replication in English from a street side computer? And I said, I’ll measure them. They’ll get a zero. I’ll spend a couple of months, I’ll leave it for a couple of months, I’ll go back, they’ll get another zero. I’ll go back to the lab and say, we need teachers. I found a village. It was called Kallikuppam in southern India. I put in Hole in the Wall computers there, downloaded all kinds of stuff from the Internet about DNA replication, most of which I didn’t understand.
The children came rushing, said, “What’s all this?” So I said, “It’s very topical, very important. But it’s all in English.” So they said, “How can we understand such big English words and diagrams and chemistry?” So by now, I had developed a new pedagogical method, so I applied that. I said, “I haven’t the foggiest idea.” “And anyway, I am going away.” So I left them for a couple of months. They’d got a zero. I gave them a test. I came back after two monthsand the children trooped in and said, “We’ve understood nothing. Well, apart from the fact that improper replication of the DNA molecule causes disease, we haven’t understood anything else.” :)
The self-management idea has already been put to use in the private sector by companies like Zappos, Sun Hydraulics and Buurtzorg with great impact and outcomes where employees govern themselves without formal hierarchical roles, structures and leaders. There are tools like Holacracy that facilitate the self-management process and a ‘leaderless’ movement is emerging.
With the right tools and structure, the mindset of the citizens can also be effectively oriented to ‘How can I contribute’ from ‘Who can I blame?’. Over the last few days, we saw this mindset in Chennai. People were not blaming anyone, even the politicians and in fact, whenever someone started a blame game, the crowd quickly put it off. This may change after a few days but it is commendable.
What is government, after all? It is a process created by people to govern themselves. Why do we have to stick to a process that doesn’t work effectively?
The Chennai example proves that self governance is possible and validates the need for a Holacracy type model in governance where citizens can actively participate and contribute to the problems that they are facing in their lives on a daily basis. It can work closely with the traditional governance model after creating the right interfaces between the two models. On top of it, all kinds of differences in the name of religion, status, caste etc melted and the real humanity came out which made me think why humanity comes out only during crisis and not on regular days. The help and the support is continuing.
Leaders need to shed the ‘I’ and melt into the ‘we’ to leverage the wisdom of crowds and their collective consciousness. I saw a message in social media that there were more volunteers than victims. Hats off to the people of Chennai! They showed what is possible and have created opportunities to take governance to a new level.
