Alumni Sharing 

Leadership Learned in the Jungles of India
By Paul Gibbons 

The jeep rumbles over the rough road between villages. In this part of India, there are more holes than road and our group has been bounced from side-to-side for several hours. This is day three, travelling to a local temple in Southeast rural India for a half-day reflection and meditation to make sense of the immense economic development challenges they have met in their encounters with villagers.

Strangely, this isn’t a group of NGOs, or aid workers. They are Western bankers on an executive development program. Their challenge during their ten days in India is to make sense of this reality and to use their leadership and commercial skills to make a difference.  In this case, individuals work for a bank ranked number one by the Financial Times for its leadership programs, and one that, despite the financial crisis, is prospering and continuing to invest heavily in programs such as this.

During the last decade, India has been a technological and economic miracle often achieving double-digit growth.  But that Indian story masks another harsher story, one of continued mass poverty. One Mumbai slum, with stacks of corrugated and cardboard huts, brought vividly to life in Slumdog Millionaire, houses an estimated 750,000 people living in squalor. The high-tech boom from Bangalore has not yet reached rural Southeast India, where people on a good day, earn one dollar. In Bangalore, center of the high-tech boom, one sees billboards for 3G telephony and high-definition television parked on top of shacks and urban garbage heaps. Poverty and high-tech co-exist in ways not seen in many European and North American cities – unless you know where to look.

Before this bumpy trip to the temple, we spent three days in the Intercontinental Mumbai, a fortress with 14 foot walls around it and armed guards at the gate to separate it from the slum that it abuts.  During these three days, the group was offered intensive training in intercultural leadership – not just because the 80 participants represented 40 different countries, but because their “customers” for the upcoming weeks will be villagers and NGOs whose world-view could not be farther from their own.  They are also introduced to the leadership framework they will use during their work, the “U process,” the brainchild of Dr. Otto Scharmer, senior lecturer of MIT, the founding chair of the Presencing Institute, and a founding member of the MIT Green Hub.

The “U” is designed to circumvent a natural human cognitive process which is to see a problem only through a single frame of reference.  An economist sees a problem as economic and applies economic fixes she has used elsewhere, a marketing executive sees a marketing problem, a banker sees a lending opportunity, and so on.  As the old saying goes, ‘”If you are good with a hammer, you tend to see a lot of nails.”  The “U” starts with an initiating and sensing phase where the object is to see the world through ones filters, but also to reflect on the filters.

 
In a complex social system, such as our Indian development challenge, multiple stakeholders are engaged, but the challenge is to see the problem through their eyes so that the solution found solves the problems as they appear to the afflicted, not just as they appear to Western bankers.

This group’s particular challenge is to work with an NGO who helps villagers form Self-Help Groups: micro-economic structures designed to help lift them out of poverty.  In this particular case, the villagers we worked with gather ayurvedic herbs.  The success or failure of this harvest means medicine or no medicine for village children, and a dollar a day or nothing for those who earn their living this way. The herbs eventually find their way into Walgreen’s as remedies, but the villagers see little of that value chain. A sole gatherer might walk 20 miles to market and be at the mercy of local trader who waits until day’s end (when she must return to her family) before offering a knock-down price. The women who do this can aggregate their crop, but typically do not have access to a truck. If the village could do more processing, sorting, and transporting locally, those parts of the value-chain would remain local and help alleviate local economic blight. However, this type of commercial and strategic analysis is foreign to these communities affording the bankers a small chance, if they get things right, to make a difference.

The group had spent two fourteen hour days in Southeast rural India visiting the tents and huts of villagers, and later meeting exporters, traders, retailers, pharmaceutical engineers and retailers.  Swamped with data, the group took a half day in the temple for reflection and presencing (the bottom of the ‘”U”) that was desperately needed.  Typically participants in this development program have life-altering insights during this space for deep reflection because although the challenges in their lives as global leaders are complex they are often tackled in habitual ways learned when the world was simpler.

Following the individual reflection time, the group sat in a circle sharing personal insights from these two days.  Some cried, moved by the plight of the villagers and moved by reflecting on their own lives as business executives and their powerlessness in the face of such systemic complexity.  However, from this reflective phase, the group derived great energy to provide insight and support.  Solutions began to coalesce and take shape. Their combined insights began to take the form of a plan and recommendations for the Self-Help Groups. Their mood shifted as they began to prototype suggestions in consultation with their ‘client’.  On the final day, the client NGO said “We are as moved and grateful today as you were during your trip to our temple.” Because of the deep engagement with stakeholders, the suggestions were rapidly accepted.  Five hundred dollars was found to buy a truck and set up a storage facility so that herbs could be sold in bulk at higher prices. 

However, the group produced more than just a consulting report. (We know how effective those are.) These Western bankers were greeted as dignitaries and began to form the backbone of a new economic structure with raised local awareness of the economic plight of the villagers.

Days later, the team, and five others like it that have been with different NGO groups, gather in Intercontinental Mumbai. The goal is to make sense of how they have developed as leaders and to plan the next phase of the project which is to develop a high-ROI innovation which they will present to the Chairman in six months.  What they do not yet know is that these next six months will test their leadership skills.  Working virtually in a complex organization on a high-value strategic initiative stretched individual capacity and worldviews in ways they could not have predicted. When they gathered in New York for this final Board-level review, many of the projects were slated for implementation: a new hedge fund strategy for the Investment Bank, a new 3G strategy for mobile phone banking.

Clearly this is a huge investment.  Why do world-class organizations invest in leadership programs such as the one described?  Why now?  Cari Caldwell, Director of Future Considerations in London, who designs and leads such programs says:  "Global companies are trying to embed an understanding of a) leading global virtual teams across cultural rifts, b) corporate responsibility (how can leaders navigate the threats and opportunities that this presents), and c) innovation (how leaders create the conditions for rapid market innovation).  They generate a new cadre of leaders alive and skilled to deal with the challenges of globalization and who can manage complex change in rapidly changing circumstances.” 

The structure of the program also means that it pays for itself, not just in intangibles such as branding, leadership learning, global networking, talent retention, and corporate social responsibility, but also in measureable financial return on investment.  Some of the “business projects” will end up as recommendations, but many see their way through to implementation because of the stakeholder engagement process insisted upon by the “U.”  

Programs such as this attempt to prepare today's leaders for the different, more complex challenges that they face in today's climate.  In obscure settings, in rural India, Brazil and Mexico, participants find themselves thrown in the deep end – far out of their comfort zone and open to learning in a way few leadership educators routinely encounter.  Faced with these challenges, they discover new depths in themselves – which translate into hard results back at work.  Increasingly, European multi-nationals are turning to programs such as this to develop their most senior or highest potential talent.  The largest European pharmaceutical company, professional services firm, FMCG company, bank and investment bank have all undertaken a program such as this in recent years.

Participants who have graduated tell a different, more personal story.  One said "I’ve come to believe in a company that I thought I would never believe in.”  Another said, "This program has provided me with more than the lifetime of leadership education I’ve undertaken previously."  Their experience in the tropics of India makes the urban and corporate jungles all that much easier to navigate.


Paul Gibbons is a European writer on global leadership, living in Madison, Wisconsin, and is founder of Future Considerations.  His current project is The Moral Anatomy of a Meltdown. You can contact him by email.

For more information on the U-Process and Theory U, visit the Presencing Institute at www.presencing.com.