Ideation on Indian Railways and the Rail Shivir jamboree

 

There is no significant progress yet on RailTech portal of Indian Railways (IR), intended to connect startups, innovators and industry partners directly with the railway network for open innovation. It is early days, so patience is wiser than judgement. We can wait for meaningful outcomes. IR also set up a designated portal for railway staff across levels to submit innovative safety and efficiency ideas, with senior officials reviewing and implementing viable suggestions (Employees Ideas Portal).

IR has been trying to manufacture ideas for as long as I can remember. An idea, like a railway train, needs a track on which to run. And that brought some memories which I will share here.

The ideation drama began in IR in the 1980s, when Quality Circles became a fad. Then came Kaizen, borrowed from Japan’s post-war manufacturing renaissance, and German terms such as Ideenfindung and Ideensammlung, idea-finding and idea-gathering. IR was determined not to be left behind.

Unfortunately, ceremony often became more important than the idea. When staff did not volunteer enough ideas, superior officers sometimes supplied them and pushed them down the hierarchy to later emerge as ideas of the workforce. Statements were issued, seminars held and reviews conducted. Openness was buried beneath its paperwork. I say this with some embarrassment because I too was part of such dramas.

Yet ideation is wonderful when treated seriously. Everyone has ideas and needs a platform where an idea can be heard, appreciated and, accepted or rejected, never ridiculed or patronised. Leaders talk well. We are less accomplished at listening, sometimes hearing without listening.

When I became General Manager of Integral Coach Factory, Chennai, I wanted to understand why an organisation with so much experience was reluctant to change. Habit was one reason. Fear was another. People build identities around established processes and expertise, so a new idea can seem a threat to personal equity.

Our answer was simple: talk, listen and think. We began dismantling feudal protocols restricting interaction between levels at ICF. We wanted people to meet, argue, disagree and contribute without checking who occupied which chair. 

The most fruitful experiment was called One Month, One Idea, a name coined by Srinivas, the then Chief Design Engineer, who led the Train 18 design effort. The principle was simple. Every officer had to conceive one idea for improving ICF, a caveat being that the idea need not be grand. A small improvement in design, process or upkeep was respectable.

This was not a consultancy exercise where one could throw an idea into the air and wait for somebody else to catch it. The officer who proposed it owned its implementation. We would sit with officers of groups such as Design or the Shell Factory and discuss their ideas freely. If accepted, the officer had three months to implement it. If rejected, the officer had to return the following month with two ideas. The only unacceptable response was an excuse. As Shakespeare’s Pembroke says in King John, “And oftentimes excusing of a fault doth make the fault the worse by the excuse.”

The system worked astonishingly well. ICF had about 165 officers; depending on the group, some presented monthly and others once in three months. On average, 75 to 100 ideas emerged each month. Over my tenure, that meant roughly 3,500 ideas, of which perhaps 2,500 became tangible improvements, assuming a strike rate of around 70 percent. Notably, some innovations were subsequently adapted for regular coaches and even for Train 18.

After each meeting, the group head and I selected two or three ideas. Originators received certificates, and their photographs appeared on ICF’s social media. Recognition matters. Seeing an idea carry their name into the organisation encourages another.

We also provided a platform to all supervisors and staff and met twice to thrice a month to listen to ideas. Ideas emerged from the lowest level of helpers to senior supervisors and many of those were implemented. For someone like me, who had worked mostly on locomotives and almost never on coaching, this was a boon. Making an agenda for myself became easier.

With apologies to Firaq, a hypercorrection:

Chhalak ke kam na ho aisī koī sharāb nahīñ

par fikr-o-faham meñ ICF, tirā javāb nahīñ

(There is no wine which does not lessen when spilt, but in thinking and discerning, ICF, you are just matchless!)

Even as our initiatives chugged along, the heavens parted and dropped Rail Shivir into our laps, looking like an opportunity. In November 2016, the Ministry organised a conclave of ideation in Delhi, but it soon felt like a state-sponsored fever dream, more jamboree than conclave. Its structure for submitting ideas was so nauseatingly formalised that filling out income tax returns looked like hopscotch. The corporate numbers game kicked off. General Managers were goaded, cajoled and practically exorcised into generating ideas. It became a spiritual edict: Thou Shalt Ideate, from every layer of IR, an empire of 1.3 million souls.

The consultants had discovered a scientific fact: the shortest distance between a terrible idea and its acceptance was a PowerPoint presentation. These went onto a bespoke website, which threatened to collapse under thousands of railwaymen trying to innovate simultaneously. It was a digital rat race, and the scoreboard was watched like the Olympic finals. We dutifully threw ideas into the void to avoid being accused of having none. One, almost lost in the noise, was to build an indigenous semi-high-speed train.

The Shivir mutated into a three-day spectacle involving more than 5,000 railwaymen trapped at a resort near Delhi. It was part global conference, part corporate retreat and two parts school excursion for senior adults who had misplaced their dignity. If forced enthusiasm generated traction, we could have laid down a freight corridor that weekend.

We arrived with fifteen people, ready to change the world, or at least the next PowerPoint slide. The Prime Minister had spoken of railwaymen coming together, introspecting and letting organic concepts emerge. Between that visionary sentence and the resort gates, the concept collided with consultants, PowerPoint, rankings, filters, five dress rehearsals and enough choreography to rival a Republic Day parade.

Eight ideas were picked up as the holy 'Top Concepts,' worthy of elaborate presentations for the Prime Minister. I was among sixteen presenters, two per topic, presumably so one could perform CPR on the other.

Late one evening, after spirited revelry with long-lost colleagues, I was summoned to a windowless hall for midnight rehearsal. The presenters sat before the Chairman of the Railway Board, CRB, like disciplined schoolboys awaiting inspection.

When my turn came, bleeding from PowerPoint poisoning, I tried to inject soul into the corporate wasteland with an Urdu couplet. The CRB stopped me dead. “Keep your ghazals and qawwalis for your club, mister. This is a serious affair. Now, next slide please.”

The message was clear. I was to speak somebody else’s thoughts in my own voice, preferably like a man announcing electricity. We rehearsed repeatedly. By the end, the presentation had the smoothness of a railway timetable and the same relationship with real life. Many chosen blokes took the task seriously, practising as if Modi ji were about to redeem them for life. Others, particularly the excluded GMs, felt slighted and dejected. The railway had invented a competition in which both selected and rejected could lose. I was resigned to becoming a spectacle on the podium. I consoled myself with these words of poet Wahshat Kalkatvi:

Aap apnā rū-e-zebā dekhiye

yā mujhe mahv-e-tamāshā dekhiye

Haa.e re zauq-e-tamāshā-e-jamāl

ḳhud tamāshā huuñ tamāshā dekhiye

(Look at your lovely face or look at me engaged in watching the display. Oh, this taste for a spectacle of beauty! I am an exhibition myself, look at my exposition.)

The next day, the Prime Minister arrived. More than 5,000 railwaymen filled the hall. The proceedings were conducted and televised. My fellow presenter, a senior RDSO officer, and I delivered our carefully sterilised script. We even received congratulatory messages. I had apparently ‘performed’ well in a presentation I did not believe in, delivering words that were not mine to demonstrate the power of ideas. It was a curious victory for eloquence over authenticity; frankly, an embarrassment for me to this day.

Shakespeare would have understood. In Twelfth Night, the Fool says, “Well, God give them wisdom that have it. And those that are fools, let them use their talents.” I felt I had certainly used mine.

Our idea, an indigenous modern semi-high-speed train set, something that would eventually be born as Train 18/Vande Bharat, was presented in an almost inconsequential hall to a smaller gathering. It produced, as expected, zilch. Yet that failure became the beginning of something real.

Within days, we regrouped at ICF and prepared a rudimentary proposal for an indigenous train set. Preliminary costing put it at about Rs 100 crore per train set. The proposal encountered the familiar Railway Board combination of sloth, ambiguity and indifference, but with some goodwill, a file began to move.

In Railway Board, a moving file is not a milestone. It is merely a file that has demonstrated that it needs legs. For months, the proposal wandered through late 2016 and early 2017. We knew we needed formal approval. I did not involve the hundred ICF dreamers, whose dream was larger than mine and who were ready to build it. Eventually, I had to fall at the feet of the Chairman to get the sanction to design and build two trains. I did it with pride, as these dreamers were looking to me for sanction and the go-ahead.

The more we met staff and officers, the more ideas emerged. Innovation was not scarce. What was scarce was the willingness to listen, trust and allow people to own their ideas. We celebrated this culture by creating Innovation Illam, a modest shed at the entrance to the Furnishing Factory where innovations were displayed. It became a physical reminder that ideas were not merely discussed; they were expected to become things.

Someone warned that too many ideas might kill the initiative. I told him ICF was too large to be throttled by ideas. The problem with IR has never been a shortage of intelligence, experience or imagination, but the distance between an idea and the person empowered to act.

Carl Jung said, “You can expect no influence if you are not susceptible to influence.” That is perhaps the essential lesson for any leader. To invite ideas, one must be willing to be influenced by them. And then there is John Steinbeck’s wonderfully mischievous observation: “Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.”

At ICF, we discovered that he was right. The trick is not to organise a Shivir to count the rabbits. It is to let them run.

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