Immediate reward is the only agent of change

Every morning I watch a group of cyclists zipping through my lane. I can see that they have the finest cycles and advance equipment; things even a European would be envious of.

Unfortunately, I can clearly see that any health benefit they could have gotten from their first-world lifestyle is lost due to the third world air they are forced to breathe. The reason is the smoke, full of particulate matter, rising from mounds of burning leaves around my home.

For me, these rising smoke columns have a lesson to offer for future human management, especially in India. As Indians we really need to understand the lesson. 

Since this is the season for trees to shed leaves, the overburdened Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation sweepers prefer to opt for the shortcut of burning them. I am absolutely sure that the sweepers are categorically told and may be even trained by the AMC to not burn leaves. But, the reality on the ground is that, even if the AMC commissioner takes cognisance of this column and takes a stern action, in all likelihood, they will be back to burning in no time.

We may like to blame the sweepers for not doing their job properly, but, the truth is that he chooses to burn the litter instead of following the directions given by the system because burning reduces his work. On the contrary, he is gifted with no gain in addressing the system’s objective of controlling or reducing pollution.

Whether we like it or not, the sweepers’ logic is sound as it is based on what he has learnt from real life. India is still a developing nation after seventy years of sovereignty because, we have failed in connecting people with systemic benefits.

As a nation, we are prone to believe in idealism and hence, we keep trying to use motivation (now even nationalism) as a way to solve this problem. But, the harsh reality is, humans are carrot-and-stick creatures. So, those who really want to bring a change have no other option but to offer direct benefits of the change to the individuals who are expected to change.

The problem of a reward-based incentivising is that it leads to a cost to the system that can make it unviable. But, truth is, if we want a change, we have no other choice. So, it is all about working out the right scale of reward and following it.

The real key to management in India is to build mechanisms that allow visible gains on following the system. If we need sweepers to stop burning leaves, we need to bait them with incentives. A direct gain of even a rupee would work better than hundred hours of training using motivational speeches about benefits of clean air.

As the virus of virtue of selfishness spreads, modern policymakers will have to do some real tightrope walking if they want results. So, accurate cost-benefit analysis will hold major value for future human management, for which we will further need hard data and mathematical modellers capable of quantifying the seemingly intangible. 

Thankfully, we have a strange ally provided by nature for this, as there is a psychological chink in the human brain. Any gain that is offered as a freebie, however small, has a strange power to attract humans. So, a system designed around this human weakness will make it possible to build a cost-effective reward policy without going overboard with rewarding. As India needs a lot of things to change, we need to consciously reposition our HR training to make it have visible and direct gain for individuals. 

People are not going to change by motivational speeches of intangible long-term collective gain. They need cash and now! Let us hope our policy makers recognise this truth. 

City-based science nomad who tries to find definitive answers 
samir.shukla@icloud.com