Transcript
Edited for readability.
Introduction
The genesis of Illumine lies in one problem we have seen in communities, in organisations and in educational institutions: people need what is called cognitive empowerment. They need to be given the ability to feel empowered in their sense of identity, in the way they look at their roles, in the way they look at the structures of their own minds — because that is the only way they will be able to deal with a changing world.
That is the basis of our work in India. In the last ten years or so, we have reached more than 2 million people. We have worked, for example, with India’s largest bank, State Bank of India; with one of the largest private industrial groups; with large universities; and we are working with the school system. So we are working across the board — at the corporate level, the university level and the student level.
Whatever I share with you now is a product of those experiences. Although some of it may look theoretical, none of what I say is theoretical. It is built in practice, out of the past decade’s work.
Positive people
With that brief background, let me start with my first point. If we want to build a positive economy, we need positive people. If you don’t have positive people, you are not going to have a positive economy.
And when I say positive people, how many do we want? A few people — the people in this audience? We are going to need far more. We are going to need thousands, hundreds of thousands of positive people. Our challenge is going to be: how do we create positive people at scale, across the world?
If we want to give people this positivity, the question we must ask is: aren’t our educational systems and models already in a position to do it? The short answer, I think, is no.
Our educational models teach us skills. They give us information, concepts, knowledge. But that doesn’t mean they give us the capacity to adapt, to transform, to evolve, to grow with new circumstances.
In fact, none of us in this room can truly even begin to imagine what the world will look like ten years from now. Some of its very basic elements may stay as they are, but most of what we do — the job environment, the technological environment, the social environment — is going to undergo huge changes. So while we might have skills and information capacities, the question is: do we have the capacity to evolve, to transform ourselves, to adapt and adopt the new world? Will we be able to embrace it?
That is really the topic of my conversation.
The evolutionary adventurer
Here is my first hypothesis: this new society — what we call the positive economy — will be built by people I call evolutionary adventurers.
Evolutionary adventurers will have three qualities.
First, they will be capable of evolving themselves. They should be able to find meaning and purpose in what they do, and find fulfilment in the work they take up. They need to be able to adapt and think differently as they go along. And, perhaps most important, they should be people who can live with integrity in the world around us.
Second, they will co-evolve with others. Just because people evolve individually does not mean they will be able to evolve in a collective context. They need to work along with their collectives — in their families, their communities, the places where they work. Others are going to change and grow, and each evolutionary adventurer will have to grow with all the people around them.
Third, they will build. They will have to build new models, new institutions, new mechanisms for working.
These are the three responsibilities that evolutionary adventurers will carry within themselves.
How to become an evolutionary adventurer
What is it going to take to build these evolutionary adventurers? How can each one of us in this room become one — someone able to adapt and evolve with the changing world?
The answer is probably not simple, because it will involve completely new ways of looking at ourselves, which I’ll quickly walk you through. Clearly it is not going to be skills, and clearly it is not going to be information capacities.
Conscious sense-making
The first and most important quality each of us will have to develop is what I call conscious sense-making.
It is not enough to look at information. There is so much information out there; we are flooded with it. The skill is not in being able to use Google. The skill is in being able to make sense of everything that is going on out there.
And what kind of sense will it be — some disembodied sense out there, or sense to me as an individual? Take career opportunities. How do young people understand them? Not in terms of “there are 2 million jobs or 50,000 jobs this year, and this is the demand–supply gap.” That’s fine for economists. But for an individual facing the world, who has to build a career, it is not enough. What he or she needs to know is: Does this career make sense to me? Am I going to succeed in it? Do I understand myself well enough to succeed? Will the job I take up bring out the best in me? Will it give me the kind of fulfilment I seek in my life?
To understand that, I need to understand myself along with the opportunity. Which means sense-making is not objective — sense-making is reflexive. It is a double loop: understanding the world, understanding ourselves, and then going back and understanding the world differently based on our new understanding of ourselves.
That is the first capacity you need in order to adapt and transform in this world.
New modes of thinking
The second thing you need is to build new modes of thinking.
What do I mean by modes of thinking? Take one new mode of thinking people are talking about these days: design thinking. How do I approach any problem with a design mode of mind? How do I look at a problem and ask whether there are new ways of solving it? How do I build the capacity, the mode of thinking, to engage deeply with any problem I am given? I’m given a new problem; I don’t know the answer; I haven’t heard of it before. Can I dive deep into it, involve myself with it, and find answers?
Another new mode of thought is enlightened self-interest. We have long known what it means to operate competitively, to operate out of selfishness. We also understand unselfishness. But what does it take to live in enlightened self-interest — to think win-win in every transaction, every interaction we have in our lives? This requires a new mode of mind, a new way of thinking.
That is the second step if we really want to be evolutionary adventurers.
How to deal with challenges
But that is not going to be enough. There is a third thing we will need. Yes, we need to transform our modes of mind; yes, we need to make sense of the world. But along with that: how do we deal with challenges?
Are we going to deal with challenges by simply saying, “Here is a challenge; I’m going to find an answer”? Sometimes that doesn’t work. Everything you have learned in the past does not help you solve the problem. Your history does not help you deal with the future.
If my history doesn’t help me deal with the future, how do I deal with such a problem? I can’t go for help — there is nobody out there to help me. So I need to depend on myself, and I have to do it through a process of evolution. I have to learn to lift myself from within — to build completely new ways of thinking within myself in order to deal with an external challenge.
So it is not enough to be courageous; it is not enough to be brave. It is also important to awaken something much greater in ourselves than we believe we have. That awakening of something greater within ourselves — something that allows us to be more than who we are — is, in a sense, what is called evolution. That is the kind of evolution we will need, and we need to do it continuously, with every challenge we face.
Rediscovering who we are
The fourth and most important point, I think, is that every one of us will have to relook at who we are.
How do we define ourselves? Do I define myself only in terms of my friends, my community? Do I define myself in terms of my qualifications, my position, or the amount of money I have? Do I define myself in terms of my capabilities — “I’m good at this, I’m not good at that”? Do I define myself as Italian, or culturally European?
Or is there a universal way of defining ourselves — one that transcends geographic boundaries and local constructs, and allows us to operate at a different level? Then you start looking for your universal identity, your identity as a human being — and you start hooking on to your human potential.
So if we want to educate our children, if we want each one of us to become evolutionary adventurers in the world we are talking about, we need to train ourselves — and share with the people around us — the ability to hook on to their universal identities, and thereby awaken the new possibilities, the infinite possibilities, that exist within each individual.
Just imagine what classrooms would be like if teachers really believed that the children in front of them had infinite possibilities. They would not rank and grade children as good or bad. They would not say that just because you did badly yesterday, you are not capable of doing incredibly well tomorrow. If you believed in human possibilities, it would transform your understanding as a teacher.
We have now worked with thousands of teachers and millions of students, and I can tell you that this is the central challenge of the 21st-century classroom: how do you get teachers to believe in their own infinite possibilities, and in the infinite possibilities of each one of those children?
And how can each one of you in this audience walk out with that conviction — not as a theory, not as some concept or idea out there, but as something you believe in your heart: Yes, I do have infinite possibilities. I can become anyone I want to be. It is an altogether different thing to comprehend something intellectually, and to know it in your heart. What we are talking about is: do you know that you have infinite possibilities, and do you act out of that knowledge, out of that belief? That is when each one of us will start becoming an evolutionary adventurer.
Teachable and learnable at scale
So this is what we need to accomplish. We need to build an educational system that creates positive individuals for a positive economy — people who have not just capacities and information-handling skills, but the capacity to adapt, evolve and change.
And the best part about this capacity is that it is teachable and learnable — at scale. It is possible to incorporate all of this into our educational models, to embed this new thinking into our educational system. We just have to awaken ourselves to the idea that we could do it.
Scale and depth
Let me take you to the next level of this conversation. If this has to be done, how will it be done? How will you implement it? What does it take? What are the challenges? If existing educational models don’t work, are there new educational methods through which we can solve these problems?
To answer that, you first need to understand the problem more deeply. Here is the problem we are trying to solve. We want people who can evolve — but not five people or ten people; they already exist in the world. We are not interested in 20 people. We are interested in thousands, hundreds of thousands.
My country, India, has 1.28 billion people. We have 5 million graduates coming out every year — approximately the same as the entire EU. Of those 5 million graduates, we need at least 5% of the graduating class, a year or two from now, to be evolutionary adventurers. That means we want 250,000 to 300,000 evolutionary adventurers. So we need scale.
And yet, to become an evolutionary adventurer, we need depth. We can’t be talking at the surface level, in mere concepts and ideas. We need to dive deep into human beings and get them to reflect on themselves. So we need richness and depth — we need people to be able to climb the ladder — and along with it, we need to reach out and give this to many, many people across communities.
How are you going to do it? How are you going to build this kind of positive economy at scale, and get it out of a conference and into the lives of millions of people? If you need to do that, the next question is: you need a model for doing it.
So here is a model we have built. How do I know whether it works? As I told you, over the last ten years we have worked with 2 million people, across corporations and universities. We work with Gujarat Technological University — 400 colleges in Gujarat. Today we work with more than 500 schools in India. We also work with some of the largest corporations. Given all these experiences, this might be a simple approach for you to consider.
Enabling identities
The first and most important thing in our journey of getting people to evolve, and to build evolutionary capacities, is that we need to get them to start aspiring. They must want to evolve. They must want to become more than what they are. They shouldn’t be happy saying, “I’m comfortable in my little land, my little world, in everything that is known and familiar to me.” They should desire to grow and become more than who they are.
That desire is brought about when we give people not ideas, but ideals. You need to give people new visions of who they are, and pathways to get there.
We need to give people what I call enabling identities. A disabling identity is: “I’m somebody who is good at only three things.” That’s useful for those three things — but it becomes disabling when there’s a fourth thing I need to learn, because I say, “I know three things; I don’t know four.” But if I have an identity that says “I’m a learner,” that is an enabling identity. “I’m a contributor” is an enabling identity, because it allows me to grow and learn all the time. People need to carry identities that allow them to expand, to let go, and to adopt new things.
We don’t have the time for me to give you specific examples for each of these. But the important thought I want to leave you with is that, first of all, we need to give people maps. Just as geographic maps tell you how to get from place A to place B, I need a map of how I, as a human being, can get from place A — where I am today — to place B, where I want to be tomorrow.
Once you start giving people maps, they get excited. They say, “There’s a pathway. It’s not some unknown land where I don’t know what will happen to me. I have a journey, and it’s going to be an exciting, adventurous journey. I’m going to evolve. I’m going to be an evolutionary adventurer who takes up that journey and makes it successful.” These are the kinds of maps we need to give our young people.
Tools for assimilation
That’s the first thing. The second thing we need to do is get people beyond their brains — beyond comprehension. Our entire educational model is built on intellectual capabilities; it is built on the mind. What we really need is not comprehension of concepts. What we need is assimilation. You need to become it. And if you need to become it — to transform every part of who you are — that means something else altogether.
What it means is that you need to give people what you can call tools for assimilation. Who does the assimilating? The individual. So you can’t teach somebody to assimilate.
A very simple example is food. Someone can put a beautiful plate of food in front of you. They might even force-feed you. But finally, the digestion is yours. And if you don’t digest it, it’s not going to make you strong.
So if you need these ideals to make you strong, it’s not enough simply to understand them. It’s not enough, for example, to understand the positive economy. We have to assimilate it — translate it into our very being, so that we live it in every action we carry out.
That assimilation is really the challenge of our society. It’s not ideas. Go to YouTube today, watch TED Talks — you will get millions of ideas, maybe a thousand times more than you’ve got at this conference. You can attend a thousand conferences if you want, but that’s not going to change your life — until you take one of those ideas, one TED Talk you find inspiring, that can make you become something else, and you assimilate it and digest it. Then it will make you strong. That is what we need to give people, at scale.
We need to give them new tools for thinking.
Creative faith. There is the faith we know of, which says, “I believe in something out there.” People are often too scientific to say that. But it is sometimes necessary to have faith, because otherwise you cannot walk. Creative faith is a journey where I make small jumps: I have faith in something nearby, make a jump, catch hold of it, know it to be true — and then take a bigger jump. Creative faith is a journey of building faith in ourselves and in the world around us.
Enlightened design. Not design that just solves problems, but design that is win-win-win: a win for the individual, a win for the organisation or company, and a win for society as a whole.
Co-created answers. We can’t tell people what they have to do, because this is a journey of evolution that people have to undertake themselves. You can’t sit on a podium and say, “You have to take that journey.” It doesn’t work. They have to adopt it themselves, which means you have to co-create the answer with them. That is what we mean when we say we need to assimilate these ideas.
Role models
And that is not going to be enough, because as a system we also need to give people role models.
We need to give people methods for peer learning, and we need best practices harvested and shared from one university to another. One simple exercise we carried out was in a university in Gujarat, where we took five colleges as a cluster. If one college was carrying out some best practice, how do you share it across the cluster of four or five colleges? In no time, the teachers were learning from each other. Peer learning multiplied by best practices — and suddenly you have a continuous evolution in thinking. That is not very hard to build or put into place in society.
You need measurement — but not grades that tell you how bad you are. You need enabling audits that tell you how to improve. We don’t need to tell people “you are here”; we need to tell them how to get there. That means new measurement models that help people grow, which is completely different from the kinds of measurement and evaluation we use in the current economy.
And finally, we need communities of practice, because you are not going to be able to do it alone. You need help.
This is the kind of work we have to do if we really want to scale positive people — to create thousands and millions of positive people all over the world.
Case studies
Here are some quick case studies to share with you.
One is our work with the bank, where we gave people a completely new citizenship vision.
A second is our work with rural housewives, where we gave people new identities — not as “illiterate housewives,” but as what in India are called Durga, Lakshmi and Saraswati, who are goddesses. We said: you are the protector of your family; you are the creator of your family’s prosperity. So you give them self-esteem, and the ability to find their own answers.
And here is another solution, which I want to show you in a short video: what we call the Awakened Citizen Programme for school children. In this brief video, I’ll share how we are giving millions of children a new vision of themselves as repositories of infinite possibilities. Once they see those possibilities, it changes their “I can” attitude. It allows them to participate differently; it gives them confidence and self-awareness of their potential. Many fruits come out of that one single root — a new vision of self.
Closing
With that, I’ll bring my short half-hour talk to a close. Thank you very much.