Business, society, revolutions & the Sarkar Game

Recently, I came across a role-play game 'Sarkar Game' used in foresight practice, invented by futurists and academics?Joe Voros and Peter Hayward, based on a model of social change from Indian philosopher and macrohistorian Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar.

"Sarkar developed a cyclical theory of social change with a belief that understanding history boosted the stimulation and creation of alternative futures. His emphasis was on creating a new type of leadership spiralling to a transformational future. Sarkar identifies macro-sized, evolutionary categories that describe long swathes of human development. Frequently, a revolution or evolution takes place when each cycle concludes. Then the cycle begins once more. Four types of power (epistemes) are drawn from these historic cycles:

the worker,

the warrior,

the intellectual and

the capitalist (merchant)."

The categorisation is just the 'varna system' of the yore (which descended into chaotic caste system in our times). But what it points to is the meta construct of the leadership - that the king's style of running the kingdom - would be cyclical and based on these four pointers which could be directly mapped to the ''varnas' (Shudra, Kshtriya, Brahmin & Vaishya).

If one looks at the typical maturity stages of a business, one can see that the founder also needs to change his attitude accordingly in the different stages.

As a start-up, the mindset needed is of a worker - the one who works non-stop within the guardrails of 100 compliances trying to make the business work. A new startup idea would not have many competitors and much of the energy goes in making things work.

Next stage of growth, the team and business start growing but competitors also start entering the fray and the founder needs to defend his/her territory as a warrior with innovation across the board from HR to sales.

At the maturity stages, business is well understood, market matures and profits are stable, focus is on optimisation. The founder takes on the role of the intellectual to bring 'happiness' amongst the stakeholders.

The decline stage points to the red ocean when the new competitors have started eating into the profits and sales fall. The founder has to take a hard call on the business and brand it created with passion and zeal - to kill and move on or resurrect it with new innovation.

The cyclical nature of existence is core to Indian and many Asian philosophical systems. There is a quote on the lifecycle on revolutions too-

A good note on the cyclical nature of these four social roles is in a blog I came across, which also puts forward an interesting point on relative powers of these four roles and why the INTELLECTUAL is often found subservient to the BUSINESSMAN. How the Suez canal crisis was handled by USA's financial might to push off the UK-French military combine is a case in point illustrated in the blog.

And in the end a quote on revolutions - "Every successful revolution puts on in time, the robes of the tyrant it has deposed." - Barbara Tuchman

One has seen the journey of socialism in the world and it fits the Sarkar cycle perfectly. which began as a movement of the 'workers' or 'proletariat' and the rise of the oligarchs points to a different end of the capitalist spectrum from Russia to Kerala.

"We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time."

-T S Eliot