The Hidden Potential of Mission Karmayogi - Part 1

The vision of Mission Karmayogi is to make civil servants future-ready so that they can play a major role in the making of a New India. This requires building the capacity of civil servants so that they practice leadership, as opposed to merely exercising bureaucratic power.

During their career, administrators (used interchangeably with civil servants) progress through three broad stages. In the first stage, administrators make tactical decisions in live situations in districts. In the second stage, they acquire domain concentration (not specialization). Finally, in the last stage, administrators do strategic decision-making. Unlike the funnel-shaped conventional leadership pathway in which leaders start as generalists and progress to specialize more and more in narrow domains, the leadership pathway for administrators hourglass-shaped - they start as generalists in the lower bulb, gradually gain domain concentration in the neck and finally, loop back to become expert-generalists in the upper bulb. Let us look at these three stages in more detail.

Lower bulb (generalists): Tactical decision-making consists of choosing from alternate activities to reach an objective, or practicing to connect the how to do (know-how) with what to do (know-what). Every time an objective is achieved, administrators learn not just to solve a problem, but also gain an experience. This storehouse of experiences consists of the know-what and know-how of problems and opportunities. Whenever faced with a new challenge, administrators look for common elements in the new decision situation and the stored experiences. This similarity becomes the starting point for understanding and acting in the new situation. With time, administrators acquire a rich and diverse repertoire and this enables them to quickly draw upon near-similar experiences and make faster and better decisions.

Neck (domain concentration): Once administrators complete their district postings, they head departments/ PSUs or work in the Secretariat in the Centre/State. They start to design policies and also supervise implementation from a distance. In the first stage they had learnt the know-how and know-what, now, they learn the know-why of things. The know-why comes from learning theory.  

Simply put, theories are statements of what causes things to happen, and why. The why of theory enables prediction of what problems and opportunities are likely to occur when any intervention (e.g. policy, law, programme) is implemented. Theory explains what would happen, even before one experiences it. Policy-making requires a deep understanding of what caused what to happen, and why; this comes from the theory. In the words of Professor Christensen (Harvard Business School); without theory, policy-making would be like going sailing in the sea without a sextant.

Administrators often complain that theories are not useful in real life. This happens because the right theory is often not combined with the right experience. It is like trying to send a rocket into space based on Archimedes’ principle of floatation, not Newton’s laws of gravitation. Without the right theory, administrators are able to explore what they hope would happen, not predict what will happen.

 Upper bulb (expert generalists): Having practiced the application of the right theory to experience, administrators progress to the upper bulb. Here, decision-making is largely driven by a strong experience-based intuition, which comes from an admix of theory and experience in the following ways.  

First, administrators are able to generalize from the particular experiences not to produce general laws or universal rules, but to build cognitive bridges across experiences. The cognitive bridges arise from a sort of bundling of similar experiences (both own and others’) to produce themes, and these themes become the source material for policy-making.

Second, administrators are able to understand the wider implications of their decisions in the political economy. Theory empowers them to get to know in advance who has a stake, what each group or individual wants, how much they care, and how much influence they have on others. Such visualization helps administrators to assess and predict the nature and extent of support or resistance to the policy.

Third, they are able to improve and innovate. A key requirement for innovation is associational thinking - the process of connecting fields, ideas and problems, hitherto thought to be unrelated. Inserting the right theory between administrators and their experience empowers them “to intuitively recognize patterns and use the insights to make inductive predictions both vertically within categories and horizontally across categories”.

Finally, theory tells us what works, what does not, and under what conditions. When stuck during policy implementation, administrators are quickly able to identify the bottlenecks and move ahead.

Thus, the leadership pathway of administrators is different from traditional professions Capacity building based on the hourglass paradigm would provide an opportunity for civil servants to constantly build and strengthen their behavioral, functional and domain competencies in their self-driven and mandated learning paths.

This is a key component of Mission Karmayogi.

Views are personal. This article first appeared on The Pioneer, Volume 2, Issue 361, Page 2, on 10 October 2020 at https://www.dailypioneer.com/uploads/2020/epaper/october/hyderabad-english-edition-2020-10-10.pdf