Why Did I Join Vivir? - Learnings from our Startup Journey

Who among you would have never thought of leaving your job and beginning your own venture with a select group of your peers? Most of us have at least pondered on this once, if not many times. In our case, the initiation of the consulting startup - Vivir - began after many such pondering conversations beside water coolers and coffee tables. We wish to share some of our learnings through the course of our journey so far, hoping that it might inspire and help others along their way.

From its very inception, the idea of initiating Vivir was centered on incubating the culture of a creative think-tank than a traditional consulting enterprise. As Frederick Herzberg - the renowned scholar on the psychology of motivation - once said: the most powerful motivator isn’t money; it’s the opportunity to learn, grow in responsibilities, contribute and be recognized (Herzberg, 1987). Vivir allowed for the culmination of that opportunity while walking through the twilights of our individual careers. Moreover, we viewed our work in the development sector as a matter of creative practice and revision, than a pursuit of absolute clarity.

One of us may have been the traditional consultant who couldn't help sophisticating every input, followed by the other obsessed with simplicity in communication huddled together with someone who was too strict about resource allocation. In spite of all these seemingly opposite qualities within the group, we all were at that juncture seeking some form of creative disruption in our lives. What felt like opinionated stakeholders from the start, transformed into a bunch of eclectic thinkers, as we identify now. Whether the reasons were intellectual, operational, or even emotional, the need to learn and contribute was essential to our individual sense of relevance to this group, much unlike what our former jobs could offer.

The final leap to get the ball rolling was the faith and mutual respect in the capabilities of this peer group. An environmentalist, communication specialist, engineer, management consultant and an urban planner: while we seemed interdisciplinary to the outside world, in actuality, we were ideologically divided from the inside. But the group offered the promising prospect of learning, if we stayed honest with each other. And that has been a driving motive to this day, which we even coined into our vision: to draw from our cross-disciplinary creative abilities and skills to bring together ideas for equitable development in the water and sanitation sectors.

Vivir was an opportunity to connect and grow intellectually from the on-field experiences in the sanitation sector of five individuals who held conviction in their practice. In hindsight, the journey has taught us that professional growth isn’t merely organizational but in the process, individual transformations are inevitable. At times it may get hard but we promise you it’s worth it. 

Through the course of the time at Vivir, we have worked on a selective and creative body of unique projects from designing algorithms for waste management [1] to advising an international not-for-profit on how to introduce liquid waste management interventions in rural India [2] and supporting a multi-national consulting firm on the sampling methodology for characterizing solid waste. Add to that, the team also has worked on exhibiting various service model concepts for solid and liquid waste management in urban India [3 & 4]. A lot of these collaborations came into conception due to an openness to listen, contribute and persevere.

Through our few successes and many failures, we have learned that money only serves as a hygiene factor to guide sustenance but it cannot be the underlying vision you work for. The key questions (with regard to your career) to ask are whether you’re doing work that challenges you and whether it fulfills you. The late Harvard professor Clayton Christensen points this out as a key highlight in his work ‘How Will You Measure Your Life’ (Christensen, Allworth, & Dillon, 2012).

In Vivir’s case, this meant being open to new ideas from our peers who all have different interests while merging them with our own ideas. A balance of something old, something new and something borrowed seems to serve well not only as a good luck charm for wedding days.

While it is easy to point out learnings in hindsight, applying those learnings aren’t always easy. As research suggests, the marginal cost of doing something wrong just this once always seems alluringly low (Christensen, Allworth, & Dillon, 2012). Though it seems clear to you that a certain approach won’t work, but due to the difficult circumstances at that point in time, you may settle for an okay compromise. A wrong action pulls you in, because you do not see the full cost of that compromise. This isn’t something easily known to the everyday employee of a prosperous firm, but it needs to be learnt experientially while getting your hands dirty with real-time experience while handling all aspects of a business. An example of such a compromise could be, to not seek perfection for your response to a client’s request. Another example could entail being too fixated on pre-set targets without being more aware of real time opportunities emerging before you.

When you’re building a professional collective that offers a creative escape to its members, it also should be backed by a system of accountability. If this is the case, the work will speak for itself. At Vivir, we are striving to achieve this by building a truly (not merely aspirational) multi-disciplinary culture of being open to ideas – of infrastructure development – centered on efficiency as well as social values. Most young professionals with the characteristic fire in their bellies - at the early career stage - would relate with how frustration (for not being heard), anxiety (to express) and boredom (for lack of relatability to a manager’s goals) consciously takes over what was once a promising mind-space brimming with potential.

While sustainability is a defining feature to achieve infrastructure development, in the times we reside in, it is being pursued in narrow silos with each tribe of practitioners too focused on their brand of social, economic or ecological sustainability, rather than integrating all of the above. As such, through our experience, we are learning that being patient, and having a constant mindset for learning new perspectives, are cornerstones for building a responsible practice in the development sector. This would include being sensitive to social, economic and ecological considerations while not losing the creative drive of openness.

References

1. Project Title: Advisory support to GIWA (Global Interfaith WASH Alliance) towards developing a technology compendium for sustainable sanitation solutions
2. Project Title: Advisory support to WaterAID India for undertaking a Rural FSM Scoping Study in Chittoor district of Andhra Pradesh
3. Project Innovation Concept within the IHUWASH Accelerator Program (coordinated by the National Institute of Urban Affairs) featured in the "Compendium of Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) Innovations in India”
4. Vivir Consultancy's concept idea SATTVA, was submitted at the InkWASH summit amongst the select list of 'Game changing ideas'.
5. Christensen, C., Allworth, J., & Dillon, K. (2012). How Will You Measure Your Life? Boston: Harper Business.
6. Herzberg, F. (1987). One More Time: How Do You Motivate Employees? Harvard Business Review, 5-16.
7. Paravanethu, L., Satish, S., Patil, D., & Devangan, K. K. (2021, January 25). Interview for Article titled "Why did I Join Vivir...?". (A. Y. Kumar, Interviewer)