While you are reading this article I hope you are safe, healthy and are doing everything to keep yourself happy and calm in these times of COVID-19 that has never been seen before.
These are difficult times for all of us not just as an individual but also for communities, governments, businesses and environment where we have been tested on our capabilities to emerge stronger than ever before. All said and done, these are ‘right’ things to say to motivate someone and keep the positivity going, but I know that it is not as easy as it sounds. It is very hard to acknowledge, adjust and then act on the sudden shift that has happened in all of our lives to find the new normal.
Such times of sudden crisis, whether it may be the COVID-19 pandemic, natural disasters or even sudden political changes happening around the world, call for rapid, contextual and effective problem solving with Human-Centered Design. But it is not always possible to be ready for such a shift that is completely unprecedented, especially for businesses and governments. Our team at Xeno Co-lab has always been an advocate of Jugaad as a mindset to be creative in the most constrained situations. We believe that it is more necessary than ever to adopt the Jugaad mindset in these times.
For those of you who don’t know what a Jugaad mindset is — it is a flexible approach to problem-solving that uses limited resources in an innovative way as defined by the Oxford Dictionary. It is a colloquial Hindi word which can be loosely translated as ‘a hack’ in English. Even though Jugaad as a concept is very specific to India but there are parallel concepts in other parts of the world like Gambiara in Brazil. The mindset was born out of the need of creating innovative solutions with the available resources in resource constrained & volatile situations like limited money, material or access to infrastructure. The current crisis with COVID-19 can be exactly defined as a resource constrained environment and volatile situation wherein we are not in control of a lot of factors. Applying Jugaad mindset to our challenges and needs might just be a solution to adapting quickly to this change and sustain for longer.
Jugaad as a mindset can be encapsulated in three main traits — a. being resilient & flexible to the surrounding changes, b. being resourceful in finding solutions from the available, accessible resources and c. being gutsy by not getting discouraged with adversity but using it as an opportunity like a rebel change-maker. These traits are applicable and useful for both, individuals and businesses.
A. Resilience & flexibility to cope-up with the sudden changes
The current health crisis is having a great impact on individuals, markets, economies and even the global supply chains. This unexpected change is making situations uncertain worldwide like never before. It is time for businesses to become more flexible and adaptable, both internally and externally, by adopting rapid processes and agile teams. By building resilience into the organisational culture, companies can be ready to compete in today’s crisis and also adapt to stay relevant for such situations in the future.
The banking industry is adopting rapid changes in their operations in order to make essential services available to their customers during the country-wide lockdown in India. Considering banking is an urgent and essential service that needs to be accessible to all and at all times, they have had to adapt to this lockdown more rapidly than others. ICICI Bank has now launched a banking service on WhatsApp to enable its customers to access banking needs from their home. Customers can check their savings account balance, last three transactions, get details of pre-approved instant loan offers etc. with ICICI WhatsApp banking services. Apart from this, they can also get details of three ICICI Bank ATMs and branches in their vicinity.
Irrespective of whether these changes will be adopted permanently into their operations, it is important to understand how and why businesses need to be agile in such times to reconfigure themselves during such unprecedented crisis.
B. Resourcefulness in finding rapid, creative solutions
Being resourceful is something that all of us can completely empathise with at this point, since we all are being extremely creative in terms of having to make do with whatever supplies we have available at home. May it be, finding interesting recipes to cook with the ingredients that you have available at home or making face masks at home with the available supplies.
Being resourceful and creative is one of the key elements of Jugaad as it is always born out of resource constrained situations. But this is not just a trait for us as individuals but also for companies and businesses to adopt to the sudden change that might affect their access to money/materials/manpower etc. We see this happening on food & grocery delivery platforms where Swiggy and Zomato are helping out Grofers to deliver their grocery orders by sharing delivery personnels to overcome the shortage of delivery staff. Unlike before, these parallel industry competitors are now sharing resources to keep their operations functional and relevant. Along with sharing resources, it is also important to reimagine the function or role of the existing resources. According to Retail Association of India, around 25% of the staff of brick-and-mortar stores turned up for delivery and backend work. Along with this, we also saw Indian Railways repurposing the trains coaches as isolation wards and The Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation (KSRTC) is converting its old buses into mobile sanitiser buses to disinfect people in public places.
The key takeaway here is to evaluate the available resources and find creative ways of utilising them by sharing, repurposing, reusing and recycling by pushing ourselves to consider the entire lifecycle of a product/service.
C. Being gutsy to fight the adversity
This is one of the most powerful trait to initiate change and yet may be considered risky or scary by many, when we think of adopting Jugaad mindset within our organisation or at an individual level. But the core intention here is to take a risk in creating something and putting it out there to test sooner than later without waiting for a final & refined solution. Similar to the iterative process, that we follow in Human-Centered Design, it is important to create something rapidly by taking measured risks and trying it out to with an intention to refine it further. This helps in mitigating risks and loss at a large scale.
We can call Pankaj Gupta, the founder of a Singapore-based startup; one of such gutsy Jugaad innovators in the times of COVID-19. He, along with his 200 volunteers, designed, built and donated more than 10,000 four-way ventilator splitters for hospitals battling COVID-19. Ventilators usually run at 20%–30% capacity as they can push 2,000 ml of oxygen per minute into the lungs of a 280 kg body (patients usually do not weigh this much). Hence, they realised that a splitter can distribute oxygen to four patients from one ventilator, making it a “cost-efficient, scalable and quick” method.
By being resourceful, Pankaj took the first gutsy step to testing and creating an efficient solution and without waiting for the situation to get better to create a refined or a ‘good-looking’ solution. During such crisis, it becomes necessary to take a step forward in making positive change without getting discouraged by the adversity or waiting for the situation to run it’s natural course.
But Jugaad mindset is relevant for businesses even beyond this pandemic. It is an everyday innovation mindset to build a sustainable future. Through this mindset not only can we cope with this sudden crisis but also help in building a sustainable future and complement the Circular Design mindset in the long run. This mindset could also help us to rapidly adapt to volatile political shifts, which we have been witnessing quite often globally, rapid technological advancements, which are only increasing day by day or even the global environmental crisis which is an extremely important aspect for us to prioritise as we build our future.
