“The ultimate purpose of life, mind, and human striving: to deploy energy and information to fight back the tide of entropy (disorder) and carve out refuges of beneficial order.” — Steven Pinker

Organisms most likely to survive are often those with the most clever control of entropy (disorder) generation. Well, we have finite energy and that finite energy is split into doing so many things. Things that are very important to things that could have been avoided.

The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of any isolated system will always increase over time. Most energy is spent battling the ever-increasing Entropy- the chaos, disturbance, noise, and uncertainty- engulfing you? If most energy is spent or wasted in battling entropy, chaos, or reducing noise where would you have the energy to create something enduring and worthwhile. So it’s worthwhile to look at reducing entropy.

This entropy drives a myopic Culture of impatience, impermanence, and instant gratification. It permeates deep within our culture and it is perpetuated by people, and practices. We succumb to the continuous barrage of competitive impulses and drain tremendous amounts of time, money, and effort by waging competitive wars. Rising entropy takes over and we eventually tap out having lost the will or the resources required to keep going.

“Illusion is inevitable without self-knowledge.” J. Krishnamurti

Another big reason for entropy is we are obsessed with (excessive)competitive benchmarks or fickle variables outside of them contrary to these, brands that are built on their Positive Valence- the authentic, inherent, and positively inspiring strengths that are fundamental to your DNA; Brands that embody what humans Value (9values) and represent a Culture that your Customers would proudly imbibe; Brands that serve a larger, impelling Purpose, have unprecedented customer loyalty and spend less on competitive frenzy. These brands are less entropic and are positive…..Over time they are far more successful and profitable….

Brands who shift their focus from frenzy or correction to creation, would enhance life, and not compete to add to the chaos that exists; saving them millions of dollars spent on arresting migration and competing. Brands that deliver a strong triple bottom line of people, planet, and subject-oriented products, are the Brands that command the deepest level of trust, and the highest order of loyalty.

Sounds exciting, doesn’t it? It all starts with pressing pause and distancing yourself from the Entropy. It requires you to shift your focus from the uncontrollable variables outside to the enduring constants within; To relook and redefine your brand thoroughly from the inside out.

(This Perspective was originally published on October 20, 2021 by Shekhar Badve on LinkedIn)

Former president Florentino Perez built Real Madrid’s football team based on the “Galacticos strategy” (Spanish for galactic, referring to superstars) where he focused on acquiring superstars and marketing the franchise. Despite having an alluring squad, Casillas, Roberto Carlos, David Beckham, Zinedine Zidane, Luis Figo, Raul, and Ronaldo, Real Madrid failed to deliver.

An absolutely underwhelming and quite frankly embarrassing failure that turned out to be. Sure they won some but that was the bare minimum that those players should have achieved and that’s pretty much what they achieved. How on earth did it happen? Despite all the quality and credentials they had, they could never truly deliver success. Whether this was because of club dynamics or the players couldn’t emerge out of failures, or simply the fact that the players were extremely over-rated and never had the mindset to win in a team, the question still remains to be explored.

Similarly at the heart of many organisations today there are star teams or individuals who are not able to deliver. This is a deeper problem that blocks organisations from transforming and innovating. In today’s volatile business environment and supersonic technological advancements, transformation and innovation become key to deliver shareholder value and achieve customer satisfaction. To overcome challenges posed by volatility, ambiguity, and prolonged uncertainty an organisation requires teams and processes that are formed through a continuous realignment of resources and capabilities.

Transformation and innovation-capable teams are made up of people who are not only high performers but have an inherent balance of skills, attitudes, and mindsets that allow them to sustain orientation, focus, agility, and optimism in the face of ambiguity and uncertainty for prolonged periods of time. Unfortunately, not all top-performing and academically brilliant team members are equipped.

In 1991, Danish politician and social worker Uffe Elbæk took out a $100,000 personal loan to open an unusual business school called Kaospilot. The vision of the business school was to develop a new skill set in students for navigating uncertain problems. He subsequently saw the opportunity to teach these skills to business leaders who needed to do the same. Chaos pilots are needed on a transformative and innovative team to wade through uncertain waters for prolonged periods of time.

Chaos pilots are people who can creatively lead a project through ambiguity and uncertainty. They inherently have the capability, but most importantly they also have other critical skills, such as the ability to create structure and modify processes within chaos and take action. Leaders who are chaos pilots are able to drive a team forward on a project even as the environment around them is negative and fluctuating.

How to identify a Chaos Pilot:

• They are high performers
• They are people who make those around them uncomfortable by challenging the status quo
• Hold a unique balance of skill, attitude, and mindset
• Strong problem framing skills
• They have sustained focus, agility, and optimism even in prolonged uncertainty
• Comfortably lead a project through uncertainty
• They have the ability to create structure within chaos and take action
• Drive a team forward on a project in a fluctuating environment
• Divergent thinking, convergent action, and influential communication
• Skilled at implementation and advanced technologies
• Future-oriented and with real-world project experience
• They are often seen posing “why” questions

(This Perspective was originally published on September 9, 2021 by Shekhar Badve on LinkedIn)

Consider, for example, ceiling fans — most often, surface level or incorrect questions will lead to an object-oriented design of it and will end up in aesthetic modification or some bit of functional correction. One would never work upon its subject — to reduce the body core temperature (and not to reduce the temperature of the room or to throw air around). Some AC manufacturers are working on improving buildings rather than improving their AC’s, Chinese Taipei Government and Indore Municipal Corporation dramatically reduced their waste and waste management problem, Dyson changed the way fans and vacuum cleaners could be, reverse time counters on traffic signals reduced our anxiety and many accidents. These are a few examples of how the right questions could lead to simple and effective innovations.

In a rapidly changing world, with dynamic requirements, assumptions will change, including potentially the assumptions that made a particular approach the best one, or made a performance objective the most relevant. Asking the right question is a uniquely powerful tool for unlocking value in an organisation or an individual: It spurs learning and the exchange of ideas, it fuels innovation and performance improvement, and it can mitigate business risk by uncovering unforeseen pitfalls and hazards. The right question takes you close to the root or the core or the subject of the challenge or problem. If you ask fundamental subject-oriented questions numerous possibilities and opportunities will open up for breakthrough innovation.

The right question helps you break out of incremental tendencies. Incrementalism makes us believe we are doing OK, but it can obscure the real danger of falling ever further behind more rapidly advancing alternatives and expectations. But it’s one thing to understand that incremental efforts are not enough and another to let go of running a little harder on the business-as-usual treadmill and to really look for what might make the treadmill obsolete. Framing the right question can break the barrier, pop the bubble of complacency, push you to reconsider the rules of the game. A right question has the power to make you step back and ask: Why is this product or service needed? Why does our organisation exist? Is this what we should be doing? What else is possible? Are the organisations shared outcomes still the most relevant and important thing you should be focused on?

The right question is:

• Deep and authentic: Powerful questions should expose what you don’t yet know
• Compelling: A powerful question should pull people out of an incremental mindset, refocusing how to achieve an entirely new level of impact
• Wide and open-ended: Instead of inspiring a single, definitive answer, the right question should open things up
• Purposeful and focused: A right question should start with a WHY and then lead to What and How question/s
• Verb-based and actionable. The right question should be based on deep insight and should push you to take action

Examples of right questions:

• Why do we need a particular appliance or what purpose does it really serve? (see the ceiling fan example above)
• Why do we want to make our trains even faster? (is reaching early psychological or notional. Can we deal with this question differently)
• How do we grow higher-quality food in a future with half the water supply?
• Why do people jump traffic signals which lead to chaos and accidents?
• Why do people waste and litter and how do solve waste management problems?
• How can we use technology to see the impact of our decisions and make better ones?

The right question would get you closer to the root of the problem, reduce entropy, and shed light on new approaches to consider that weren’t necessarily the original, “assumed” problem. Right questions have the power to transport us to unimagined scenarios and transform the way we see reality. When people see things from a new perspective, innovation happens.

So the next time you are designing a pen, ask yourself the right question, if you are designing merely an object (pen), or you’re designing for its subject (communication). What sort of a pen would make you more romantic or what sort of pen makes you write more or communicate better.

(This Perspective was originally published on July 17, 2021 by Shekhar Badve on LinkedIn)

Patterns like weather, diseases, stock-markets, migration, technological development, traffic flow, and many others follow the self-similarity of fractals at different scales.

“Miracles happen, not in opposition to Nature, but in opposition to what we know of Nature”. — St. Augustine

Chaos (entropy) describes a system that has apparent randomness but, when more closely observed, the order is seen. Fractals are objects in which the same patterns occur again and again at different scales and sizes. In a perfect mathematical fractal — such as the famous Mandelbrot set, this “self-similarity” goes infinitely deep: each pattern is made up of smaller copies of itself, and those smaller copies are made up of smaller copies again, forever. Many natural phenomena are fractal to some degree.

The chaos and irregularity of the world — Mandelbrot referred to it as “roughness” — is something to be celebrated. It would be a shame if clouds really were spheres and mountain cones. Look closely at a fractal, and you will find that the complexity is still present at a smaller scale. A small cloud is strikingly similar to the whole thing. A pine tree is composed of branches that are composed of branches — which in turn are composed of branches.

A tiny sand dune or a puddle in a mountain track has the same shapes as a huge sand dune and a lake in a mountain gully. This “self-similarity” at different scales is a defining characteristic of fractals. Fractal geometry can also provide a way to understand complexity in “systems” as well as just in shapes. The timing and sizes of earthquakes and the variation in a person’s heartbeat and the prevalence of diseases are just three cases in which fractal geometry can describe the unpredictable.

“The ultimate purpose of life, mind, and human striving: to deploy energy and information to fight back the tide of entropy and carve out refuges of beneficial order.”— Steven Pinker

The disorder is not a mistake or a curse; it is our default. Order is always artificial and temporary. An autopoietic system is the regeneration of components within a boundary of its own making. We have to expend a lot of energy to keep things in an ordered state. What if the disordered state is by design or the desired goal or part of the plan. The energy needed to remain in a disordered state will be very less. Low entropy or complexity brings boredom and complacency and high entropy brings confusion and despair. Optimum entropy brings pleasantness, positivity, and surprise.

Higher degree of predictability leads to rigid, inflexible thinking associated with repetitive and ruminative disorders such as depression, addictions, and OCD. And while at the other end of the spectrum, too much entropy is associated with a psychotic detachment from reality. We recognise life as that is made by certain chemicals, which have come together. May it is plants, animals, humans, or bacteria they are the same basic chemicals. The question then is, are there any other chemical combinations that we don’t recognise as life…(and maybe they don’t recognise us as life)

The equilibrium in nature is dynamic. “What else, when chaos draws all forces inward to shape a single leaf” Conrad Aiken

Instead of seeing entropy as a form of destruction (things falling apart) it to be seen as a state of active play. Can collapse or chaos/ disturbance be used for building the future? How definitions limit us, chaos or collapse is seen as negative but can be used for building the future making it positive. What if systems expend part of themselves to sustain and rest is consumed in disorder (entropy) or the rest collapses to form a preplanned or designed disorder that is essential for the future or is future-ready.

Imagine some part of the home items or furniture collapses due to entropy to become something, which is a future need or can be usable later. Collapse due to entropy becomes something useful later. This is how the natural system is. Something dies and becomes food or ingredients, a source of energy for someone else.

By studying extremes and self-similarities we can learn which system and features are more sensitive to changes so that we can apply this knowledge to build new systems that are more resilient and symbiotic.

(This Perspective was originally published on June 12, 2021 by Shekhar Badve on LinkedIn)

Are we creating devices those trigger boredom and a society that is bored?

Boredom is such a large part of day-to-day existence the word was first seen in Charles Dickens’ Bleak House in 1852. But because of its prevalence in our day-to-day lives, thinkers and scientists had been slow to explore this. Boredom is a much bigger problem than suffering. Meta-systems and products that were designed to deal with suffering are not especially effective at dealing with boredom.

In a personal survey conducted of close family members, friends, and colleagues I found boredom appeared even more frequently in their responses than “loneliness” or “lack of fresh air,” and trailed by “lack of freedom”. Multiply that experience across billions of people, and you’ll get a sense of how much boredom the world is facing right now. Of all the difficulties and tragedies we faced it sounds absurd to say that we’re bored in a pandemic but the stress of this moment changes our ability to pay attention. Very few people recognise that we can’t solve boredom just by having the right podcasts, must-read books, blockbuster movies, puzzles, or baking sets to keep you busy. Boredom is a completely natural reaction to not being meaningfully engaged in the world.

Apart from the pandemic-induced boredom, there is boredom because life is easy. There is boredom because achievement is difficult without effort, and effort is too much trouble. We are now overstimulated — easy access to almost infinite entertainment options is feeding boredom rather than discouraging it. Boredom a form of entropy, it turns out, can be a dangerous and disruptive state of mind that damages your health — and even cuts years off your lifespan. As designers, are we creating devices those trigger boredom and a society that is bored? It’s a question worth pondering over and debating.

There are multiple opportunities to deal with boredom only if we start with a clean slate. But we should be cautious about looking for an immediate solution or an escape. Before we set out to eliminate boredom let’s ask what it is trying to tell us. Most objects that are designed and demanded simply offer instant gratification may it be a smartphone or tablet or an entertainment solution or service, which are counter-productive, the more entertained we are, the more entertainment we need to feel satisfied.

The more we fill our world with fast-moving, high-intensity time-filling devices, ever-changing stimulation, and synthetic second-hand excitement, the more we get used to that and the less tolerant we become of lower levels. We crave more time. However, when we have free time, we don’t know what to do with it. It’s like a hedonic treadmill nothing seems exciting enough to deserve our valuable time. We end up doing nothing and get bored.

Instead, it would be wiser for designers to question whether there are more serious, long-term issues that are causing us to feel disengaged. John Eastwood, director of the Boredom Lab at York University believes that boredom is a ‘crisis of meaning.’ It invites us to reflect on how we engage with the world. “Priming people to feel their lives have a greater purpose and meaning tends to make them less bored,” says Eastwood. As we enter the post-pandemic era, it would be worthwhile to re-evaluate the purpose and design approaches towards boredom-killing devices or services and to rethink what we actually mean when we say we are bored.

(This Perspective was originally published on June 5, 2021 by Shekhar Badve on LinkedIn)

As circumstances change, the challenges we face vary in severity, proportion and impact. But haven’t humans always transcended their limitations! We always aspire to improve and become better. Sometimes, however, we get too caught up in the pathways already paved. Just like the army ants, who keep following each other in a continuous loop when they lose their pheromone track (only to die of exhaustion!), we circle the endless loop of set paradigms.

Although invisible, a magnetic field is a force that pulls on ferromagnetic materials and attracts or repels other magnets. And it emerges out of the internal composition of magnets. Likewise, our behaviour and actions too emerge out of who we are from within, what we value inherently. Every day, we invest our energy in trying to align ourselves to our surroundings. But in doing so, we lose self-congruence. When our behaviour and actions do not align with our core values, we lose harmony. And such an increase in our internal disturbance is just like the Entropy inside a magnet that reduces its magnetism.

It is just like the entropy that consumes the Himalayan Musk Deer. Excited by the ravishing odour of Musk, the Deer frisks about anxiously sniffing under trees, and searching everywhere to find the source of the fragrance. Unable to find the source, he grows very restless and angry. And in this frenzy, he ends up plunging to death by jumping off the high Himalayan cliffs. If only the Deer could touch his nostrils to his own navel, he would have found the cherished Musk and saved himself from his painful death!

Our Positive Valence is our core building block that is intrinsic, inherent, authentic and positively inspiring to us. It is the essence, the fundamental quality that the world would miss in our absence. It is that which enables the magnetic field for a magnet. It is that which delivers musk to the Himalayan Deer.

But we people have been hard-wired to set our reference points outside of us, even when we are deciding for ourselves. All our external reference points- be it our families, friends, professional colleagues, or even the larger socio-cultural context- are fickle variables beyond our control.

This lack of self-congruence is where our deepest insecurities stem from. It is the principal source of the internal Entropy that we are perpetually consumed by. And there is external Entropy as well- the way external forces of heat and damage hamper a magnet’s potential of creating a strong magnetic field, our potential is hampered by the many self-consuming and powerful influences surrounding us. We have to distance ourselves from this Entropy to discover our Positive Valence and maximise its potential towards creating enduring relationships and inspiring positive action.

(This Perspective was originally published on May 20, 2021 by Shekhar Badve on LinkedIn)

The intention of this article is to present questions that would provoke every policy or decision-maker or an inventor or a designer, or every thinking person. These are my points of view, those could be used to explore to improve situations governing our cities, planet, our societies, our environment, and our ambiguous future. As most of our methods and systems have failed or at times create more challenges than the ones we already have I feel these approaches would be thought starters to understand and find solutions in a non-typical way.

Let’s start with some basics of what is entropy and how can we use this knowledge to create change. Entropy has been associated with chaos, disorder, or disturbance, but it is much more than only chaos or disturbance (another topic for another time). The reason a deck of cards doesn’t reorganise itself when you drop it is because it’s naturally easier for it to remain unordered. Think about the energy that it takes to arrange cards by value and suit (scale it to our cities, society, and the planet, and one understands the gravity of our situation). It takes a lot of energy to reduce entropy or maintain equilibrium. A simple example to describe entropy is that it makes a hot cup of tea go cold, but unfortunately, there is no freeway to getting this lost heat (energy) back and reuse it. Energy is transferred from the hot cup to the surrounding air, the table on which the cup is kept and to your hands, in this process the energy of the hot cup is lost to the surrounding system, thus increasing the entropy of the surrounding system.

Energy is the ability to do work (or to cause change). Energy plays a crucial role in ordering and maintaining complex systems. Energy plays an essential role in cultural systems such as a city’s inward flow of food and resources amidst its outward flow of products and wastes; energy is a key ingredient in today’s economy, technology, and civilisation.

Technological advancement is a prime feature of cultural evolution occurring on Earth today. Technology decreases entropy locally by artificially manufacturing complex products, at the cost of expending energy and increased entropy in the larger environment of raw materials used to make those goods. Throughout the past few centuries, people chose shorter travel times, lower transportation costs, and heavier shipping loads; steam-powered iron ships replaced wind-powered boats, while jumbo jets have superseded them all. Likewise, horses and mules were eliminated by steam and eventually by gasoline engines. Typewriters, slide rules, air-conditioners, refrigerators, and computers among many other innovative inventions, were selected under the pressure of customer demand and commercial profit, often replaced initially by luxuries that eventually became necessities.

Either way, energy remains the driver, and with accelerated pace — a clear trend shows that engineering improvement and customer selection over generations of products made machines more intricate and efficient, yet more complex. The bottom line is that more energy is expended to drive those newer improvements. However, all of this progress, which has decidedly bettered the quality of human life as measured by health, education, and welfare, inevitably came — and continues to come — at the expense of greatly increased demand for more energy — to what end we cannot be certain. It is a vicious circle!

Two aspects to keep in mind one, energy is always conserved but it is transferred and the second, in any process entropy always increases. To reduce entropy we need to expend energy, that too continuously, so the question is, do we have an unlimited supply of energy and the answer, of course, is no. It takes very little intelligence to understand why we need to conserve energy and reduce complexity. Let me broaden the meaning of energy; it is not only the electrical or the mechanical or thermal or potential energy but energy available in the form of human effort, time, or money.

So how do we reduce complexity and entropy? Can the new advancements be designed with complexity and entropy reduction as their primary criteria? What should design be looking at as a guiding light? Shouldn’t we move away from form follows function to purpose and harmony? Shouldn’t systems design be our priority? Are our priorities set right? So what are the sources of low entropy from where we can draw energy? Can they be planted in our existing systems? How can we tap into free sources of low entropies? What’s making our entropies increase? How can we barter the currency of low entropy for carrying out our life? What would be our future currency? What would stock markets trade? Could there be readily available complexity and entropy metrics, before any planning or design exercise starts! Can’t we slow down, at least in some aspects of life?

Shouldn’t we be applying our limited energies to things that result in the betterment of society, or humanity, or the planet? Let’s think, at least!

(This Perspective was originally published on May 19, 2021 by Shekhar Badve on LinkedIn)

It is high time we understand micro and macro entropies, rethink and reimagine.

I was amazed to see many CEOs going bonkers over the Jugaad model, citing India’s way of innovating and quick fixing everything. Some have written best-sellers. As many praised Jugaad as India’s contribution to innovation and frugal engineering, we took it as an endorsement and much-deserved world recognition, something original from India. The reality is, India has romanticised a totally wrong and devastating casual fix-it-all approach and use it anywhere attitude instead of a far systematic planning and problem-solving method. Unfortunately, we take pride in Jugaad and glorify the person who got things by doing Jugaad.

Jugaad at best can be a very small step in a larger innovation or problem-solving process. It can be a shortcut, that too not always, to get out of a sticky situation but we have taken it to the next level; it has become our nations’ standard operating procedure. Government to bureaucrats, to policymakers, to every decision-maker to every citizen of our country swears by Jugaad. Jugaad has totally infested our nation, made us hollow from inside.

The Covid pandemic has shattered our glorification. Several Indians have not died purely because of Covid but they died of our Jugaad attitude. “Dekha jayega jab hoga tab” why fix it if it’s not broken method of planning and total lack of foresight of our political leadership and bureaucracy could not provide patients with oxygen supply, ICU beds, life-saving ventilators, and crucial medicines. The sad stories of people begging for oxygen are innumerable and heartbreaking. These stories will be a permanent reminder to us about our systems’ unpardonable failures. See how well we have managed the crisis become cases studies and we celebrate them. This is where it all begins. We have paid a price for this Jugaadu attitude and our rubbish planning.

‘Jugaad’ is a curse and a hindrance, it forces us away from planning anything systematically and reaching excellence. Jugaad is about, imperfection is OK as long as the job is done. Jugaad is an attitude, that will neither make us self-reliant nor allow us to be good at anything. Jugaad cannot be celebrated!

What’s the point of celebrating how well we have managed to come out of the crisis if in the first place the crisis could have been totally avoided. If India in March 2020 went through the most severe lockdown ever, what led to this level of stupid complacency in January 2021. It was evident and seen across the world that we would be hit by a big and an even deadlier second wave. World statistics were showing a disaster in the waiting. It doesn’t take much intelligence to plan and organise ourselves well in advance.

Why crucial medications were not produced in bulk and kept ready? Why weren’t oxygen plants ready and a Mumbai model planned well in advance? Why were jumbo Covid centres dismantled? Why didn’t we place orders with other foreign vaccine manufacturers? Why were vaccination camps not organised at mass levels after the first wave? Why were private sector hospitals not engaged from the very beginning as part of vaccine distribution? Why were super spreader events allowed? Why does the Supreme Court have to intervene in every possible critical issue in this country? The list of severe lack of systems planning and forecasting issues is endless.

Jugaad hasn’t worked it is in fact destroying us: India is gasping for breath, people helplessly are on the streets looking for medicines and queuing up outside hospitals for ICU beds while patients die waiting for one. India needs to re-think the whole game from a systems design perspective by understanding entropies in almost every aspect of public interest: health, security, delivery of public services, and natural disasters. We cannot plan to avoid and handle emergencies with Jugaad and ad hoc decision-making.

Our post-pandemic government/s will need a totally new avatar at two levels: One at systems planning and design level; envisioning, understanding micro and macro entropies, forecasting, planning, and designing systems for implementation. Secondly, a government that is performance-driven, agile, and quick at decision making. The world has changed around us and all the fatal flaws are exposed this is the time to rethink and redesign.

Let’s think and change!

(This Perspective was originally published on May 12, 2021 by Shekhar Badve on LinkedIn)

“Religion is the opium of the world” ~ Karl Marx

Religious fanaticism is a mega scheme that produces pointless work. As a result, it wastes energy, time, money and generates material destruction, mental agony, and depreciates human life, these are all variations of Entropy. This phenomenon has existed throughout the centuries and continues to grow in one form or another. J.K. Rowling had said it wonderfully “The trouble is, humans do have a knack of choosing precisely those things that are worst for them.”

There is a revived effort of brainwashing by the clergy around the world to attract and convert more faithful with all kinds of dogmatic beliefs and rewards. The value of human life is thus reduced by this promise of sanctitude. For the major part of human history, religion and economics have been the two most powerful stories which almost all of us believed and have stood for. We have fought numerous wars and killed millions to behold these fictitious ideas. Masses are drawn to such hysteria under the need for association or a strong fear of losing out. Buddhism, Jainism, and a few more religions are an exception to such a craze.

Entropy is the energy wasted when any work is performed. Entropy is also defined as the level of disturbance or destruction which irreversibly reduces the quality of the environment and leads to a chaotic situation. Entropy is seen in an ecosystem, the biological world of a living organism, even the politics, and religions in a societal system. Entropy is based on a stochastic model with uncertain outcomes, which aptly describes the complexity of our world today.

Is there a possible cure for the problem? Should we be afraid of entropy? Should we hope that a supernatural deity will save our world? Is there an alternate approach?

Amongst other possibilities, one possibility in an era of turbulence and uncertainty is interfaith action that may offer an important antidote to our precarious situation. Conscious spread of values of empathy, compassion, forgiveness, and altruism are needed today more than ever.

Another approach is to create a parallel story alongside religion and economics to make people and nations understand the priority and importance of harmony. We need to create and propagate an equal or more powerful story of harmony if we are looking forward to overcoming these challenges and have a better tomorrow. To conserve energy, and achieve both short-term and long-term benefits we need to start looking at every policy, decision, tool, framework, and method, including design and technologies from the lens of harmony.

In today’s spiraling polarisation not only towards religious sentiments but overt capitalism, if we are to survive and thrive, harmony should be the focal point of every aspect of our society.

Reduction in entropy and utilising our energies for harmony is the hope for our survival and betterment.

(This Perspective was originally published on May 5, 2021 by Shekhar Badve on LinkedIn)