Jugaad, a hack, or innovative-fix, or simple workaround ? Whatever it is, jugaad is an inherent philosophy of the Indian way of life, deriving its roots in limited resources and hence frugal adaptations.
Before we go into jugaad in corporates, a little jugaad story from my dance experience 😊
I had newly joined my organization in a new role, and soon after we had this outing with the teams to this beautiful location in Lonavala. The senior girls of my team knew of my dancing skills. They wanted me to teach them a small dance that they would perform and surprise their teams. Should I say, I was more than surprised by the end of the whole of the experience? 😜
The girls promised me that they all had experience with classical dance, as my own dance skills are limited to classical and folk. So with this confidence, we went all set with dress and jewellery to the location. It was already post mid day before we reached. And then we realized it was a no-phone zone, and we were all packed away in rooms scattered around. By the time we figured who was where, and where we could practice and try gathering the girls, it was late evening. The time for learning and performing by dinner time was passing us by. Disappointing!! very much!!!!
As 3 of us were walking around dejected, we were asked to go see this location below.
Who wouldn't fall in love with this beautiful place? And then an idea struck, and my real torture started 😁
After collecting the girls into a room, I gave them one step to show me what they knew. And surprise, surprise!!! They had lost all touch with classical dancing😔 (putting it in nice way😆). Either the legs caught up with the dance, or the hands, never both!!!! Which basically meant, all the choreography I had in my head was not going to happen!!
Second round of disappointment!! (But, this set the floor for a whole 4 hours of ROFL time!!!)
But the need of the hour for me, was to make the wish a reality. For all those girls who had dreamt of this moment.
So, it was basically JUGAAD time!!!!!
A quick rework, trial and error of what steps they could do with only legs, only hands, and with both together. And me covering up for all that they couldn't.
This continued till late into the night. Followed by an early morning dress-up and gathering at this beautiful view point for a recording. (So, the team actually got to watch their managers/seniors perform multiple times for the recordings, not just once as was planned, and also got the chance to make them dance... for a change !!) You can watch the final recording with all edits and cuts, including learning time and bloopers, below.
But what's really important is the end product.
A product that not only took into account, the limitations of the dancers, but also the positive side of the beautiful location, the early morning vibes, the energy of the team around, and the different skills of videography, editing to create a beautiful video.
A video that fulfilled the wishes not momentarily, but created a moment that is going live long in the web, and also will be cherished for long in our memories.
Jugaad : Adapting for the environment
If there are promoters of applying jugaad in a corporate environment, there are also detractors. Each have their valid reasons. I try to list down a few of my points in making jugaad a possibility.
Using jugaad for the right reasons
Using jugaad as a means to quickly resolve a customer problem without much thought, or to override an existing process to make things faster would only mean a recipe for more unknown, not-thought-of issues to crop up in the system. Jugaad is not a quick fix.
Jugaad makes sense when used wisely.
Jugaad definitely is a way to overcome lack of resources, but not for lack of skills or knowledge. Building skills and knowledge should be an important factor to either overcome problem, or for enabling a new idea. The jugaad ideas that have turned successful have been heavily built on the knowledge of people. Let's take the mud refrigerators and ACs videos that you see around. This doesn't come just as a replacement to expensive electronic appliances. But it relies on the knowledge of properties of mud, and the physics behind cooling.
In my dance story above, I may seem to contradict on the skills part. But that's not true. What I did here was to utilize the non-classical dancing skills the girls had, and create a dance that was a mix of my classical and their semi-classical moves.
Jugaad could be used in software when creating a new idea, to overcome the lack of any technical enhancements or to prove how certain ideas could work and add benefit. I remember using jugaad code to prove that a certain way could increase performance of a system highly. But this was used only for proving and not as a final solution.
Jugaad could be used to go with a step-by-step incremental development of a new innovation too, as a means to get early feedback from consumers and help us understand our consumers better.
Using jugaad in the right way
A jugaadu idea can be converted to real solution provided it solves the problem for more than short term. I wouldn't use the word long-term here, as I believe a final better solution should always be the way ahead.
Jugaad should really consider affordability. The first basic principle of jugaad is frugality, make something available under lack of resources and at lesser cost. Doing most with less.
A jugaad cannot compromise on the efficiency, safety and security of the solution provided. Efficiency and cost-effectiveness of the solution are a must. If the jugaad costs more than reasonable, results in performance drops, does not last long enough, then it violates the very principle of jugaad.
Safety and security of the customer, or customer data cannot be compromised at any cost. The impact of any breach, any accident would turn out to be much more costlier to deal with than the jugaad itself. Again violating the very principles of jugaad.
Replace jugaad with real long term solution
Jugaad cannot always be a replacement for real innovation which is based on the deeper understanding of the science or technology or even art, considering my story above.
Long term solution are a must. A jugaad proof of concept needs to be replaced with the right technology or development models for ensuring long term stable and maintainable solutions.
In my story above, we did a jugaad that stayed for long. But that wouldn't help in creating more such beautiful videos, because at one point the novelty is lost, beautiful locations will not be always available, and with limited movements we will have repeated dances and videos. New, better dances can be created, only if deeper knowledge of classical dance and dancing skills are built, to create new stories, new movements and new moments !! 😊😊
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