Opinion
Rice farming can inspire a collaborative work culture
Summary
- The armed forces offer lessons too. The key is to remember that work at its best is a social endeavour.
Recently, I watched a chat with Lieutenant General Kanwal Jeet Singh Dhillon in which he described an unusual situation. His wife had heard of his death, mistakenly, not once but twice in his career. When it happened the second time, he was a commanding officer in Kashmir and his family lived in a military station near Ranikhet in Uttarakhand. His wife heard the tragic news around midnight. The next morning, she knew that family members of other soldiers in the military station will come home to console her. But she was sure of one thing. As the commanding officer’s wife, she did not want to be seen as a weak or shattered woman in front of family members of her husband’s junior colleagues. So in the morning, she combed her hair, dressed up and was ready to face visitors with a dignified demeanour.
Since the covid pandemic days, there has been a lingering question in the corporate world. Is work predominantly an individual activity or is it mainly a social activity? In this context, the above-mentioned video could serve to remind the corporate world what the fundamental nature of work is.
This video is a reminder that in the Indian armed forces, work is very much a group activity. Not just fellow soldiers, but even their family members who live together in the cantonment area are an integral part of the larger work culture of the armed forces. So Lieutenant General Singh’s wife knew even at the saddest moment of her life that she too had an onerous duty to perform: she had a responsibility to keep the morale high of an entire military station.
Evolutionarily, work has never been an individual activity. For hundreds of millennia, hunting was the predominant work that humans undertook. And hunting was always done in a group with equal participation from men and women. It is interesting to note that those individuals who hunted alone or who did not join the group in its hunting expeditions were usually outcasts of that group.
Yet, one area where individualism is the norm is our educational system. This system has developed an environment in which each individual competes against others on academic performance. Success in a class-room happens when one has beaten everyone else in an examination race. Any type of collaboration while doing a project or writing an exam is termed “copying" and is considered unethical and even illegal. For the most part, collaboration and winning as a team are out-of-syllabus subjects in our educational system.
How do we transform students who have been trained to be very individualistic to become corporate citizens who act as true team players? An answer possibly arises from rice farming.
Rice cultivation needs standing water and thus complex irrigation systems that have to worked upon each year, with water to be drained, etc. One farmer’s use of water affects his neighbour’s yield. So rice farmers need to work together in collaborative ways. Rice farmers coordinate their water-use and keep track of everyone’s labour contribution. On the other hand, wheat is a crop that does not need too much water or irrigation. Wheat farmers need to share water much less. To plant and harvest it takes half as much work as rice does. How does this farming scenario impact the behaviour of respective farmers?
A test case was China, where the Yangtze River divides northern wheat growers from southern rice cultivators. Studies have found that the southern part with rice cultivation, which requires sharing of water between various farmers, evolved to be a far more collaborative society. Rice villages established strong norms of reciprocity to cope with labour demands that were twice as high as drier-land crops like wheat. On the other hand, wheat farmers in the northern part of China grew up to be more individualistic. They were found to be just as individualistic as people in Western countries, which incidentally are predominantly wheat-growing.
A crucial question faced by corporate leaders is whether they can build a successful organization with more ‘wheat farmers’ or ‘rice farmers.’ To create more rice-farmer type of corporate citizens, who have a strong tendency to collaborate, organizations need to develop an environment where cooperation among employees is essential for each person’s ultimate success. Unfortunately, during the last few years, because of the covid pandemic, workplaces have typically become less collaborative in nature.
With many employees working from home, a new individualistic narrative of work has emerged. With many an employee attending virtual meetings with their cameras switched off, forging camaraderie and emotional connections among team members has become a very difficult task. This is really hard on fresh talent that joined the corporate world in the last few years around the pandemic. They still haven’t got an opportunity to shed the ‘wheat farming’ orientation of their educational upbringing and adapt to the ‘rice farming’ demands of the corporate world.
Post the pandemic, in the manufacturing industry and service sectors, work is back as a social activity. In the knowledge industry, however, work is yet to become a fully social activity. It is high time this industry’s leaders learn a trick or two from rice farmers, and even more so from the Indian armed forces, on how to create a work culture that is truly social and appropriately collaborative.
