What makes ordinary human beings achieve the extraordinary?

There is no easily discernible pattern to the names listed above. But look closely and a shape starts emerging. Some are members of the Chandrayaan 3 team, and others are from the Indian cricket team that won the World Cup in 1983.

These are both teams that achieved something for the first time in India’s history. Crucially both did it despite the odds stacked against them.

What makes ordinary human beings achieve the extraordinary?

Some argue that you have to be born an exceptional individual to do great things. Take for instance, an Albert Einstein or a Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, or a Martin Luther King. You could equally easily argue the other way too. There was little to predict that a clerk in the Swiss Patent Office, a barrister in South Africa, and a pastor in the US would rearrange the way the world saw itself.

According to an RTI application reply less than 2% of Isro staff is from IITs or NITs, the commonly accepted signifiers of academic potential and brilliance in India. Even though many in Isro do not have the hefty resume of a Nandan Nilekani, a Pradeep Sindhu, or a Gururaj Deshpandey, this remarkable organisation has, over the last 50 years, delivered a string of extraordinary achievements. These are the kind of achievements that put Indian science and engineering on the world map.

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So what explains the excellence achieved by the brilliance of these scientists?

All for one and one for all

The place to begin is ‘Isro culture’. According to Isro: “Anyone, irrespective of organisational hierarchy, can put forth a technical argument that warrants a detailed discussion before proceeding further. No member of the team, including its leader, is greater than the team.

Team leaders cannot and need not be an expert in all the disciplines, but the leader has to ensure to bring the best in each. Anyone who notices an anomaly, even if the person noticing it is directly responsible for it, brings it to the notice of the teams. Critical thinking is highly appreciated.

Discussions and remedies need not demand formal meetings; they can happen over tea or lunch tables.”

This is not the culture organisations in India traditionally, certainly not for government organisations. Do not say flat hierarchy because that is akin to taking the butter out of paneer butter masala. What's the point of it all then?

What Isro has done over the years is to make sure that their “moonshots” are owned by the entire organisation. Not just a few rocket scientists. Women scientists are no “hidden figures” here. More than 100 women worked on Chandrayaan 3 project alone. If anything, this can only be a hive-mind, a collective intelligence squaring equations an individual synapse can barely solve.

No fear of failure

Behavioural psychologists often talk about “loss aversion” - a small probability of failure deters from many taking up an activity even though the chances of success might be high.

In other words, a small chance of pain deters us more than the possibility of great pleasure when considering an action. Isro in its initial days saw its fair share of failures. Writing in the Business Standard, journalist Shine Jacob quotes a former Isro scientist as saying: “When the SLV (1979) mission failed and landed in the sea, they called it the ‘Sea Landing Vehicle’. When ASLV (Augmented Satellite Launch Vehicle) failed, they called it the ‘Always Sea Landing Vehicle’. The media constantly criticised and drew cartoons about our failures until the 1990s.”

From the start, the leadership of Isro would take the blame for failure, while giving the credit of success to the team. This has been a key pillar of organisational culture at Isro from Vikram Sarabhai, to MGK Menon, to Satish Dhawan, to UR Rao, to K Kasturirangan, to G Madhavan Nair, to K Radhakrishnan, to Shailesh Nayak, to AS Kiran Kumar, to K Sivan, and till S Somanath. This has built immense resilience to the organisation.

Isro, simply put, doesn’t get bogged down by loss aversion.

Institutional memory

Congress MP Shashi Tharoor was among those who noticed that many of the top brass of Isro haven’t come out of the top-rung engineering institutes.

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What Tharoor got right is the “unsung”, unfancied nature of many of these engineering colleges. TKM Engineering College in Kollam, Isro chairman S Somanath’s alma mater, is among the second rung of engineering colleges even within Kerala, with College of Engineering, Thirvananthapuram or CUSAT in Kochi attracting the cream of the crop from the state engineering entrance exams over the years.

So what makes them thrive in the environment at Isro?

The age old debate of people versus processes matter here. Isro is among the few government organisations with a well-rounded systemic-memory, with an emphasis on the collective.

An engineer who retired from Isro a few years back says that among Isro’s strengths is the ability to assimilate people around a common mission. He adds that this is because of the sharp nature of what Isro sets out to achieve. “Missions and objectives are well defined, and working is about delivering to that objective,” he says.

In other words, it is the collective that pushes the individual to be extraordinary.

Dreaming big helps. Because of the sheer heft of these mission objectives - who wouldn’t want to work on moon missions? - people tend to stick around for longer and often until retirement. That aids the creation and sustenance of these processes as well as nurtures the culture of a systemic memory, handed over from generation to generation.

There is another aspect to this. The value of this systemic memory is often underestimated, often by the system itself. With a mandatory retirement age of 60, many of the finest Isro engineers and scientists end up leaving too early. India’s private sector might be missing a trick here to learn from some extraordinary people.

While some of these people are kept for longer by Isro after being given special dispensation or for special projects or as advisors, India’s private sector has by and large failed to recognise the heft they bring along with them.

Barring few projects like TeamIndus, a privately funded moon mission which had competed for the Google Lunar XPrize until 2018, there have been few organised attempts to tap into Isro-retirees.

It would be terrific if the country could nurture Isro’s in other walks of life. Taxpayer-funded government institutions can literally reach for the moon provided if they get some of the basics right. It is never too late to change.

India winning the World Cup in 1983 created a wave of new cricketers who went on to become the best in the world. Isro’s achievements have similar potential to be a trigger for the rest of the country to redefine itself to be better