top of page

By:

Rashmi Kulkarni

23 March 2025 at 2:58:52 pm

Making a New Normal Feel Obvious

Normal is not what’s written. Normal is what repeats. The temple bell rings at the same time every day. Not everyone prays. Not everyone even walks in. Some people don’t care at all. And yet when that bell rings, the whole neighborhood syncs. Shops open, chores move, calls pause. The bell doesn’t convince anyone. It simply creates rhythm. That’s how “normal” is built inside a legacy MSME too. Not by speeches. By repetition. Quick recap: Week 1: You inherited an equilibrium. Week 2: People...

Making a New Normal Feel Obvious

Normal is not what’s written. Normal is what repeats. The temple bell rings at the same time every day. Not everyone prays. Not everyone even walks in. Some people don’t care at all. And yet when that bell rings, the whole neighborhood syncs. Shops open, chores move, calls pause. The bell doesn’t convince anyone. It simply creates rhythm. That’s how “normal” is built inside a legacy MSME too. Not by speeches. By repetition. Quick recap: Week 1: You inherited an equilibrium. Week 2: People resist loss, not improvement. Week 3: Status quo wins when your new way is harder. Week 4 is the next problem: even when your idea is good and even when it is easy, it can still fail because people don’t move together. One team starts. Another team waits. One person follows. Another person quietly returns to the old way. So, the old normal comes back … not because your idea was wrong, but because your new normal never became normal. Which Seat? • Inherited : people expect direction, but they only shift when they see what you consistently protect. • Hired : people wait for proof “Is this just a corporate habit you’ll drop in a month?” • Promoted : people watch whether you stay consistent under pressure. Now here’s the useful idea from Thomas Schelling: a “focal point”. Don’t worry about the term. In simple words, it means: you don’t need everyone convinced. You need one clear anchor that everyone can align around. In a legacy MSME, that anchor is rarely a policy document. It’s not a rollout email. It’s a ritual. Why Rituals? These firms run on informal rules, relationships, memory, and quick calls. That flexibility keeps work moving, but it also makes change socially risky. Even supportive people hesitate because they’re thinking: “If I follow this and others don’t, I’ll look foolish.” “If I share real numbers, will I become the target?” “If I push this new flow, will I upset a senior person?” “If I do it properly, will it slow me down?” When people feel that risk, they wait. And waiting is how the status quo survives. A focal ritual breaks the waiting. It sends one clean signal: “This is real. This is how we work now.” Focal Ritual It’s a short, fixed review that repeats with the same format. For example: a weekly scoreboard review (15 minutes) a daily dispatch huddle (10 minutes) a fixed purchase-approval window (cutoff + queue) The meeting isn’t the magic. The repetition is. When it repeats without drama, it becomes believable. When it becomes believable, people start syncing to it, even the ones who were unsure. Common Mistake New leaders enter with energy and pressure: “show impact”. So they try to fix reporting, planning, quality, procurement, digitization … everything. The result is predictable. People don’t know what is truly “must follow”. So everything becomes “optional”. They do a little of each, and nothing holds. If you want change to stick, pick one focal ritual and make it sacred. Not forever. Just long enough for the bell to become the bell. Field Test Step 1 : Pick one pain area that creates daily chaos: delayed dispatch, pending purchase approvals, rework, overdue collections. Step 2 : Set the ritual: Fixed time, fixed duration (15 minutes). One scoreboard (one page, one screen). Same three questions every time: – What moved since last time? – What is stuck and why? – What decision is needed today? One owner who closes the loop (decisions + due dates). Step 3 : Protect it for 8 weeks. Don’t cancel because you’re busy. Don’t skip because a VIP came. Don’t “postpone once” because someone complained. I’ve seen a simple weekly dispatch scoreboard die this exact way. Week one was sharp. By week three, it got pushed “just this once” because someone had a client visit. Week four, it moved again for “urgent work”. After that, nobody took it seriously. The old follow-ups returned, and the leader was back to chasing people daily. The first casual cancellation tells the system: “This was a phase”. And the old normal returns fast. One Warning Don’t turn the ritual into policing. If it becomes humiliation, people will hide information. If it becomes shouting, people will stop speaking. If it becomes a lecture, people will mentally leave. Keep it calm. Keep it consistent. Keep it useful. A bell doesn’t shout. It just rings. (The author is Co-founder at PPS Consulting and a business operations advisor. She helps businesses across sectors and geographies improve execution through global best practices. She could be reached at rashmi@ppsconsulting.biz)

System Failure

The accident and the gargantuan traffic snarl along the Mumbai–Pune Expressway after a gas tanker overturned was a brutal exposure of Maharashtra’s hollowness in emergency preparedness, crisis coordination and basic administrative empathy.


After a tanker carrying highly flammable propylene gas overturned in the Khandala ghat section and a gas leak was detected, traffic was completely shut for over 24 hours as the State administration merely watched commuters in hundreds of cars, buses and trucks standing immobilised. Women, children and the elderly spent a harrowing night to remember, trapped without food, water or toilets. Ambulances and public transport were no exception. Social media, rather than the government, became the primary source of information and outrage.


The Mumbai–Pune Expressway is not an obscure rural road. It is India’s first access-controlled, six-lane concrete expressway, a tolled artery linking the country’s financial capital with one of its most important industrial cities. It passes through terrain that is notoriously accident-prone, especially for heavy vehicles descending slopes. Hazardous cargo on this stretch is routine. That makes the absence of a swift, rehearsed emergency response a damning indictment of the government’s lack of seriousness.


The response exposed a vacuum where leadership should have been. Traffic was diverted too late and too clumsily, funnelled into bottlenecks rather than dispersed upstream. Information systems failed and message boards were useless, and commuters relied on social media for scraps of truth. Relief teams were invisible.


Officials insisted they were working on a ‘war footing.’ If so, it was a war without commanders, maps or supply lines. Closing an expressway in the face of a gas leak is the easiest decision to take. Managing what happens to thousands of stranded people afterwards is the hard part and the Maharashtra government showed it has not even begun to think seriously about that obligation.


The cruelty lay not only in the delay but in the indifference. There was no single authoritative voice explaining what had happened, how long it might last, or what help was on the way. In a state that boasts of digital governance and real-time dashboards, silence reigned where communication should have been relentless.


Systems exist precisely to prevent one driver’s error from cascading into mass suffering. When hundreds are stranded overnight without water or toilets on a premium toll road, responsibility lies squarely with the state.


Maharashtra has repeatedly shown that it excels at inaugurating infrastructure and falters at operating it under stress. The implications are serious. An immobilised expressway is a public-safety hazard. In a country scarred by road fatalities, such negligence is indefensible.


Maharashtra likes to see itself as India’s gateway to global capital. In this vein, the Mumbai–Pune Expressway was meant to symbolise modern governance. Instead, it revealed a state that can build infrastructure but cannot manage it under stress, that can collect tolls but cannot deliver care and that treats citizens as revenue streams rather than lives to be protected.  


Comments

bottom of page