Dharma and yoga in product development
Every Hindu is aware of the word Dharma. People in India use it with different interpretations, in different context. The words 'Guru' and 'karma' have already gotten into the English dictionary being part of the vocabulary. It will not be much longer before the word 'Dharma' makes its way. What is the real meaning of the word Dharma? People usually associate with the english word 'duty'. Going deeper into sanskrit grammar, the word Dharma means 'spontaneous property of any object/entity'. Every object exhibits some natural property which cannot be disassociated from it. Like the property of sweetness is tightly coupled with entity sugar, flowing property is associated with water, heat with fire etc... one can go on. Dharma is an idea in people's mind on how a object generally behaves. Its a perception of reality unchangeable with time. Environmental influences can temporarily modify the property - like low temperature can modify the property of flowing of water by converting into ice.
Now lets see what is Quality Management before creating a solid connection between the two. Quality Management is the science of understanding customer perception about the expected behavior of a product and delivering it to the satisfaction/delight of the customer. As we saw earlier, Dharma is the expected natural behavior of any object. So we can conclude that understanding and delivering dharma is the science of quality management. The goal of organizations is to enable engineers to embed dharma into the products. Adharma is any deviation(Defects) wrt expected behaviour in the product. This can be due to misunderstanding dharma (customer's perspective of the natural spontaneous property of the product) or unable to instill dharma in the product. If we look into our sastras, Dharma is always demonstrated thru yoga. Different kinds of yoga practices enable us to enact the dharma of human being. Without yoga we start behaving like animals by degrading to adharma. Applying the same to production principles, if yoga is not there during the product building stage, there cannot be an output of Dharma. The product development life cycle needs karma yoga(Action), Jnana yoga(knowledge), Dhyana yoga(contemplation) and bhakti yoga(passion, love) to delight the customer. Lets delineate the importance of each of the yoga mechanisms in product development.
Karma Yoga: belief in Prescribed action. The prescribed action is derived from industry established best practices. If members of project team align to karma yoga or prescribed action, success is guaranteed in terms of embedding dharma into the product
Jnana Yoga: Belief in Knowledge. Project should demonstrate knowledge sharing mechanisms among the members before, during and after the execution. Knowledge of Customers and their perception of dharma (voice of the customer) is very important
Dhyana Yoga(Yoga of contemplation) Individual, team introspections should be encouraged and formal channels has to be provided to encourage introspection. Each person should think whether he is line to fulfill dharma or is there adharma creeping in. What engineering yoga practices can be included/excluded? MSA is an example of Dhyana yoga at the organization level and Lessons learned is an example at the team level. What we lack is employee level contemplation which should in reality feed the other two
Bhakti yoga:Passion, love motivation must exist towards satisfying customer's need. Its the project manager's duty to instil bhakti in team members.
Vishwa rupa darsana yoga: Zoom out perspective on markets, competition, ecosystem of the customer has to be provided which can cause Bhakti(passion) to arise in team members. Manytimes demotivation is a result of not knowing the value transaction in the big picture, what difference to the world are we making.
A good model can be created by going deep into each of the Yoga described in the Gita. At present we have the above outline. By the practice of the above kinds of yoga in teams, we can reduce adharma(defects) to a large extent and ensure our customers and we can experience swarga after every project release.
Karma Yoga: belief in Prescribed action. The prescribed action is derived from industry established best practices. If members of project team align to karma yoga or prescribed action, success is guaranteed in terms of embedding dharma into the product
Jnana Yoga: Belief in Knowledge. Project should demonstrate knowledge sharing mechanisms among the members before, during and after the execution. Knowledge of Customers and their perception of dharma (voice of the customer) is very important
Dhyana Yoga(Yoga of contemplation) Individual, team introspections should be encouraged and formal channels has to be provided to encourage introspection. Each person should think whether he is line to fulfill dharma or is there adharma creeping in. What engineering yoga practices can be included/excluded? MSA is an example of Dhyana yoga at the organization level and Lessons learned is an example at the team level. What we lack is employee level contemplation which should in reality feed the other two
Bhakti yoga:Passion, love motivation must exist towards satisfying customer's need. Its the project manager's duty to instil bhakti in team members.
Vishwa rupa darsana yoga: Zoom out perspective on markets, competition, ecosystem of the customer has to be provided which can cause Bhakti(passion) to arise in team members. Manytimes demotivation is a result of not knowing the value transaction in the big picture, what difference to the world are we making.
A good model can be created by going deep into each of the Yoga described in the Gita. At present we have the above outline. By the practice of the above kinds of yoga in teams, we can reduce adharma(defects) to a large extent and ensure our customers and we can experience swarga after every project release.
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