On Scaling

On Scaling: Vipassana and Gyaanshala The numbers are so gigantic in India – any enterprise that wants to make a difference has to figure out how to scale. This is what we can learn from two amazing organizations: Vipassana centres and Gyaanshala. Take Gyaanshala first. It is an organization founded and run by my good friend Pankaj Jain in Ahmedabad – its aim is to provide primary education to slum children. Today, it is certainly the largest in India and perhaps in the world, with several thousand children enrolled. There are many aspects of this story, but the one I want to concentrate on here is: how did they solve the problem of scaling? The single biggest constraint facing any such enterprise today is lack of good teachers – that too, teachers willing to go and teach in slums, where the schools are located. Pankaj concluded that the only way to deal with the constraint was to make it go away – to evaporate the cloud, as Goldratt would have put it. He created a system where teachers become the least of the constraint – strong materials, detailed scripting of every session, and repeated and intense training and retraining of teachers, makes it possible for anyone to be a teacher in this system. Vipassana is another example. There are now Vipassana centres throughout the world, and thousands of people go through them every month. How has Mr. Goenka, the founder of these Centres in India, solved the scaling problem? In every session, at every centre, there are facilitators but their role is very limited – they hardly even speak. Even the instruction ‘take a break for 15 minutes’ is given by Goenkaji himself by a recorded audio. Every session is scripted in advance and controlled by an audio recording of Goenkaji. There is zero room for local deviations. And the experience is wonderful. The parallels are obvious, I do not need to explicate them…