Abstract for: Letting YOUR Complex Self Go: Conveying Insights from Models to Bureaucrats and Politicians

Over the past four years (2021-24), I left MIT to lead the Government of India’s Innovation Office, Atal Innovation Mission (aim.gov.in). Being a student of System Dynamics (SD), I always modeled various situations to understand what could be done — but that was not enough. The bigger problem was this: how to effectively convey what needs to be done to top bureaucrats and politicians? (1) Build models (causal or working) for your own understanding of the complexity/physics first. (2) Determine what is that one “crux of the problem or solution pathway” that must get conveyed. (3) Snap away, and create the most effective illustration for the message to hit home, in the “language” of the decision maker. Learned the process of letting go of one’s own detailed understanding of the complexity to convey the main message to mobilize top decision makers. Led to significant commitments by the India’s union cabinet to allocate budgets to large programs on innovation and entrepreneurship. (1) Complex decision setting surrounding important choices in a world’s largest democracy. (2) The process of detaching, to put the message above the model. (3) Knowing one’s limits as metaphors and analogies when conveying the insights from a model.