When nothing goes wrong, but you’re still in trouble

For the longest time, Mumbai’s dabbawallas performed one of the great daily miracles of urban life. Every morning, thousands of home-cooked lunches were collected from kitchens across the city, sorted, transported by bicycle and train, re-sorted, and delivered to office workers with astonishing reliability. Then, hours later, the empty tiffin boxes made the whole journey home again.

The system became legendary because it achieved all this with very little technology. No sophisticated software. No armies of managers. No elaborate tracking systems. Instead: simple codes painted on lids, deep local knowledge, disciplined handoffs, standard routines, a cooperative work ethic, and a workforce that understood exactly how its piece fitted into the whole. 

It was logistics reduced to its essence, a vast human network somehow operating with the precision of machinery.

So remarkable was this phenomenon that learned professors from business schools came to study it. I loved that: ordinary people with no MBAs had created a super-efficient, grounded and deeply human system, without recourse to management theory.

And yet.

The dabbawallas are now in steep decline. Before the pandemic, they were delivering close to 200,000 tiffins a day. Recent estimates put that figure at only 50,000 to 70,000. Their workforce, once around 5,000 strong, has fallen to roughly 3,000.

But here is the important part: the famous system did not suddenly become stupid. Its elegant coding did not stop working. The handoffs did not collapse. The dabbawallas did not forget how to do what had made them extraordinary. Something much larger shifted underneath them.

And therein lies the real lesson.

The system still works, but the world around it is no longer the same. What changed was both supply and demand.

The dabbawalla system required someone to cook the food in home kitchens. But Mumbai’s domestic patterns, like those of most modern cities, have changed considerably. Fewer households can be assumed to have someone at home preparing a daily meal for a family member at work. And young workers are much less inclined to become tiffin-carriers themselves, leaving an ageing workforce and a big succession problem.

Food consumption, too, is very different. Modern workers are less attached to homemade staples. As in most modern cities, cloud kitchens and delivery apps have created vastly more lunchtime choice. And hybrid and remote working have broken the five-day rhythm of delivery that the system relied on.

So the dabbawallas were not defeated by a better way of moving your mother’s lovingly cooked lunch across the city; they were defeated by changing patterns of work, food consumption, and food production.

That makes the dabbawallas a rather poignant strategy case. For decades, they were held up at Harvard and elsewhere as the miracle of process design: minimal technology, extraordinary accuracy, decentralised coordination, visual coding, relentless standardization.

Their process remained excellent. But the world moved around them.

This could happen to any business. We all rest on a set of assumptions about how customers behave, how employees work, how value is created, what people will continue to want. These assumptions become convictions, and leaders become so absorbed in improving the machine that they stop asking whether the machine still belongs in the future.

I’m sure your organization is engrossed in optimizing processes, sharpening execution, tightening controls, improving service, reducing costs. 

All useful. None sufficient.

The printed newspaper was an efficient way of producing and distributing a physical news product. Bank branches perfected teller operations and cheque processing. Postal services did a great job of getting mail to all corners of the land.

And then the ground shifted.

A good strategist is always aware of this danger: that you can become exceptionally good at doing something the world is ceasing to need.

And so: always look up, always look ahead.

THE SIGNAL IN THE NOISE

Sometimes nothing goes wrong. The world simply goes elsewhere.

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