Lack of accountability
The moment you can do things without facing repercussions, you are automatically incentivized to try the shortcut and solve your problem in the short term - without having to pay for the secondary order effects or the larger consequences. That is a lack of accountability, and India has a lot of it.
Think about people breaking traffic rules. Yesterday I was going down a busy street in Hyderabad, on the left side of the road - the correct side in India - and one person on a bike was on the leftmost side of the road going in the opposite direction. He was asking me to shift instead of him going the other way. He was asking me to shift just a little.
That “just a little” attitude is a big problem. He was willing to break traffic norms blatantly because there are no repercussions. As long as there are no repercussions, people break laws, and that is why India’s traffic is so bad. When I talk about accountability, I mean people knowing that once they breach a rule, no one can even track them. Remove the tracking and people are more inclined to breach those rules.
Take surgeons, because right now I am looking for a surgeon. For me, a successful result means that after the surgery, the patient lives a healthy life without complications for many years. If I cannot track which surgeons actually produced successful results, then all we are really talking about is whether the surgeon performed the surgery “successfully”. It is like judging a hair transplant surgeon by the number of hair transplants they have performed rather than the outcome over a number of years - are people losing hair over time anyway, or is the hair actually sticking? Unless we can track outcomes, we can never really measure how good a person is in these domains.
Same with a manager in any corporate company. As long as you cannot see the past data about how they have been managing people and what their attrition rate has been over the past n years, you cannot judge a good manager versus a bad manager. Unless you can track people’s reviews about a manager, it is always a blank slate. There is no layer of accountability. Accountability needs to be added.
The second thing is people falling off their words. Don’t commit to anything if you can’t do it. This is a very poor way of doing business. Just say no, and I will find someone else who does the work well - I want to get the work done. Either commit to it or say no. Don’t leave me hanging and then say you cannot do it. That just wastes time and slows me down. I am anyway willing to pay the money - why wouldn’t I go to someone who can do the work? Why not specialize in the work you can actually provide?
This is a very common problem, and generally it is a cultural thing. It comes from some core policies that create this overall culture. I think missing accountability is one of them - it is closely tied to incentive structures, and measuring the wrong proxy instead of the outcome is where bad metrics lead.