Profile of the Speaker: R. Narayanan is currently the Vice-President (Learning & Development) at TCS. He is responsible for planning, delivering and measuring Induction and Continuous Learning initiatives of all TCS associates in Technology, Domain, Management and Soft skills. A Master’s in Mathematics with additional diplomas in Statistics and French, he has more than 35 years' experience with IT and specially Software and before joining TCS, he had a glorious stint of 26 years with the Indian Space Research Organization.

Session: The two hour long session, focused on “Applied System Thinking” started with the question – ‘Who is a consultant?’ Mr. Narayanan then helped the class explore the job of the consultant from the perspective of the client as well as the consultant. For all the successful assignments, there are well defined deliverables, the assignment is completed on time, within budget, solution fits the need, there are no post implementation problems and benefits exceed business case and can be sustained over time. But the industry is not immune to failures and bad clients always blame the consultant and bad consultants always love bad clients

Discussing the causes of failures, Mr. Narayanan elaborated on the ‘Gaps in Consultancy’ – Cognitive, Perception, Communication and Implementation. Added to this, the environment itself is changing. In such a complex and dynamic environment, Systems Thinking provides tools to make the full patterns clearer, and to help us to see how to change them effectively. Systems Thinking was defined as “a multidisciplinary approach to the study of innate complexity which by synthesizing systemic findings from the natural, social, technological, behavioral, life sciences and other specialized fields brings holistic perspectives to the solution of problems within a general context.” To make it more real, using a multi-level reasoning framework, Systems Thinking approach was applied to problems like Traffic dynamics, Primary education and Market intelligence. The session concluded with, Mr. Narayanan answering students’queries.