It began with beautiful, passionate noise.
\nI still remember my very first meeting with PUCAR — the Public Collective for Avoidance and Resolution of Disputes. Around the table sat lawyers from Agami, researchers from XKDR Forum, technocrats from eGovernments Foundation, and systemic transformation experts from Samagra. All of us were deeply mission-driven, united by one audacious goal: to transform the dispute resolution experience for every citizen in India.
\nYet, what I heard that day was not harmony. It was noise — brilliant individual tunes clashing against each other. Like a room full of the country’s best violinists, pianists, and drummers, each playing their own masterpiece.
\nImage 1: PUCARs full team brainstorming session in 2023
\nHow do you turn that noise into a symphony capable of tackling something as complex as India’s judiciary — a system with over 5 crore pending cases that, at the current pace, would take more than 300 years to clear?
\nThat question became our north star. Over the last few years, working inside PUCAR has taught us that creating a true collective symphony requires deliberate design. Here are the five key characteristics we discovered — and the practical answers we found to the “What if…” questions every collective inevitably faces.
\n1. What if everyone wants to be involved in everything?
\nMission-driven people are highly motivated. Naturally, they want to contribute to every decision.
\nWe learned this the hard way while redesigning the very first stage of the case lifecycle — the filing experience. 20 passionate minds from 4 organisations spent 60 days in endless meetings (that often stretched from two hours to four), and we arrived at… no solution.
\nOur answer: Councils
\nWe created small, focused, empowered groups with clear decision rights:
\nEvery organisation has representation, and decisions taken in the council are binding. We also introduced a Documentation Lead in every council. After losing months of earlier discussions to memory, we now maintain searchable agendas and minutes. Today, I can Ctrl+F any past decision and instantly recall the rationale.
\n2. What if you can’t build or do everything by yourself?
\nEarly on, we tried building our own AI transcription tool for legal drafting in Malayalam. After 2–3 months of training, accuracy was stuck at a painful 5%. Malayalam + legal language is brutally complex.
\nOur answer: Networking
\nIn a collective, you don’t just bring the people in the room — you bring their entire ecosystems and networks. Often, the solution is just two connections away.
\nWe discovered 2 MIT graduates who had recently trained models on thousands of public judgements and orders. Instead of reinventing the wheel, we said, let’s integrate with their solution.
\nLesson: Leverage your networks. The smartest people working on your exact problem are probably already out there.
\n3. What if everyone commits… but no one actually does it?
\nWe once faced a classic collective failure. Three different partners each privately assured our development partner that they would handle the development of the landing page of the website at their end. Three weeks before go-live, we realised: everyone thought someone else was doing it. No one was.
\nOur answer: Over-communication
\nWe treat our Weekly All-Hands call every Wednesday as sacred. The entire core team joins to share progress, blockers, decisions, and support needed. This call has run without break for over 3 years. Whenever we’ve skipped it or lost rhythm, confusion has crept back in.
\nOver-communication is the oxygen of any collective.
\n4. What if you’re tackling deeply complex, untouched problems with no quick answers?
\nOne stubborn problem: it still takes nearly 300 days after filing for the opposite party to appear in court. Almost a year lost before the case even begins.
\nWe brainstormed wild ideas — freezing bank accounts until appearance, among others. But how do you decide on a solution when no proven convention exists?
\nOur answer: Consensus through rigorous debate
\nSix months of intense consultation, healthy disagreement, and going back to the drawing board led us to a practical, aligned solution: serve summons via E-Post, which guarantees delivery within 24 hours. This has the potential to bring the delay down to under 30 days.
\n5. What if not everyone is equally driven or timely in delivering?
\nEven highly motivated teams can slip. We found tasks planned for two weeks were taking 30–45 days. User satisfaction was dropping.
\nBringing the team to witness user pain helped briefly, but the effect faded.
\nOur answer: Accountability — with a twist
\nEvery single task in PUCAR has two roles:
\nThe accountability holder is never your own manager. When you don’t feel the user’s pain directly, someone else in the collective does — and they hold you to it. This cross-organisational accountability has been transformative.
\nWhen these five come together…
\nCouncils + Networking + Over-communication + Consensus + Cross-organisational Accountability, the grand orchestra stops playing individual tunes.
\nFor us, that symphony is 24x7 ON Court — Kerala’s (and India’s) first 24/7 digital court for cheque-bounce cases.
\nImage 2: 24X7 ON Courts public website
\nSince its launch in November 2024, the results have been remarkable:
\nTake these lessons to your own orchestra
\nWhether you run a government programme, a multi-partner project, or any mission-driven initiative, chances are you’re also conducting an orchestra — with government partners on violins, knowledge partners in the choir, tech vendors on cellos, and funders on kettle drums.
\nHere are the five practical takeaways you can apply immediately:
\nWe have broken out of noise and created symphonies — not by luck, but by design.
\nIf your work also feels like an orchestra (formal or informal), I hope these lessons help you turn your own beautiful noise into lasting impact.
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\nImage 4: PUCARs full team at an In-person All Hands meeting for strategic planning in 2025