When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing(47)

I’m guessing you wouldn’t offer me a second meeting, let alone any funding.

Yet Raghunath Medge, president of the Nutan Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers Association, claims the dabbawalas have an error rate of 1 in 16 million, a statistic widely repeated but never verified. Still, the walas’ efficiency is notable enough to have been celebrated by Richard Branson and Prince Charles—and to have been memorialized in a Harvard Business School case study. Somehow, since its beginnings in 1890, it has worked. And one reason it works is the second principle of group timing.

After individuals synch to the boss, the external standard that sets the pace of their work, they must synch to the tribe—to one another. That requires a deep sense of belonging.


In 1995, two social psychologists, Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary, put forth what they called “the belongingness hypothesis.” They proposed that “a need to belong is a fundamental human motivation . . . and that much of what human beings do is done in the service of belongingness.” Other thinkers, including Sigmund Freud and Abraham Maslow, had made similar claims, but Baumeister and Leary set about finding empirical proof. The evidence they assembled was overwhelming (their twenty-six-page paper cites more than three hundred sources). Belongingness, they found, profoundly shapes our thoughts and emotions. Its absence leads to ill effects, its presence to health and satisfaction.8

Evolution offers at least a partial explanation.9 After we primates climbed down from trees to roam the open savannah, belonging to a group became essential for survival. We needed others to share the work and watch our backs. Belonging kept us alive. Not belonging turned us into lunch for some prehistoric beast.

Today, this enduring preference for belonging helps us time our actions with others. Social cohesion, many scholars have discovered, leads to greater synchrony.10 Or, as Simmons puts it, “You get a better sound if there’s a sense of belonging. You get better attendance rates at rehearsals, better smiles on their faces.” But while the drive for belonging is innate, its emergence sometimes requires some effort. For group coordination, it comes in three forms: codes, garb, and touch.


Codes

For the dabbawalas, the secret code is painted (or written with a marker) on every lunch bag they handle. For example, look at this photograph, taken from a bird’s-eye view, of the top of a lunch container that Adhav was transporting:



To you, me, and even the owner of the lunch bag, what’s scrawled there is meaningless. But to the dabbawalas, it’s the key to coordinating. As our train rumbles toward South Mumbai, and our bodies rumble along with it (this isn’t luxury travel), Adhav explains the symbols. VP and Y indicate the neighborhood and building from which the lunch was picked up that morning. The 0 is the station where the lunch will exit. The 7 tells which wala will take the lunch from the station to the customer. And the S137 indicates the building and floor where that customer works. That’s it. No bar codes, not even any street addresses. “I look at this,” Adhav tells me, “and it’s all in my head.”

In the luggage compartment—nobody’s allowed to carry big packages in Mumbai’s overstuffed railway cars—the dabbawalas sit on the floor amid a heap of maybe two hundred cloth and plastic lunch bags. They joke and talk with one another in Marathi, the language of the state of Maharashtra, rather than in the far more dominant language of Hindi. The dabbawalas all come from the same set of small villages roughly 150 kilometers southeast of Mumbai. Many are related. Adhav and Medge, in fact, are cousins.

Swapnil Bache, one of the walas, tells me that the shared language and home villages create what he calls “a brotherly feeling.” And that sense of affiliation, like the codes on the lunches, produces an informal understanding that allows the walas to anticipate one another’s actions and move in harmony.

Feelings of belonging boost job satisfaction and performance. Research by Alex Pentland at MIT “has shown that the more cohesive and communicative a team is—the more they chat and gossip—the more they get done.”11 Even the structure of the operation fosters belongingness. The dabbawalas are not a corporation but a cooperative, which operates on a profit-sharing model that pays each wala in equal shares.* Shared language and heritage make it easy to share profits.


Garb

Adhav is thin and wiry. His white shirt fits him more as if his body were a hanger than a mannequin. He wears dark trousers and sandals, and has two bindi dots on his forehead. But atop his head is the most important element of his attire—a white Gandhi hat that signifies that he is a dabbawala. One of the few restrictions on the walas’ behavior is that they must wear this hat on the job at all times. The hat is another element of their synchronization. It affiliates them with one another and identifies them to those outside the dabbawala tribe.



Dabbawalas Eknath Khanbar (left) and Swapnil Bache examine the code that determines where to deliver a lunch.

Clothing, operating as a marker of affiliation and identification, enables coordination. Take elite restaurants, whose inner workings are one part ballet, another part military invasion. Auguste Escoffier, one of the pioneers of French cuisine, believed that clothing created synchrony. “Escoffier disciplined, drilled, and dressed his chefs,” one analyst writes. “Uniforms enforced erect posture and bearing. The double breasted white jacket became the standard to emphasize cleanliness and good sanitation. More subtly, these jackets helped infuse a sense of loyalty, inclusion and pride amongst the chefs, between them and the rest of the restaurant staff.”12