No single point of view can capture a complex problem. EPIC gives you five.
A five-minute refresher before we meet on 4 July: the EPIC flow, the five lenses, and the five methods — in plain words. No jargon, no homework.
Four small nudges, each clearing one obstacle, so we arrive on the day ready to do, not just listen.
Real problems at work — falling engagement, a stalled change, a team that keeps firefighting — aren't puzzles with one neat answer. They're tangles of people, processes and pressures, all pulling on each other. Look through one lens and you'll fix a symptom while the cause carries on. EPIC's move is simple: look through five different lenses first, see what each one reveals, and only then decide where to act.
Before the workshop we asked one question: "Your commute keeps getting slower — even as the roads get wider. What would actually fix it?" Here's how all 35 of you answered.
Two-thirds of you already sensed it: no single lever fixes this. That instinct is exactly where systems thinking begins — on the day we look at the same problem through the five lenses, then ask the room again.
A loop you walk, not a checklist you tick. On the day, we go hands-on with the first two.
Look at the messy situation through the five lenses. Note what you notice (insights), then what worries you (issues). Resist jumping to fixes.
Sort the real drivers from the side-effects, score each lens, and choose the method that fits. Shape the plan.
Act — but stay light on your feet. The situation moves, so keep looking and keep adjusting as you go.
Did things improve across all five lenses? Reflect, learn, loop back. EPIC never really ends.
On 4 July we'll work hands-on through Explore and Produce on real cases — that's the heart of the session.
Each lens makes you notice something the others miss. Tap one to look through it — the simple questions are the ones we'll actually use in the room.
Once a lens shows you the trouble, there's a method built to act on it. You don't run all five — you start where it hurts most.
Redesign how work actually flows around the customer, and strip out the waste.
Map the feedback loops and delays to find the one leverage point that shifts the whole.
Diagnose whether the organisation can adapt and balance control with local autonomy.
Surface the different worldviews and build enough shared understanding to move forward together.
Ask whose interests are served, who's excluded, and where the boundary has been drawn.
This is the case we work through together on the day. Have a read now so we can go straight into the lenses.
For decades India's cities have widened roads, thrown up flyovers and laid new metro lines. Yet the commute keeps getting slower. More capacity, more congestion. Why does the problem keep coming back — and what would actually change it?
India's cities aren't just congested — they're stuck, and the data backs up what most commuters already feel in their gut. To understand why, Down To Earth spent May and June 2025 visiting more than 40 cities, and one finding stood out: right across the country, the time it takes to get somewhere roughly doubles once you hit peak hours. Metro or small town, the slowdown is everywhere.
The global picture is just as stark — India ranks third in the world for population exposure to ozone pollution. TomTom's 2024 traffic index found that the average urban Indian loses close to 94 hours a year just crawling through a 10 km trip inside the city centre. And it isn't only Delhi and Mumbai dragging that average down: Kolkata, Bengaluru and Pune all sit among the world's five slowest cities for traffic.
Here's the part that should give us pause. India has thrown money at this problem for decades — wider roads, new flyovers, metro lines — and it still isn't working. Delhi-NCR hands over more of its land to roads than any other Indian city, around 23%, yet remains one of the most gridlocked places to drive. Compare that with Kolkata and Mumbai: both have far less room to work with, and both manage congestion better — simply because far more people actually use public transport.
The same story repeats at every scale. Big cities are the most congested on average (39%), then mid-sized cities (35%), then smaller ones (28%) — and it tracks almost perfectly with how dependent each city is on cars and two-wheelers, and how weak its public transport is. Even a small hill town like Shillong follows the pattern, its traffic speeds falling from 25 km/h to under 18 km/h at peak times. And Bengaluru proves cars aren't the only culprit: despite a tiny car share of just 7%, it's one of India's most congested cities — because of how many people ride two-wheelers.
Underneath the numbers is a human cost repeated city after city: lost productive hours, lost family time, and rising exposure to vehicular pollution. In Delhi, vehicles alone contribute roughly 40% of particulate matter and a staggering 81% of NOx emissions — a pattern broadly mirrored across other large cities. The gridlock isn't only a time cost; it's a health cost too.
25.5M vehicles added in FY24–25, ~90% for personal use. Delhi alone adds 500+ cars a day.
Bus ridership down ~6% in metros; new metro lines still absorb under 1% of trips.
Average commutes up ~10%; Delhi's average trip nearly doubled, from 6 km to 11 km.
Through your assigned lens, examine why the commute keeps getting worse despite decades of spending. Capture what you notice (insights), then what worries you (issues) — and where a real, structural change might sit. Not a quick symptomatic fix.
Your job isn't to solve it today. It's to make sure the problem is deeply and correctly understood.
Your group captures insights, issues and lens scores (0–4) in here. (Make sure sharing is set to "anyone with the link".)
The take-home pack. It unlocks here right after the session, so everything lives in one place.
The lens → method cheat-sheet, worked through on the traffic case.
Open the cheat-sheet →Curated reading on each method and model.
Open the reading guide →Slides, recording and notes — posted here right after the session.