Ravana Was Brilliant. That Is the Whole Point.

A Dussehra reflection on why capable organisations fail, and what the festival is actually asking us to do.

🏹 The version we tell is too easy

Today, effigies burn across India. The story is told as good defeating evil, and that is true as far as it goes.

But it flattens the more useful part.

In the tradition, Ravana is a scholar of the Vedas, a master of the veena, an astronomer, and the ruler of a kingdom so prosperous it is remembered as golden. He is exceptional by any measure, and he is not defeated because he lacked intelligence, resources or capability.

He had all three. He still lost. That is what makes the story worth returning to every year. 🎯

🔟 What Dussehra actually means

One traditional reading of the name is dasha-hara, the removal of the ten.

Not the defeat of someone else. The removal of ten things, and in the most common interpretation the ten heads are read as ten traits carried inside a person: desire, anger, greed, attachment, pride, envy, and the faculties of mind, intellect, will and ego when they serve the self rather than what is right.

Read that way, the festival is not a victory lap. It is an annual audit, and the subject of the audit is you. 🪞

And the effigy is rebuilt every year. Nobody treats last year's burning as permanent. Which is, if you think about it, an unusually honest piece of design.

🗣️ The failure was not knowledge. It was governance.

Here is the part that has stayed with me.

Ravana was told. Repeatedly, and by people close to him. Vibhishana, his own brother, counselled him plainly and was exiled for it. Mandodari, his queen, told him the same thing. Maricha warned him. The advice was available, it was correct, and it came from inside the house.

He had the information. He had capable advisors. He overrode them.

That is not a knowledge failure. That is a governance failure, and it is the most common way capable organisations come apart. ⚖️

We have written a lot this year about AI governance, control points, audit trails and where a human belongs in a workflow. The pattern underneath all of it is the same one in this story.

Most organisations do not fail because the information was missing. They fail because the information reached someone who could not act on it, or would not, and because the person carrying it paid a price for carrying it.

🧭 The ten, as a leadership audit

Not all ten, because a list of ten is a list nobody uses. Five that recur:

Pride that cannot take the brief. 👑 The senior person who has decided, and now only wants the version of the analysis that agrees.

Ego that overrides the advisor. 🗣️ Not disagreement, which is healthy. Overriding, repeatedly, people hired precisely for that judgement. Watch what happens to the second person who raises it.

Attachment to the plan. 📎 The plan was right in March. It is October. Sunk cost dressed as commitment.

Greed that skips the step. ⏭️ The governance step, the test, the review. Removed because the quarter was tight, and never put back.

Anger at the messenger. 🔥 The most expensive of the five. One visible example and your organisation stops telling you things. After that you are managing a reporting line that only sends good news, and you will be the last to know.

The honest question for any of us today is not whether these exist in our organisation. It is which one we personally contributed to this year.

🏢 Where our work touches this

Briefly, because this is a festival and not a sales letter.

Most of what we build is, in the end, about making sure an organisation can act on what it already knows.

A record of what an agent did, and under whose approval, so nobody has to rely on memory. An internal layer that surfaces the questions people keep asking and cannot get answered, which is usually the most uncomfortable report a leadership team reads. A query you can inspect, so a number is a finding rather than an assertion.

None of that replaces judgement. It just removes the excuse that nobody knew.

The Vibhishana function matters more than any of the tooling. Someone in your organisation is telling you the thing you do not want to hear. What happens to that person is the real governance test, and no system answers it for you. 🪖

🪖 A genuine wish

Dussehra is a festival of renewal, and the thing that makes it durable is the humility built into it. You do not remove the ten once. You do it again next year, because next year there will be ten again.

For our colleagues, clients and partners in India, in Germany and everywhere else: may the day bring you good company, rest, and the particular clarity that comes from being honest with yourself about the year behind you.

From all of us at MeJuvante, a very happy Dussehra. 🙏