Mr. Arijit Ghosh
AVP - Academics, Seth M. R. Jaipuria Schools
“If your surgeon is 'good enough,' your pilot is 'good enough,' your architect is 'good enough' — does it sound dangerous? Yes. So what makes us think the impact our school has on a child is not critical enough?”On why "good enough" is the wrong bar
Session recap
"Good enough" is the bar we accidentally set — and the bar we have to break.
Arijit Ghosh opened Leadership Discourse 1 with a deceptively simple question. Would you be comfortable if your surgeon were "good enough"? Your pilot? Your architect? The room said no — those are roles where precision matters, where the work cannot be reversed, where lives are involved. He then turned the question on the room: so what makes us think the impact a school has on a child is not critical enough? Why do schools, of all institutions, tolerate "good enough"?
He sharpened the diagnosis with one line that landed across the room: "Average is dangerous when it becomes a permission." Permission to not prepare in depth. Permission to not follow up. Permission to lower the goalpost. The danger is not in the average score itself — it is in the moment when "kaam chal raha hai" silently becomes the standard, and no one in the system questions it any longer.
Drawing on Todd Rose's The End of Average, he showed how designing for the average serves no one well. The US Air Force, in the 1960s, used body-scan data from thousands of pilots to design the "perfect" cockpit. Error rates rose. When they checked, they found that not a single pilot's body actually matched the averaged dimensions. Compare that to Formula 1, where the car is built for one driver alone. The lesson for schools: children are jagged — interest and ability rise and fall by subject, by week, by topic. A system built for the average serves none of them well.
“It is not about choosing between care and accountability. It is about practising both of them together — that is the only zone that builds a growth culture.”
The room then mapped where "good enough" has quietly entered Jaipuria schools — and the answers came fast: recruitment under deadline pressure, student admissions taken on the promise of personalised remediation, detention decisions made on sympathy not standards, lesson observations that wave through average teaching, feedback that stays vague, follow-up that never lands, assemblies that no one bothered to design, library periods that became silent sitting periods. Compliance, Arijit reframed, is not culture. A neatly filled lesson-plan diary that does not change the classroom is documentation without learning.
He offered a four-reason audit for why the drift happens: lack of clarity (we ourselves don't know what excellence looks like), lack of courage (questioning has repercussions), lack of systems (no rituals of follow-up), and lack of ownership (the buck doesn't stop with anyone). Most cases of "good enough" sit in one or more of these four. Naming them in the room, table by table, was the first move toward fixing them.
Arijit then introduced a 2×2 that gave the discussion its language: care on the y-axis, accountability on the x-axis. High care + low accountability creates comfort culture — pleasant, drifting, average. Low care + high accountability creates fear culture — compliant, brittle, talent-bleeding. Low care + low accountability is collapse. The only zone where a school actually moves is high care + high accountability — a growth culture. What strong leaders do in that zone, he said, is specific: they notice, they question, they praise, they permit, and they follow up. The moment teachers and students realise there will be follow-up, the bar moves on its own.
Dr. V P Singh added the closing punch. Thirty years ago, a researcher visited Bill Gates and asked about the Henry Ford portrait on his wall. "I don't admire him," Bill Gates said. "I keep it there because I don't want to be him." Ford started the automobile revolution and lost the market. Gates was afraid every day that a student somewhere in a garage was building the thing that would kill Microsoft. That fear has a name: productive paranoia — the fear of what is merely good. If you are not afraid of "good," Dr. Singh told the room, your school will become obsolete. You as a principal will become obsolete. The work, then, is selfish in the best sense: stay scared of good, and the leap to great will come.
Editorial summary compiled by the LDP team — not a verbatim transcript. Spotted an inaccuracy? Let us know.
Key takeaways
- 1
The surgeon test
If "good enough" sounds dangerous in a surgeon, a pilot or an architect, it should sound dangerous in a classroom. The impact is no less critical — and far less reversible than we tell ourselves.
- 2
Average is permission
"Good enough" turns dangerous the moment it becomes the unwritten standard — permission to not prepare deeply, not follow up, not question. Audit your school for where that permission lives.
- 3
Design for the jagged child, not the average
The Air Force's "average pilot" cockpit fit no one. Formula 1 builds for one driver. Personalisation is not a perk; it's the only honest response to how children actually learn.
- 4
Care + accountability is the only growth zone
High care alone is comfort. High accountability alone is fear. Real culture is the rare combination — practised together, every week, every observation, every conversation.
- 5
The four leaks of "good enough"
Drift comes from one of four sources: lack of clarity, lack of courage, lack of systems, lack of ownership. Diagnose which one is leaking in your school before you try to fix the symptom.
- 6
Productive paranoia
Bill Gates kept a Henry Ford photo on his wall as a warning. Be afraid of "good." If you're not, you will be replaced — by a competitor, by AI, or by your own irrelevance.
What he spoke on
What does "good enough" actually mean in a school?
Compliance that looks complete on paper. A filled-in lesson plan diary that did not change the lesson. An observed class with no specific feedback. A library period with no reading culture. Surface without substance.
Where does it most quietly enter?
Recruitment under deadline, admissions taken on the promise of remediation, detention decisions softened, observations turned into rubber-stamps, assemblies left to the period before the bell. The cost compounds.
The four reasons culture drifts
Lack of clarity (we don't know the gold standard), lack of courage (questioning has repercussions), lack of systems (no follow-up rituals), lack of ownership (buck doesn't stop anywhere). Most "good enough" sits in one of these four.
Feedback is not feedback when it's broad
"The students were engaged. You managed your class well." These are statements about teacher activity, not student learning. Specific, contextual, constructive — or it does not move the bar.
The care-accountability matrix
Comfort culture (high care, low accountability) protects the average. Fear culture (low care, high accountability) bleeds talent. Growth culture demands both — and it is rarer than we admit.
Productive paranoia, applied to schools
The fear that something better will replace you is not anxiety. It is intentional leadership. Stay scared of "good," and "great" stops feeling unreachable.
Q&A captured
Q. Good enough from whose point of view? One man's food is another man's poison — isn't that subjective?
This conversation is not about external standards. It is about self-reflection: what am I setting as the gold standard? Whether we attain 60%, 80% or 90% of that standard is a separate question. The first move is to define the bar — not lower it.
Q. We work with first-generation learners. Don't we have to lower the bar sometimes?
No — we have to widen the path. Lowering the bar is a permission. Designing a different pathway to the same bar is leadership. The Jaipuria curriculum already encodes that; the work is in attainment, not redefinition.
Q. What about recruiting under pressure when good teachers aren't available?
This is the single biggest "good enough" leak in the system. The compromise feels necessary in the moment and compounds for years. Better to delay the class for two days than to staff it for two terms with a wrong hire.
Q. How does a principal give feedback without it feeling like policing?
Make follow-up the ritual, not the surprise. Teachers do not resist standards — they resist arbitrariness. If the conversation happens every week, around a clear gold standard, agreed in advance, it stops being policing and starts being mentorship.
Q. How do I keep my own edge as a leader?
Productive paranoia. Be afraid of "good." The world of higher education is changing, AI is replacing professors and coaches faster than we believed possible, and schools are next. Renew yourself continuously, or the system will renew itself without you.