Shekar Natarajan is the founder and CEO of Orchestro.AI.
Growing up in the slums of India, I wasn’t exposed to systems that worked. Instead, I grew up watching people make systems work.
When the monsoons hit and the streets flooded, we didn’t submit a ticket—we found a way. When the power went out, or the taps ran dry, we didn’t wait for permission or for someone else to come along and fix things—we improvised. And if our neighbor was in trouble, we didn’t hesitate to roll up our sleeves and jump right in. No one modeled this for me more than my father. He carried water at dawn. He fixed what was broken. He jumped in to help without being asked. No formal education, no training—just instinct, care and persistence.
In the chaotic streets of India, we understood that we were part of a system, even if that system frequently fell apart. We learned to show up to help keep the whole system working.
That was my first exposure to logistics, but it wasn’t called that. It was just life.
Who Makes The System Work?
Years later, I found myself walking the floor of a one-million-square-foot distribution center in America. I was a supply chain executive by then. But instead of sitting in the glass office, I wanted to know what it was like to work the line, to experience the system. The woman who trained me, Brittany, was a single mother of two, who walked 14 miles of conveyor daily for $16 an hour. What she worried about most wasn’t inventory or metrics. It was her kids. Phones weren’t allowed on the floor, so if something happened at school, she wouldn’t know until break.
Meanwhile, I carried two phones—one in case my family needed me. Because I was in a leadership position, no one questioned me. That moment forced me to ask myself: why do we design systems that ask the most from the people we trust the least?
Brittany was trusted to lift, scan, sort and move thousands of units with speed and precision—yet not trusted to keep a phone in her pocket in case her children needed her. The system depended on her showing up, solving problems, improvising when things broke—but it didn’t account for her humanity. That contradiction—high expectation, low trust—is embedded in too many of our policies, platforms and protocols. And it’s a design failure. One that doesn’t just hurt people—it holds back performance.
Humans Are Not Bugs In The System
In tech circles, there’s a persistent narrative that humans are a problem to be solved. Too slow. Too emotional. Too inconsistent. But from where I stand, that’s backwards.
The reason supply chains work at all isn’t because they’re perfect. It’s because people—on docks, in warehouses, in dispatch centers—constantly find ways to work around the imperfections.
I’ve seen drivers reroute mid-shift because they knew a road would flood after 20 minutes of rain. I’ve watched warehouse leads redesign pick flows in real time when the system glitched. I’ve seen operations managers coordinate on WhatsApp when the official tech stack fell short.
AI doesn’t improvise. People do.
We’ve trained machines for precision. But human value lies in resourcefulness. That’s what lets us adapt, reroute and reconfigure. And that’s the intelligence we ignore at our own risk.
What The Dabbawalas Can Teach Us
A few years ago, I spent time studying the Mumbai dabbawalas—workers who deliver thousands of home-cooked meals across the city each day. There’s no centralized system. No tech platform. Just humans handing off color-coded tins from home kitchens to trains, to offices, six days a week, with a 99.99% accuracy rate.
It’s a logistics miracle powered by memory, intuition and collective rhythm. Not software.
That kind of tribal knowledge—that passes from person to person and lives in muscle memory—is disappearing. And as we automate more and codify less, we risk building systems that forget how the world actually works.
Every generation forgets a little more of what the last one knew. My grandfather’s knowledge passed to my father, who passed 90% to me. I will pass 90% of that to my son. By the fourth generation, we’ve lost half of our family’s generational knowledge.
This isn’t romantic nostalgia. It’s a real systems issue.
Building With, Not Around, The Human
In the massive distribution center, I was told the safest policy is to ban all personal devices in warehouses. But banning doesn’t build trust. Empowerment does.
So I pushed for bone-conduction headsets. They let workers listen to music without blocking environmental noise. I changed our phone policy—not to eliminate risk, but to manage it responsibly. We gave people options. And what we saw wasn’t distraction, it was dignity. Productivity rose. Engagement went up. Turnover went down.
That’s not because of better enforcement. It’s because we stopped assuming the worst of the people we trusted most with our products.
Technology that’s built around the human—not around compliance or control—creates better outcomes. It’s not just ethical. It’s efficient.
Angels In The System
We talk a lot about AI, but the real backbone of logistics is still very human. Maybe they don’t show up on the software dashboards, but they jump in when the forklift battery dies. They are the ones who track exceptions in their heads, the ones who figure it out.
They are the angels of the system. And if we’re going to build anything that lasts, we have to build for them.
Technology will continue to evolve. But resourcefulness, care, tribal knowledge and improvisation—that’s still our most undervalued asset. The future I believe in harnesses that collective intelligence and grows with every decision made across the network.
Let’s stop designing around people. And start designing with them. What my father taught me remains true: Every time you tap into the human spirit, you wind up creating something extraordinary.
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