New Delhi, Sept. 8 -- How can a leader make the right decision if the information reaching them does not present the full picture? This gap between information and reality can become one of the greatest risks to leadership. Decisions may still be taken with confidence and presentations may still appear reassuring, but once facts are filtered, softened or misunderstood, authority begins operating within an incomplete picture. The Mahabharata offers a remarkable figure through whom to examine this danger. Sanjaya was far more than the narrator of the Kurukshetra war. He was Dhritarashtra's charioteer, counsellor and trusted emissary. Before the war, he travelled to the Pandavas on the king's behalf in an effort to avert conflict. Later, Maharishi Vyasa granted him divya drishti, the extraordinary ability to witness the battlefield from afar. Yet Sanjaya's significance lies not simply in what he could see, but in the discipline with which he understood, interpreted and communicated what he saw.
His story therefore rests on a larger proposition: the possession of knowledge is not power alone. It is a responsibility to see clearly, interpret wisely, speak truthfully and remain sufficiently detached from the outcome to preserve one's judgement. This responsibility is especially relevant to modern organisations, where senior leaders rarely observe every development firsthand. They depend on others for financial, operational and strategic information. The quality of a leader's judgement is therefore shaped by the quality of the information that reaches them.
Perhaps the strongest lesson from Sanjaya is that seeing is not the same as understanding. His divya drishti gave him extraordinary sight, but sight alone would have made him merely an observer. Its value came from his ability to recognise the meaning and significance of what unfolded before him. This distinction has become even more important in the age of artificial intelligence. Dashboards provide real-time information; analytics reveal patterns; surveys measure sentiment; forecasts model future outcomes; and AI can process volumes of information beyond individual human capacity. Yet information abundance continues to coexist with poor judgement. Data gives us sight. Wisdom gives us perspective.
A dashboard can reveal falling sales without explaining whether the cause is pricing, customer dissatisfaction, competition or changing behaviour. An algorithm may identify correlation without understanding context. A forecast may estimate what is likely to happen without answering what ought to be done. The challenge for leadership is therefore not simply to acquire more information, but to convert information into understanding and understanding into judgement. Technology can expand our field of vision, but it cannot remove the human responsibility to interpret consequences, question assumptions and exercise discernment. Sanjaya is relevant precisely because his gift was not passive sight. It was sight accompanied by perspective.
The same principle applies to those who carry information upward. The duty of an adviser is to tell a leader what the leader needs to hear, not merely what the leader wants to hear. Sanjaya served Dhritarashtra, yet service did not require him to reinforce every hope or illusion of the king. Traditional accounts repeatedly portray him recognising and communicating the destructive direction in which events were moving. Modern institutions face the same difficulty. Bad news is often diluted as it rises. A missed target becomes a temporary deviation. A failing strategy becomes one requiring only minor adjustment.
The higher a leader rises, the greater the danger that truth reaches them only after passing through layers of fear, ambition and deference. People learn which messages receive approval and which create discomfort. Over time, even without explicit instruction, an organisation can begin editing reality before presenting it to authority. Sanjaya represents an institutional antidote to that danger. Leaders need colleagues who improve the accuracy of their understanding, not merely the comfort of their surroundings.
This leads naturally to another lesson. Loyalty to a person must never become disloyalty to the truth. Sanjaya remained deeply loyal to Dhritarashtra, and his loyalty continued even after the destruction of the war. He later accompanied the ageing king during his withdrawal to forest life. Yet loyalty did not require him to validate Dhritarashtra's illusions. Modern organisations frequently confuse loyalty with agreement, particularly when disagreement involves someone senior. But genuine loyalty can require precisely the opposite.
A courageous colleague is not necessarily the person who supports every decision. Sometimes it is the person prepared to say respectfully that a decision may harm both the leader and the institution. True loyalty sometimes requires disagreement because commitment to an organisation's long-term wellbeing must be stronger than the desire for immediate approval. This does not mean that dissent should become habitual opposition. It means that agreement should never be purchased at the cost of judgement.
Sanjaya's example becomes even more powerful when we consider the emotional conditions in which he performed his duty. Kurukshetra was hardly an emotionally neutral environment. He was reporting death, reversal, catastrophe and ultimately the destruction of Dhritarashtra's own sons to a father deeply invested in one side of the conflict. Yet his responsibility was to distinguish what was happening from what the king desperately wished were happening. Objectivity matters most when emotions are strongest.
Organisations face their own moments in which emotion threatens judgement: the collapse of an important project, a major financial shock, a public controversy, a failed acquisition, a reputational crisis or conflict among senior colleagues. Such moments naturally generate fear, defensiveness and attachment to earlier decisions. Yet this is precisely when institutions require more objectivity, not less. When setbacks occur, organisations need people capable of separating explanation from excuse, assumption from evidence and temporary difficulty from structural weakness. Calm assessment is not pessimism. It is a form of institutional responsibility.
There is also an ethical dimension to communication that goes beyond factual accuracy. Information can be technically correct and still create a fundamentally misleading picture. Selective statistics, buried adverse information, carefully framed disclosures or algorithmic outputs presented without proper context may contain individually accurate facts while leading the audience towards an inaccurate conclusion. A board presentation can disclose every required number and still conceal the seriousness of a problem through emphasis and omission.
Sanjaya suggests a higher standard. Ethical communication requires fidelity not merely to individual facts, but to the truth those facts collectively represent. The responsibility of the communicator is therefore not satisfied by being technically defensible. It also requires asking whether the recipient has been given a fair understanding of reality.
At the same time, Sanjaya teaches the important distinction between counsel and control. He could observe, interpret and advise Dhritarashtra, but he could not compel him to choose differently. This remains highly relevant for advisers, specialists and senior colleagues. Integrity requires the courage to advise honestly, while wisdom requires humility about the limits of one's authority. One must present the strongest judgement possible without assuming that giving advice creates ownership over every final decision.
There is another, less obvious lesson in Sanjaya's conduct. The messenger must not become the protagonist. Sanjaya witnessed one of the greatest events of his age, yet he does not attempt to place himself at the centre of it. He becomes the medium through which knowledge travels. This is an important lesson for those who advise leadership. Good advisers do not need ownership of every successful decision or public recognition for every contribution. Their value may lie in improving the quality of judgement, asking the question others have missed or ensuring that the decision-maker sees the full picture. Influence need not always announce itself.
Yet even accurate information and sound judgement remain incomplete without moral discernment. Sanjaya's narration is not merely an account of troop movements and battlefield outcomes. It exists within the Mahabharata's larger enquiry into dharma, responsibility and human choice. A modern organisation can know exactly what is happening and still fail to ask whether what it is doing is right. The progression therefore should not end with information. It must move from information to understanding, from understanding to judgement, from judgement to dharma, and from dharma to action.
This also leads to perhaps the most sobering lesson. A leader may have a Sanjaya beside him and still remain blind. The presence of truthful advisers, reliable information and clear warnings cannot guarantee wise leadership if authority refuses to accept what it has been shown. Institutions often invest heavily in systems designed to improve decision-making, yet no system can compensate for a leader determined to hear only reassuring conclusions. The responsibility for truth therefore exists on both sides. Advisers must have the courage to speak, but leaders must have the maturity to listen.
Sanjaya possessed divya drishti, but perhaps his greatest gift was the discipline with which he used it. He saw without becoming intoxicated by what he saw, interpreted without manipulating, advised without flattering, remained loyal without surrendering judgement and conveyed painful truths without abandoning compassion. Today, we possess extraordinary tools that allow us to see more than any generation before us, from data and analytics to artificial intelligence. Yet our challenge remains remarkably similar. Can we distinguish information from wisdom, loyalty from obedience, reassurance from truth and knowledge from judgement? The ability to see is a gift. The courage to see clearly is a virtue, and the willingness to convey what one sees truthfully is a responsibility. But ultimately, even the clearest counsel is of little value unless leadership has the wisdom to listen and the courage to act.
Views expressed are personal. The Writer is Chairperson, Bharat Ki Soch
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from Millennium Post.