Sylvia's Journal

I joined a small group of people, most of them nutritionists, as they continued their strategizing about how to implement a Gates Foundation -funded project aimed at moving the nutrition agenda forward in a number of countries with high levels of malnutrition and stunted growth of children. They had met earlier with a larger group in Geneva. At that meeting seeds were planted to explore alternatives to UN expert-driven needs assessments. I was invited as a change management expert and was asked to answer the question: what are the components of readiness for change and how do you assess these?

We met on the 10th floor of the UNICEF building in a small windowless meeting room. Because we were less than 20 people, as per UNICEF’s rules, we did not get coffee or lunch catered, so we drank water from little plastic cups until our coffee break that required descending 10 floors.

It was a new world for me, with new abbreviations and jargon and peopled with professionals who had known each other for many years. The meeting was very informal; a good thing, as I went way over the minutes allocated to my presentation. Although what I presented resonated with people’s experiences, it also put some question marks around the planned agenda items as I questioned the underlying premises of their design. It was perfect because my intervention (an expert coming in presenting new ways of doing things) mimicked exactly what this group planned to do in the targeted countries. I asked them to reflect on that experience, of being on the other side of the change initiative. The same things came up that they will have to deal with in their work: discomfort about suggestions of abandoning familiar process in exchange for something that is not taught in nutrition school; worry about time pressures, the extra work, losing some control and not being able to rely on their own professional networks to provide expertise in large group process facilitation.

Andre Gide said “One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.” Some people in the group were ready to push off and others were more cautious. One thing everyone agreed on is that they would need lots of leadership, and they would need it at all levels. It was a congenial group of people and I enjoyed spending a day with them.

I left the meeting before it was over, not wanting to miss my flight. I added an extra hour to the departure time suggested by my hosts which was smart. Between the taxi ride and the security line I used up two full hours, only to find out that my flight was delayed by one hour.

My taxidriver was from Bangladesh. He spent the first 45 minutes of our ride talking incessantly to me. I learned everything about his kids, he dictated me cooking instructions for making Tandoori chicken the Bangladeshi way (much better than the Indian way of course), pausing after each cooking step to ask me ‘do you understand?’ Then he moved on to recite (and explain) the entire menu of the restaurant ‘Curry in a Hurry’ operated by a friend of his. At that time I began to tune out and watch the 10th iteration of a looping TV show on local eateries in Manhattan that serve high cholesterol breakfasts (I had seen the same loop also for one hour on my way into Manhattan on Wednesday evening). Luckily his cellphone rang and the next half hour I was treated to a loud and excited telephone conversation in Bangla. I recognized the frequent ‘atcha’s’ which I believe means something like OK. Sometimes it wasn’t clear who he was talking to, so from time to time I made a sound that showed I was paying attention.

I did little walking yesterday but when I did, upon my arrival at the airport, I suddenly realized I walked normally. I toed off the way I am supposed to and I think my gait was indistinguishable from other normal walkers. It felt great and very different from my walking a day earlier. I had hoped that I had entered a new phase of my foot’s recovery or maybe I was simply well rested. At any rate it gave me a boost. This morning, however, I woke up with a new set of pains in my foot. My body seems quite adept at inventing new discomforts….and so the beat goes on.