Sylvia's Journal

Today is our big event for this week. We call it the Senior Alignment Meeting. The purpose is to bring senior government officials on board with our leadership initiative by exploring links between the things that keep them awake at night and the promises of this program. When we did this program in Nepal a couple of years ago only 7 people showed up of the 35 invited and we did not quite get the alignment we had hoped (we got it later). Here it looks like we’ll have the opposite. We would have been happy with 10 people but the latest tally is nearing 40. Whether numbers correlate with degree of alignment remains to be seen.

I went out with a longtime friend last night who I had not seen since I last worked in Ghana in 2004. I had my first not starchy meal (Tigerprawns and haricots verts, or, as they used to be called when we lived in Senegal, Harry Couverts). We caught up and compared experiences of getting close to our sixties; we who always thought only other people got old. I received a good overview of the lay of the land, at least one person’s perspective and received some advice that may prevent surprises. Much of this has to do with expectations and people taking things so for granted that they fail to articulate them. This is what sometimes gets foreigners in trouble. We assume, but we don’t check. So last night I checked. It is all part of the leadership practice we call scanning

During the day we designed and prepared for this important meeting with four members of our newly built facilitator team. To get us in the right frame of mind, we started the day with a wonderful internet slide show called an Irish prayer that was sent to me the night before by one of my colleagues whose mother just passed away. It is about wishing people not smooth sailing and beds of roses but the things that help you through rough times. It was about all the things that we experienced over the last six months.http://www.e-water.net/irishblessing_en.html

We had a very productive day. The resulting design of the meeting today is better than the draft I did on my own the night before. I had used some of the Ghanaian Adinkra symbols that mean something I felt was relevant for this program and us as a team: Two Heads are Better than One; Doing the Unusual or the Impossible, and Unity.

The leap of faith part is that I have not yet seen any one of the team members facilitate. Some people might say that it is risky to do this with such high level folks but for me it is a calculated risk. It will test my belief that facilitation is easier and less likely to go off the tracks if the design is robust. Most of the failures I have seen in meetings were a direct result of not having a design at all.

I discovered that several of the people I met with during the nutrition meeting At UNICEF in New York a month ago are actually meeting again across town, right here in Accra. There is a lot of traveling and meeting going on in the world I live in and I wonder when some of these people are ever home. But maybe people also wonder that way about me.

While I am preparing for the immediate future, as in today, I am also, on the side, preparing for other trips over the next few months, Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Afghanistan. I am catching up with my old lifestyle and it makes me happy. The assignments are exactly the kinds of things I like to do.