Sylvia's Journal

More calls, more negotiations, explorations of options, but all separate conversations, one-on-one phone calls, small meetings with key actors missing, not sitting around a table together. This is hardly possible as centrifugal forces pull everyone into parallel or intersecting orbits, never the same. If you’d try to map these orbits it might look like a drawing from an angry child; Separates that do not make a complete wardrobe; stuff not adding up. How anyone can concentrate on doing anything well seems like a miracle. Still, stuff does get done.

I have made a new proposal, just one event, to dip the toes into the water and try this new thing that’s not called a training program. I use the word conversation. It would be actually a series of structured conversations over three days or so with all the key actors of one program together. It would have to be the family planning program because of the funding source but it really doesn’t matter – it could have been any program. And all of the conversations would concentrate on where the rubber hits the road – where the services are delivered in whatever way they are or should be.

I remember from watching a video of Parker Palmer talking about medical education where he insists that the whole patient sits in the middle of the conversation – all the time; something like that. The way to get the – in this case provider-client interaction – in the middle of the conversation I would ask them to spend an entire day either shadowing a community or outreach worker on visits or working side by side with service providers in a health facility (health post, clinic or hospital). It will not be easy to actually organize this, but that is also a matter of finding the right people (it always is), who understand the concept and are excited by the idea.

I wrote a long email to the chief of the Health Services and his HR Director and ended it with a quote from Scharmer’s Theory U book: “On the one hand it is the experience of shaping something: that’s a source of empowerment. On the other hand, it is to see the context in which you and your colleagues work. That changes your view of the larger system. You learn to see the meaning of your work in the context of the whole (region, program). Seeing that larger whole and how you relate to it is empowering. Through your better knowledge about how the system works, how the region (or program works), and by getting to know [all these] people you end up having a different access to making things work – things tend to flow more effortlessly.” (Since I read him on a Kindle I don’t have the page number, one Kindle flaw for people like me who are always looking for quotes.)

Although I am not entirely sure how this will come together I know for certain that this idea will produce the desired outcome: a small group of people who see the potential of such conversations and want more of them, with more people. I dare to stake my reputation on that – if only given the chance. I have done something like this before, nearly 10 years ago in South Africa’s Eastern Cape with the entire top team, led by its energetic chief. Not much came of it I believe because soon after the outing the chief died at the young age of 51. In the midst of paying attention to everything and everyone else he was not paying attention to himself. He died of a heart attack. Since then, when asked “what is the most important thing for leading at the top?’ I always say, “stay alive.’ After all, no matter how good you are as a leader, as a dead leader you are no good at all.

And now, onwards home after a brief catching of breath and buying of cheese in Amsterdam.

Although I didn’t feel so positive as I headed into town to speak with the HR director, road signs tried to cheer me up that good things were afoot. “French begins with you & it is possible” exclaimed a small hand painted sign tacked to a gnarled tree near the city-central cemetery.

A huge bill board from one of the main cell phone companies promised that the world would be one in 2010 and that it (the company) couldn’t wait. The small soccer ball in the corner indicated that this was only true for soccer lovers. The company operates in many countries so the odds are that ‘it’ will win. And then there was the giant national monument promising Freedom and Justice, the national motto, presumably for all; a lofty ideal that still has a way to go.

All over town there are two sets of political signs, one with the candidate who won, and his running mate, sometimes depicted as very dark skinned and on other signs as very light skinned. I wonder whether that is a printing error or intentional to appeal to all shades of Ghanaians; the party that lost also still has its giant signs up saying that their man is the best. May be he was but he did not win.

We had a long and frank conversation about this senior leadership program that I am trying to get started. There appears to be a reluctance to say no to the donors and their particular agendas. I am not hearing the ‘no thank you’ although I have suggested it as an option. Maybe I will hear it today.

Of course there is also the option of looking at the funding, with all its strings attached, as an opportunity to also get something else done or to re-negotiate the strings (possible, I am told by the donor). Once again, it appears to be a conversation that is not happening – instead I witness meetings in which people don’t really say what they mean, or, to paraphrase Martin Buber, don’t mean what they say. No wonder we are all in trouble.

So I have shifted my framing of what we can offer: a series of conversations rather than a training program, in which we can slowly rebuild the feedback loops that have been severed or missing, and hear the stories from the heart rather than the intellect. I think I can do that and today I will find out whether I’ll get that chance. Or I’ll finally hear the no, and I’ll have peace with that too as it means the timing was not right.

It was clear that my unconscious was not done with the events and insights of the day after I went to sleep. One dream put me in a winter landscape, on slippery ground where my guide plunged a long way down into a stream. He could have been killed but he survived. A wild fox that looked suspiciously like Alison’s corky Abby jumped from tree branch to tree branch overhead like a flying squirrel, it colors brilliant against the white winter landscape. I know that in Native American medicine the squirrel tells something about squirreling away nuts for later; busy now with collecting, safe later during the bleak days of winter. I certainly have been busy collecting impressions this week and have stored them (on this blog and in my mind) for later.

I wrote a message in the guestbook for my friend Susan from Alaska who has just been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. It is odd to be on the guestbook side of Caringbridge, a site so familiar to me as an author during our first 5 months of recovery. I am glad to know how important these messages are and that we are all given the chance this way to follow her in her journey and cheer her and her family on. This journey will take her to Boston repeatedly I suspect and I hope to see her in person at some point. It does put things in perspective.

After our first day of work in Ghana I can say that we made progress on one front and were set back on another. The senior leadership program is beginning to take shape. We got something I have wanted to get for months: a determination of which teams shall participate. We also have a rough idea on when this program might start and who will facilitate. I am testing the model that we constructed only a week ago in Cambridge on what sets senior leaders apart from the district teams we have been working with here in Ghana – that got a good response too.

The next hurdle will be to get attention from the very (very) busy senior leaders and their subordinates so that we can explore what they are up against, collectively and individually. We are calling and trying to get appointments but so far no luck. I have used up one of my 4.5 days here, so this will be an exciting race against the clock.

The setback is that the submission of our research proposal to the authorities, which we had thought had been duly submitted as required three weeks ago turned out to have been lost in between offices. This led to a frantic scramble to get official letters from collaborating institutions here and in the US, and a new document, written according to guidelines that have only now been revealed to us, a literature review, consent letters, etc. People and organizations like ADRA and GIMPA are coming to our rescue.

The document has to be delivered, in 13 bound copies, at the Ministry’s Research Unit early this morning – with no guarantee that the review board will get to it, or consider our handiwork of last night sufficient. The next meeting is in 2 months, too late for us to piggy back the low budget research project to the leadership development program that starts in one month. This delay would effectively nix the research project.

La Rue, bless her soul, is doing the re-writing as she knows about research and the requirements of Institutional Review Boards. I would have been totally flummoxed. My contribution was to deliver the connections and a cell phone with enough minutes to produce at least some of the letters and endorsements, including a phone call from the highest authority. Whether this will help remains to be seen and we are keeping our fingers crossed behind our backs. One step forwards, one (or two) backwards.

In the meantime a surge of energy is coming in through the internet from Sita who has set out, with her Value Web colleagues and graphic facilitator buddies to connect the dots around the world. The dots are all the people who are working for social justice and eradicating all sorts of bad stuff from the globe – not for profit but out of a deep sense of obligation, or simply the excitement of trying out something new. She is bringing idealist fervor to the table that is in sync with what our new president is trying to hold on to in the midst of public outcries and self-righteous and simplistic demands.

Sita wants me to connect her to other people who are experimenting at the edges, innovators, creative geniuses, social experimenters. It makes me search my mind for people in my network who love this sort of ambiguity, open-endedness, and would embrace the idealism of such an outrageous idea (what? work together, hook up with people around the globe, across disciplines to make the world a better place?).

It has been tried before and it can be tried again, each time a little different. The codeword I am learning, as I follow her quest, is re.co.de which stands for repetition (as in iteration), collaboration and design. I made a subfolder in my inbox to hold all this energy tightly together. I named the folder ‘Sita CTW’ – the last letters stand for Change The World.

But when I go through my network I find very few of the kind she is looking for and more of the kind who, I think, would ask me: what’s this all about ?(answer: an idea as in idealism); what’s the result ? (answer: we don’t know); what’s the outcome? (answer: something good); how would we measure that? (answer: beats me); who would benefit? (answer: everyone except the really bad people); who’s funding this? (answer: no one in particular moneywise, and everyone who joins, energy wise).

At a closer look of her last email last night I noticed that her signature stamp said, Sita Magnuson – Vice President, US – The Value Web. Imagine that, we have a VP in the family. I am so proud of her, not so much of the VP title, although that is certainly cool, but because of the energy she is applying to this connecting people to one another around the world for a greater good. It’s a long way from the moody adolescent who said she wanted to be a garbage collector in New York City because someone had convinced her they made so much money, and that’s what she wanted.