Sylvia's Journal

Because most of the training workshops are in the local language, and there are so many I couldn’t attend all, I have been rather disconnected from that what gives me life: helping people reflect on and better understand how their own behavior contributes to the status quo.

Being in this workshop for four days is reconnecting me to the core of what I am about. Even though my efforts to learn the language aren’t enough to let me follow the subtleties of the comments or questions from participants I can watch for the non verbal cues to tell me what is happening in the group and observe the kind of behavior that will get in the way of change.

There is much talk about ownership in my line of business, and in particular now in Afghanistan with the US Government’s policy of ‘Afghan First.’ But I see very little behavior, of participants and facilitators alike, in these kinds of workshops that will help develop a sense of ownership.

If you join a group to work on issue ‘x’ because you happened to be number 4 and the issue is discussed in group 4 then what responsibility do you have after you have delivered your workgroup’s flipchart with findings, suggestions, recommendations, or even an action plan? Instead of taking responsibility, as a number 4, I focus on being a good student and deliver a piece of work as per the teacher’s instructions, with the hope that the teacher will say that group #4 was the best.

This kind of group work is part of a workshop ritual that makes people proudly say their workshop is ‘participatory,’ an odd commentary on the concept of a workshop that comes from a tradition of lecturing. It’s self-delusional because the organizing team, the teachers or facilitators maintain responsibility for everything. When the participants go home and back to work the organizers/trainers/facilitators return to their office with rolls of flipcharts that will be typed up in due course (if they are at all) and, in the best of circumstances, appear as an annex to the workshop report that is produced – sometimes months later, if at all – because it is a deliverable. It’s my jaundiced view on workshops that comes from 30 plus years of workshopping or being workshopped.

This morning I saw and heard the reluctance of the participants to join a break-out group based on their expertise and/or enthusiasm for the four topics that had emerged as priorities. They ignored the lead facilitator’s prodding to do so and requested him to assign everyone to a group. This prompted me to talk about energy as our most precious resource and that it is their energy that will have to drive the change processes they say they want – not the production of a plan to please the facilitator (or me, the foreigner on the side).

I love to challenge people with the shocking statement that money is not our most precious resource. I always get a rise out of some of them when I say that. One rebutted me, saying, ‘but what about if I need to make copies and there is no toner?’ implying that the absence of toner would stop all efforts to improve on the status quo.

This time I did not have to engage with him on this very self-limiting view about resources; several other people came to my rescue with stories and arguments that showed how it is not the copy machine or the toner that will bring about change in Afghanistan.