Sylvia's Journal

This is probably the last trip of the year, unless I decide to accompany Sita and Axel to Paris early December for a meeting of the Valueweb that both are members of. Or I go to Holland to visit my Irish twin brother who has been fighting multiple staph infections in a hospital in Holland. Or I go to India to visit my team in Gujarat to play and work a little, and keep pushing the string that is our proposal for working with the department of urban development in UP.  All sorts of possibilities!

Yesterday (today? Last night?) we arrived in Jo’burg after the now familiar long flight from Atlanta. Aside from a few minor zigzags halfway through the trip, smack in the middle of the vast Atlantic ocean due to string headwinds, the flight was smooth. I had requested an upgrade to B-class but didn’t get it and so I folded myself in Delta Comfort seat 33D, next to a nice young man from Virginia who sets up call centers in South Africa (yes, he had seen ‘Outsource’). We chatted for a couple of hundred miles and then he fell asleep and I did not.

Axel sat 6 rows behind me on the other side of the plane and lucked out – an empty seat between him and a young man by the window who slept the whole way huddled over his tray table.

I read one book and then listened to another by the same author who I had just gotten to know trough a webinar on Thursday. Her approach (Cy Wakeman’s reality-based leadership), smashed a good part of my collection of taken-for-granted management and leadership beliefs. I loved her challenges to conventional wisdom, especially since they are backed up by research and resonated with my experiences, especially my recent facilitation experience in South Africa. It was a timely discovery as my proposed design got kind of thrown out the window and I found myself traveling to South Africa with empty hands/head as to what I was going to do. 

I am slated to facilitate 5 retreats this week, three half day retreats and two whole days. The first one is on Monday and will be more of a design conversation as there is no agenda – only a list of topics. Searching for some way to turn the list of topics into a coherent agenda, the universe came to my rescue and put Cy Wakeman on my path. I will propose her ideas and see where we go from there. It’s a journey. I may propose a road trip as the central metaphor for all of the retreats this week.

We landed in summer (85F), 7 hours ahead of the wintry cold day of departure. In the olden days this would have been a change of enormous proportions (imagine a 6 week voyage over stormy seas and no land in sight for weeks on end). But now it’s a cinch and we take it all in stride. It’s an important perspective to hold as we will be talking a lot about change this week (but not about change management, as that is one of the concepts that I have now jettisoned).

We are lodged in a low rise apartment complex that is around the corner of a number of restaurants, their terraces filled with people enjoying wine and good food. Axel is in heaven: good wine and a nice steak with Malagasy pepper sauce. I was also in heaven with a well prepared steak tartare and a nice glass of South African Sauvignon blanc, something we rarely get in the US where New Zealand dominates that Sauvignon. Although very tired (and alcohol not usually a good idea), we ordered the most expensive bottle of red wine (US$20), thinking we would each have a glass and then take the bottle home.  We ended up drinking the whole thing, managed to walk in a straight line to our apartment, just meters away.  And then I collapsed, to wake up in the middle of the night and write.