Sylvia's Journal

We went to Lucknow to show our wares. We did that today. Our proposal now may have some more hands to push it along. 

Much like at the university last week, now too we were dealing with a lot of moving parts, VUCA time again: until we started we did not quite know who was going to be in the room, other than that we’d have elected and career professionals in the room, an uncommon combination. We didn’t know when we would actually be able to start and how much time we had.

The participants to this experiment, acknowledged as such at the highest levels of the department, had come by car from Agra, a three and a half drive through the fog. Some arrived earlier than others, so we had a conversation about expectations. Most told us they were summoned, leaving real expectations to our imagination.

We had asked a graphic artists who we had put on our bid, whether he could create four visuals that represented four buckets of findings that we created out of the raw interview data from Ghaziabad. We told him we couldn’t pay him, and that it was an investment, just like all of us have been investing in this proposal. He did a superb and JIT job.

The morning we arrived in Lucknow, after our sleepless night, R scouted around to find a printshop nearby. They printed the four images on flipchart size (A1) boards. These we then used as small group  conversation starters. We did this for two reasons: one to find out whether the challenges and skill sets that were relevant in one municipality would resonate with elected and selected officials in another. The other reason was to show people a way of interacting with each other to make sense of ‘data’ – the things we had learned in Ghaziabad.

I am happy to say there were no PPTs, even though the conference room was superbly set up for that (a giant screen and all the cables built in) and everyone expected them. Instead we asked for a whiteboard to take notes. There was none when we arrived, but now there is a whiteboard screwed into the wall of one of the department’s brandnew conference rooms.

The day before the event we prepared and iterated several possible designs for an unknown number of participants, unknown starting time and unknown length of the session. My team mates made it clear that, no matter what, I had to establish my credibility first. They are my cultural interpreters so I listen seriously to what they say when it comes to culture and habits. Of course, we are taking some liberties with what people expect and are used to (like PPTs and sitting down all the time). After all, we are challenging the status quo and in particular habits that get in the way of UP reaching its very ambitious goals.

And so I did establish my credentials, helped by our client who introduced me and mentioned the various countries I had worked (including Nepal). I think that helped too.

I shared some of the latest trends and concepts and approaches in leadership and management development, drawing heavily on all the things I have learned from my subscription to WBECS since I left MSH. Then my team mates took over and led conversations, in two parallel small groups, focused on the information in the visuals. All this was done in Hindi. It was clear from the beginning that our program is going to have to be done in Hindi – some people were comfortable in English but most were not. Conversations in Hindi were so much more animated than in English. That evening I downloaded the Hindi program in Duolingo on my phone.

Although the session we had designed veered significantly from what actually happened yesterday, our plan turned out to be robust – we had focused on the outcome we were after, rather than a blow by blow time chart. We wanted to give people a taste of how we do capacity building and collaborative planning and problem solving. We wanted people to leave feeling hungry for more of what we had to offer (this they did). We also wanted to validate the challenges and skills sets we had identified as critical (they were).

We ended the two hour session with lunch. After a family photo in the enormous courtyard of the brand-new building, everyone was ushered into the office of the principal secretary of the department. Our client had decided it was good to work the iron while it was hot and have the participants provided immediate feedback to the man at the top.  We were asked to join (after they had discussed we know not what) and I gave a brief overview of our approach and philosophy. As we were told before we arrived, the PS would give us 15 minutes. It was like clockwork. Something really remarkable is going on here that is very different from the well worn stories people tell about Indian government bureaucracy.

We understood that the feedback would essentially open or close the door to our proposal that is currently lingering somewhere. In our final debrief with our client it was clear that we had the thumbs up. It is true that we had been a little concerned when some of the (more powerful) participants had said we hadn’t given them any solutions, only focused on problems. Our client told them, with a wink and a twinkle in her eye, that this had not been the intent of the session and, in order to get to solutions, the department would have to pay us. And this is where we took our leave. We’ll be in touch, she said.

We celebrated the efforts and good vibes of the day in restaurant that served Babur’s food. It was as if I was back in Afghanistan, except for the Indian rum (Old Monk) that accompanied my meal.