Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.
Sharon and Priya have made a wonderful dinner tonight. We planned our next days with a lasagne and a glass of wine, some nice background music and some candle lights. On the weekend we’ll go to an orphanage. We also talked about various other activities. It’s been three very productive days and it’s great to share each others stories and experiences.
The past days we had interviewed the employees of our client RULIV. It seems they liked to talk with us and they gave us a lot of information. We had asked them questions which we had solicited carefully. We wanted to make sure we understand what their company (NGO) is all about and what their biggest needs are.
What I have realized is that they are all very good in oral communication. They are straight forward, non-political, genuine, friendly and passionate. There’s a lot we have documented already at this point based on the input we got. And the many interviews gave us a lot of insight in what they are doing and what the areas for improvement are.
I think Africans are very big in telling stories. Which is great. It’s really a big strength of them. Maybe that’s why they can do free speeches so well because they are used to it. But as with everything there are two sides of the coin. So because mostly everything is communicated verbally documentation, formalization and structure is missing sometimes. That explains why someone referred to their meetings as „talkshops“ (rather than workshops).
My colleagues have amazing skills. I think we fit very well together. Each of us brings in varying backgrounds. We’re here for less than a week and I have already learned a lot from them. This includes going for very structured approaches, lean processing, rephrasing and wordsmithing, conceptual thinking and so on … I am very glad to be part of this team.