NSM 3: General sharings

The takeover party just rocked with the theme: Red light district! Luigi and me got elected as the couple of the evening but unfortunately not elected...
But aren't these just hot chicas??
It's ok, the other election was more important :-)



On day 3 and 4 of the conference we created the plan by analizing the strategy map with all its critical success factors, looked for the causes why this isn't the case for Ecuador at the moment and came up with initivatives to work on it. It was a really good approach and the people in the teams I was facilitating worked really great. I'm telling you, there is a lot to do in PD...!!

General things that were new to me:

• Daily capture:
  This takes place in the morning plenary and a person who disturbed the conference, fall asleep or did anything bad is asked on a chair in front. Then he or she gets asked questions. If their right nothing happens but if the answer is incorrect they get punished. Well fair enough if the questions are useful although most of them are damn difficult or just stupid so that they cannot be answered anyway.
  Punishment 1: A bottle of water
  Punishment 2: Flour over the head
  Punishment 3: a egg to top the whole thing up.
  When I saw it the first time I was really shocked because to me that's just over the top and way too hard because it's not really a test about if someone got the session yesterday when you ask how many people from Quito are present at the conference...

• Time management:
  Normally the job of the chair is to manage the time. Yes we all know punctuality is a different thing in latin america. But the time management of the agenda was so bad that we had to skip sessions such as evaluation of the day, a lot of breaks and cut down time on others. Which to me is just to bad. They are really useful sessions which are just left out... Reason why is especially because the morning plenary takes way too long when we do dances first, then every LC plus MC does Roll Calls (not only shouts) and the silly punishments of the chair usually took ages (20min and more)!
  When you start the morning plenary already late I don't get it why they do all the roll calls and therefore have to cut down on really important sessions such as local planning or area meeting. At the last day I only had 45min to meet with my PD guys instead of the 1.5 hours that were planned in the agenda. Of course I didn't manage to do all I wanted to do meaning discuss about some hot topics but could only agree on priority of the hot topics which we are going to discuss first online...
  I will really stress it out in the MC that if we create an agenda with a timing that it is for something. Otherwise we don't need to do it, right?!

• Comming to the point:
  What I'm used from back home about talking is when you have to say something you express your opinion and come pretty directly to the point. Time is money, right?
  Over here it's different in the way that people talk much much more around the point. Often with a huuuuge introduction they come to the point underline it with I don't know how many examples and do a fade out. Or often they don't come to the point at all. I've met people at the conference who got up and spoke for quite a long time without saying anything...
  You can even go for questions like: Tell me your priorities from the following 4 topics. And you might expect an answer such as: TtT nr. 1, Mentoring nr. 2 and so on. But what you get is answers like, well in my LC mentoring started... blablabla
  Sometimes this is kind of difficult for me to deal with, especially if there is a certain time pressure you have to deal with...

• Breaks
  As I was saying before they often didn't take place at all. We just had a dance or two and that was it. When the so called coffee breaks took place it was just a break - without coffee and cake. The inkind raising is not really well introduced here which is pretty much a fact about the selling knowledge of @ers and the attractiveness of the conference as well as the market in Ecuador...

Well, this sounds as if I was just neglecting and complaining about what is going wrong. But believe me, I don't. I'm just noticing about all the differences there are. It's interesting to find them out - that's one big reason for being here. But not only to know cultural differences, I want to understand them and live them. I'm part of this now and I accept a lot of it. Still I have my personal values, my point of perspective that I won't (or cannot) give up just like that.
I consider it as both sided learning...

Legislation output:

Since my proposals about having two memberraisings and 2 LDS a year came through it was about creating a new flow of the conferences in @Ecuador. My idea about this big conference called "singergia" died already on the first day as it's written in my post "NSM 1". But I forgot only the idea about getting newies for all the 4 days but not the option of a 4 days SDL with a 2 days conference for newies (aiesecitos how they are qutely called over here) only on the weekend to use at least a certain sinergy. Fact is that I just wanted to reduce work for every LC so that the amout of conferences they have to organise with SEMOFO and @XP doesn't double, have a bigger conference that is easier to sell and get more people together so that they start to understand the big local differences in this country by experiencing them.
But people didn't want it. They prefer organising 4 local conferences each year. Main reasons for this decision was that there is no site in Ecuador for 200 people for 4 days at the price of $30.- and more a conference shouldn't cost - people wouldn't come since it would be too expensive. The capacity of people is another reason for letting the idea down because they think an OC would be overforded by this huge event. Furthermore they were afraid that the quality of each track would suffer and the sessions not well organized and delivered...

Summary: I'm happy about the legislation of my proposals and accept the new conference flow but already have some ideas that I want to work out (such as a feasability study, SDL with a one day national learning activity, forum or whatever).

The process of change takes time - a lot of time...
does anybody have some to lend me - I need more...!

That's how we demonstrated our theme of the conference "PASS THE PASSION" and know the MC 06-07 won't stop doing so!