Lessons I Learned

I was just reminded about a friend, with whom I used to work, who wakes up every morning* and turns to whomever first crosses his path and says:

“Good morning! It’s a great day to be alive!”

And, if you wake up near him at a campsite for a few days in a row you soon realize that, indeed, it always is.

When people ask me why I chose to work in Cambodia, I almost always say “Why not?”  And when they give me a look that implies that they really do want to hear a longer reason, I usually ramble on a bit about change, and how it is palpable in Cambodia: forward, backward, and side-ward, but always some-ward. For a stagnant-a-phobe, Cambodia is a great place to be. It’s in motion and being in a place in motion means you can feed off of and into the momentum around you. I imagine working on the Thai/Burma border, with adults who have spent their ENTIRE lives in refugee camps, or in the consistent undulation of the Gaza disputes could be harder. In Cambodia, progress might sometimes seem slow or misdirected, but at least it does always feel like it is moving.

If you ask me on a verbose day (which is probably about a good 360 of the year), I might also tell you about a quote someone said to me on my first visit to Cambodia in 2002. “It’s a great time to be alive in Cambodia,” was part of her answer about why she loved her job. Alive… and time. Post 1979, after the Khmer Rouge had attempted to turn back time and when nearly a quarter of the population had died or were about to from starvation or ongoing fighting, Cambodia today seems like heaven. How does corruption effect you? “Well, it’s better than before,” she says. So indeed, it IS a great time to be alive in Cambodia, and it shows.

So perhaps that is part of why I chose to stay in Cambodia. And perhaps that is something I got out of living there, and out of Tim’s daily mantra. Today IS a great day to be alive. Now let’s go prove it

I don’t usually link to PEPY’s monthly newsletter in my blog, but the song from the PEPY Tours video in here won’t get out of my head, so I thought I’d infect you with it too.  (Click on the image to see the newsletter)

Yep, that song is a Khmer rap song. Yep, it’s pretty awesome. Do YOU wanna ride with us? Awwwww, yeah…. I hope it will be in your head all day too so you can spread the Khmer rap love around the world.

Making a monthly newsletter at PEPY is something we have been doing since 2005 and you can watch the progress and change of our vision and learnings if you flip through old additions. We’ve kept up this practice over the years as we believe that having a monthly newsletter is more valuable than just a platform to connect with supporters. It’s a way to share the lessons we have learned, reach out to other NGOs working in similar sectors, give travelers information about global philanthropy issue, and allow us to highlight a place which often gets media coverage with a different bias through a new window.  Read up, ride with us or at least sing the song, and let me know if/how you’d like to see the PEPY newsletter improve to add more value in the world

Both “participatory development” and “design thinking” theories advocate for project planning to start with the needs of the end-user. It’s interesting to me that both concepts illustrate pretty much the same intuitive process, yet the naming of both makes them seem less broadly applicable. I guess maybe that’s because “Successful impact-for-the-end-user-focused-planning” is a much less sexy name!

I had dinner last night with a fabulous crew of Rhodes Scholars who are studying everything from love to girls education in Pakistan. In addition to learning about Heidegger, I learned more about the work some of them do with an Oxford based NGO which supports programs in southern Africa. Part of their role is helping to vet project proposals.

They mentioned that when a project was proposed to them they weren’t able to tell if the proposer had considered other alternatives as the only material available to them was their current hypothesis for success. Here is a little brainstormed list of some questions that they could put on their application form to both check for and encourage “design thinking/participatory” planning.  I’d love YOUR thoughts on what questions they could add or what things you would change!

Potential questions to ask in a project proposal application form to check for an end-user impact focus:

a)    What is the goal you are working towards?

b)   What alternative actions/plans have you tried or considered outside of the proposed project which you have rejected and why?

c)    Who are the stakeholders in your proposed project, how do you know/relate to them, and how have their needs/opinions shaped your project proposal?

d)   What is your proposed project?

e)    How can you measure success towards your goal through this project?

f)     What are some potential barriers to success for this project?

g)    Can you already anticipate some ways you might need to alter your given plan if your hypothesis is unsuccessful? What might some of those ways be?

We had previously been discussing the importance of NGOs marrying themselves to an impact goal rather than the hypothesis for success which is their “plan”. This is probably the same for a novelist, an entrepreneur, a parent….. all of us. We sometimes “think” we know how to reach a goal, and we continue down the path of trying to prove that plan correct until sometimes we reach the point of failure. We were discussing how it is important to flush out many possible paths to a goal before deciding which hypothesis to consider and then how important it is to be able to notice the signs of failure fast so that you can iterate and adjust quickly towards reaching a goal. If impact “success” is the goal, it might be achieved in this manor though the executed plan will likely look very different than the original proposal.

First off, do you believe that this type of thinking is important or not, and if so why?

And second, what questions would you add/change/remove from the list above to encourage and understand this thinking?

Hope to hear your thoughts!

Clearly, business school is getting the better part of my time and my blog is being neglected. I have though had many posts written in my head….. my fingers just haven’t gotten to typing them!

None of this is new, I don’t think. I couldn’t stand to listen to my own voice for that long, so I actually haven’t heard this all…. but this is an audio interview I did this past summer about PEPY and the lessons I have learned through our work. If you want to know more about PEPY, and you feel like hearing me ramble, here you go

http://www.voicesofthecliff.com/?p=853

“Voices of the Cliff” presents interviews hosted by Douglas Scherer about the journeys and transformations of leaders, with an emphasis on authentic, sustainable, and socially conscious leadership.

This is a guest blog post by Allie Hoffman of The Pari Project. Before I left Cambodia, Allie took over the TEDxPhnomPenh license and recently organized a team to execute Cambodia’s second TEDx event. Below she describes our motives for starting this event in the first place, how doing something “for the local people” only works if it is “with”, and how the juxtaposition of expat and local development workers can lead to interesting personal insights.

I am sad that I missed this second TEDxPhnomPenh event, but I’m proud of the team that put it together and I love learning about the impact it is continuing to make. Read on to learn about Allie’s journey through this process!

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From the start, TEDxPhnomPenh was about bringing the TED brand – ideas worth spreading – to Cambodia, where we thought young people were hungry for the opportunity to share, question, challenge, explore and create. Our version of TEDx was centered around young Cambodians and what the event might mean to them.

Executing the event the first time, we had a room full of 120 people who experienced 12 amazing TEDxTalks. The audience, we estimate, was 70 – 75% Khmer.

We just recently organized the second TEDx in Cambodia. This time we wanted to expand the brand, and include more people in the TEDxPP experience. So we got busy planning a second event – a simulcast event – and set up a team to execute that, while the team for the live event stayed busy coaching speakers, counting tickets, and dressing up the space so it was camera ready.

Two weeks before the event, the MC, Vanna Sann asked me to lunch. Everyone loved having Vanna as the MC. He is well-spoken, articulate, clever and totally in tune with the event and what we were trying to do.

He had seen the ticketing spreadsheets; the entries showed over 75% Western attendees. We had set up a system that required people to electronically submit for a ticket. We thought the system would run itself, as long as we promoted via Khmer media channels. With all of the rest of the planning going on, I had not been carefully monitoring the results.

What I had not expected was that the young Khmer population at whom we were targeting the event would not be as quick to register as their Western counterparts.  Vanna was brutally honest: “I’m not doing this so that I can look out onto that audience and see a bunch of Western faces.”

Sitting at the lunch table, it felt like he was taking my internal conflicts about who I want to be in Cambodia versus who I am comfortable being, and throwing them back. It is easy to be a foreigner working in development in Phnom Penh; it’s a lot harder to push past the immediate comforts of lovely restaurants, great bars, and a lively social life – to create something enduring in a culture that I am still learning about.

I got back to the office, turned a sheet of paper over, and scribbled on the back:

Collaboration & Openness
Empowering People/Providing Opportunities
Creativity
Innovation

Seeing those words in print changed something. Over the next two weeks, we went into the database and reworked the ticketing, bringing us to 60% Khmer attendance by the time the event came around. We lost one MC, but gained another: Thul Rithy. Charismatic, funny, clever and sarcastic: he was amazing. Now he will go on to continue to lead KhmerTalks, which he founded as a way to spread the TED experience in Khmer. KhmerTalks returns to Phnom Penh on February 25^th. His participation in both events brings the ‘ideas worth spreading’ movement forward significantly.

In the end, the event went off without any major glitches. The stage that day hosted 14 talks including speakers came from America, Australia, Cambodia, India, New Zealand, Spain and Singapore.

One of my favorites was Khiev Kosal. Convicted of attempted murder at age 16, he grew up in a prison system in the US that somehow allowed him to find his voice. After being deported to Cambodia upon release, he now shares his poetry via spoken word. As he got off the stage, one of our technicians was in tears. They embraced for a long time; as others crowded around to congratulate him on what had been an enormously commanding 18 minutes, they held close – complete strangers – both sharing something powerful with the other.

I knew leading TEDxPhnomPenh would challenge me. I didn’t expect the challenge to be so personal. Am I changed? I think so. I find myself looking at the hiring process at Pari differently, asking different questions to potential clients, staying longer in certain conversations, migrating to different people in social settings. Will it last? Here’s hoping.

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This was a guest post by Allie Hoffman of The Pari Project.

I’m starting my first week of classes at the University of Oxford in their MBA program, and I realize that I am not in the minority for having chosen this program because of its connection to the Skoll Center and its focus on “social entrepreneurship.” Many of the people I have met state that some aspect of “better” business is what brought them here…. well, that and the fact that you get to study in an institution with 800+ years of history and where some of the world’s most brilliant minds have gathered. It’s a fascinating place!

During our first week of orientation we had an optional day and a half session on social innovation that opened with Pamela Hartigan, director of the Skoll Center, speaking about how she thinks the word “social” needs to be removed from “entrepreneurship”. I couldn’t agree more, especially given the reception these concepts have received from some of my MBA classmates.

The polarization of “entrepreneurship” and “social entrepreneurship” implies mutual exclusivity. If you are a “social” entrepreneur, do you somehow get to claim moral superiority over your every day entrepreneur? Many of the most mission driven organizations I have seen have never heard of nor benefited from the term “social enterprise”, so why do we make this distinction? Is this naming trend causing us to forget that ALL business has the responsibility to not only increase profits for shareholders, but also respect and support the world around it?

I view “social” enterprises as businesses working towards social changes as their mission above maximizing income. We don’t call Colgate a social enterprise, but if a group said they were starting a business with the explicit mission of getting toothpaste out to people all over the developing world to reduce tooth decay, we might consider them so. If a group with a stated social mission took on the same business as Colgate, would just the motivating factor be enough to note the difference? Or, would there be no difference at all? And towards that end, should programs like mine be working to remove the polarizing “social” from the entrepreneurship to attract more MBA’s who don’t associate at all with the social side of this curriculum. Perhaps through their drive for successful businesses they will be ones who have the largest ability to make changes in the world?

Relying on free market approaches to global development does leave me with some additional concerns many stemming from a lack of a systematic way to define what “social” impact is. If we believe that people will vote with their money for the things they believe in, then we might take the mindset that as long as you had a socially driven society, the market would drive social improvements. The dilemma here is that the social/environmental implications of certain purchases are not readily available to influence consumer decision making. More worrying is that much of this complete impact understanding is also not readily understood or sought out by business leaders themselves. If we don’t know our social impact and can’t measure it, how can we improve it?

It turns out the same dilemmas causing failures in the NGO world are at work in business. An inability or lack of effort to measure impact and tie positive impacts to future decision making, both for donors and consumers, is creating inefficient markets where funding is going to areas which, with full informational clarity would be less desirable options.

How do we mesh all of the good intentions on one side with all of the business drive on another and make all parties realize that we can and are working towards the same goals? I’m so excited to see where this year takes me and all those of us on this course and how this unique MBA program will impact the work we all take on throughout our lives. Let’s hope that in the future the “social” doesn’t need to be listed as a distinction as a better understanding of the complete spectrum of impacts of our work will be available to all business leaders and consumers and we will all prioritize a better world in designing our businesses.