Losing My Voice but Finding My Eyes

Losing My Voice but Finding My Eyes

It's the end of my first full day in the umudugudu (village), and I'm sitting in bed under my newly hung mosquito net, listening to the munching of our family cow outside our window and thinking about my whirlwind tour of the day.

We've begun the Immersion phase of the Innovation Institute, and like any good marketer, our research has begun with the old adage, "Know thy customer." Yet in Rwanda, that does not mean Googling competitors, administering a survey, planning a focus group, or commissioning a study in consumer insights. I don't have Excel or PowerPoint, and in fact I haven't turned on anything electronic in two days. How then, will we learn about the community?

One of the scariest and hardest things about this experience is not knowing Kinyarwanda. I feel like I am living the Rosetta Stone program. My vocabulary is doubling every day, but that still gives me very few words to ask any real business questions. Sitting with my family in the dark on the first night, we pointed at objects with our headlamps and repeated words from the English book from the local school in between long, awkward pauses. I thought to myself, This is never going to work. After just one day, however, I'm already seeing that losing my voice is going to help me to find my eyes, and that might just be the greatest asset we have at Think Impact.

I have already learned so much by just being immersed in this community for one day. In our welcome ceremony, no one had to say, "Murakaza neza (Welcome)." You could simply feel it in the song and dance and as we joined the village teams for a soccer scrimmage. No one had to give me a schedule. I knew it was time to get up when Mama Shalom started cleaning at 4:30AM, ad I knew it was time to shower when she brought me a bucket to bathe at 6:30PM. By watching the steady stream of children pass by our front yard, I have learned that school is Monday to Friday in two groups, morning and afternoon. I watched Mama cook a feast of cassava, sauce, meat, and beans with only a pot, a spoon, and a knife; and I am eagerly waiting for my cassava bread cooking lesson. I sat and listened to the kids playing, learning the steps until I could jump in (literally) myself in a ridiculous game of charades and song and dance with the neighbors laughing on the sidelines.

What is happening here? Without being able to ask the kinds of questions the MBA in me wants to explore, I'm having to find other tools to use. I smell the cleaner used to mop the floor and observe how carefully the house is cleaned. I hear the bicycles arrive at the front door. I touch my glass of chai tea and milk to learn whether it is safe to drink. Trying new foods that I can't identify in the dark, my sense of taste is helping me to learn the local plants and vegetables.

We do have translators to help us as this progresses, but I am already appreciating the power of simple observation. Without the distraction of my computer or phone and without the words to ask, I am learning by watching and by simply being present and engaged, knowing thy customer by living and breathing with them. I know there is more to learn than I will be able to absorb in the next seven weeks, but watching the neighborhood boys rig a battery pack out of a banana leaf, batteries, and rubber bands, and watching the kids untie the cow to jump rope, I can already tell you this: Watch out, world, I'm placing my bets now on these kids. I'm guessing our innovations this summer will come from not just talking but also watching and playing with them. They're already helping me to find my eyes.     

Phase 1: Immersion

June 23, 2012

So, what’s next? TIU is finished, and we are all ready to move to Rwamagana priovince and meet our host families. We will leave Kigali after lunch in time to get to the communities for what I hear will be quite the celebratory welcome ceremony.

Monday morning begins our real work with the “Immersion” phase of the Innovation Institute.  This phase of the Institute has three goals: build relationships, learn the culture, and uncover assets. This qualitative, ethnographic research is foundational to the larger innovation process. We will be interviewing, observing, and shadowing community members (and likely sweeping our homes, cooking dinner with our Mamas, and feeding the cows in between) for the next two weeks.

We will probably be offline for the entirety of this phase, but watch for another update on or around July 7.

Murabeho (good bye for now)! 

TIU Day 3: "We are all Rwandans"

June 23, 2012

Grave at the Kigali Memorial Centre

Over the years, I have read many powerful, moving books about Rwanda such as Romeo Dallaire’s Shake Hands with the Devil and Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow we Will Die with our Families and more. Despite its long, rich history and vibrant culture, it was much harder to find books on Amazon.com about anything besides the genocide and the rebuilding and reconciliation processes that have followed when preparing for this trip.

Walking around in the warm sunshine and soft breeze on the streets of Kigali then, it is difficult to not think about these stories of the genocide and the scars it must have left on this society and these people. This afternoon we visited the Kigali Memorial Center, one of nine national sites memorializing the genocide and the final resting place of 250,000 Rwandans. The whole thing remains difficult to comprehend, and despite our group discussions and lessons, it is hard to find the words to explain.

Names of genocide victims at the Memorial 

Yet at the same time, one of the most amazing things about our first few days here is the feeling of national solidarity and pride we have heard expressed repeatedly in the phrase, “We are all Rwandans.” It is moving and powerful and dare I say incredible. As we have talked about culture with our group and with the local young people we have met, this hopeful, optimistic sense of national identity is inspiring.

Entrepreneurship has come up over and over again in these conversations as one way to continue to rebuild and strengthen Rwanda, and the people here seems determined to not only find jobs but to create them. To the extent that our work with our communities this summer contributes to that growing entrepreneurial movement, I can’t wait to get started in earnest this week. While I still feel like I have more questions than answers, rather than focusing on the sadness of the past, I’m looking around and instead getting excited for the future of this beautiful Land of a Thousand Hills. 

View of Kigali City

TIU Day 2: Meet Team Nyarubuye

June 22, 2012

SEAL Team PT Kigali

It’s all about the LO (aka organizational behavior).  One of the most important tasks for our time in Kigali is investing in getting to know and developing strong rapport with our teams.  For example, Jason loves Dr. Pepper, and Emanuel’s dance moves put us all to shame. Before breakfast we began the day today with an adapted team building workout based on my favorite SEAL Team PT in Charlottesville. Day by day, all of these activities are helping us to learn more and more about one another.   

One exercise was particularly insightful. This morning we broke into smaller groups based on the communities in which we will be living.  We talked about our own personal mantras that guide our everyday thoughts and actions. While we each have distinct personal values and life experiences, it was interesting to see how the conversation evolved to identify the ways in which our world views converge rather than diverge.  

Team Nyarubuye, from L to R: Emily, Emanuel,
Tom (scholars) and Audrey (adviser)

After a few iterations, the four members of Team Nyarubuye (the name of the village in which we will be working) came up with the following visual representation of our shared values that inform our expectations and aspirations for the summer. I love how we combined our own personalities to find our formula for change. I think we have a wonderful team!

Through all of this, we are learning each other’s styles and preferences and how to communicate. I think this will create the culture of trust we will need through the highs and lows of the innovation process. 

We got a picture of our families!
I will be living with Mama Shalom and Papa Amiel
and their children starting Sunday!

TIU Day 1: What we stand for

Ice breaker of the day with Team Rwanda

June 21, 2012

Our whole team of scholars and advisers is now in country, and today market the official beginning of our official training at Think Impact University (TIU). We will spend from now until Sunday preparing to enter our communities and meet our host families in Rwamagana in the Eastern province with a wide variety of team building activities, technical trainings, language practice, cultural workshops, and local site visits.

I was thrilled that this morning began with a discussion of the mission and philosophy of Think Impact, as I think this establishes a really critical common foundation on which we can build our work this summer. I want to highlight three themes that dominated our dialogue today.

The tools of the trade. "The Innovator"
is our guide to the innovation process. 

• For vs. With. Perhaps most importantly, we talked about our work being in collaboration WITH rather than FOR the communities in which we live. This distinction is more than simply semantic, as it informs the whole approach we will bring to our work. We think of our community design teams as equal partners with essential assets to contribute to the innovation process. This is critically important.
• Needs vs. Assets. At first I struggled with this one. Don’t we need to figure out what the problems are before we think about solutions? Think Impact takes an asset based approach to development, meaning that will spend the first portion of the Innovation Institute focusing on assets rather than needs.  Traditional aid focuses on meeting gaps and filling needs, and this approach will encourage us to instead think about the strengths and capabilities of our partners.
• Outputs vs. Outcomes. Outputs focus on shorter-term, measurable, tangible results. Outcomes look for larger, systemic, qualitative change that is much more difficult to quantify. We want to use outputs to benchmark our progress along the way, but we will be focusing much more intensely on the quality of the inputs and processes we use to innovate. This will help to achieve the ultimate goal of co-creating and prototyping a product or service by the end of the summer.

Lunch break with Jayne from USC. 

We finished up the day with site visits to two local NGOs: Bridge2Rwanda and Generation Rwanda. Both programs prepare high school students to enter the university system. This was our first interaction with a group of young people, and through our conversations with them, it was exciting to begin to think how the themes and ideas of the Think Impact mission will inform and guide our work this summer. Get ready!

Arriving in Kigali

June 20, 2012

I am here! Our country director Noel and Patrick from Think Impact surprised me and got me at the airport just in time for dinner at our guest house last night. This morning I went running with our three advisors, Audrey, Ashlee, and Lazri, and caught my first glimpses of Kigali in daylight. It is beautiful! More soon - the rest of the scholar teams are all arriving in the next few hours.

First view of Kigali on this morning's exploration 

Pre-Arrival Reflections

June 19, 2012

I’ve spent the last few hours working on my final pre-arrival assignment for Think Impact, a reflection on our hopes, fears, and expectations for our experience. While I discussed some of my motivations professionally and personally for wanting to travel this summer in my last post, I thought I would also share candidly the things I’m worried about.

Disconnecting. I probably look at my phone 200 times a day, checking for new calls, texts, messages, etc.. I’m not kidding, and I know that means 8 times/hour. I am hyper-connected to my friends, family, the news, and everything electronic. I’m used to sending a picture or a note along as things happen in real time.  It will be very hard, but dare I say also very good, to be somewhere without electricity, water, or internet, and I am hoping that this will allow us to be fully present with our teams and communities for the next eight weeks.

Communicating. While my German and Spanish are admittedly pretty terrible, I know enough words that in most of the places I have traveled around the world that I have been able to read a menu and a map, understand the newspaper headlines, and greet and thank the people with whom I interact. Kinyarwanda is the most commonly spoken language in Rwanda, and I’m not certain that I can even correctly pronounce “good morning” (Mwaramutse) correctly let alone “thank you” (Murakoze). Our research here is based on our ability to converse with and understand our community members deeply, and I worry about our ability to communicate, to learn and appreciate the culture, and to build relationships without a shared, common language.

Trusting the Process.  I just had two years of this at Darden right, right? Well this is a different “Process.” I admit to being a compulsive planner, scheduler, and slave to Outlook, and I have neither planned nor scheduled anything for the next eight weeks. I have put my faith in Think Impact and the design thinking process. I know that this is a purposefully messy and complicated endeavor, and I am already practicing telling the planner in me that it’s ok if things don’t happen exactly on time or when I think they should.

We’re not all MBAs.  This means two things. One, I have to tone down the jargon and vocabulary that have come to dominate the conversations amongst my MBA friends. I have to learn to communicate with a more diverse set of colleagues with different assumptions, knowledge, and views of the world. Really we are lucky to have such diverse teams, and I am thankful for that. Second, Darden hard wired me to want to jump to “take action” quickly and deliberately even with imperfect information. I don’t know how quickly or deliberately anything will happen here. Neither of these things is necessarily bad, but they are things I am acutely aware of. They pose unique personal challenges of which I am already thinking about.

Impact. What are the motivations driving our work for each of us, and what kind of an impact will we be able to make in a relatively short period of time?  I’m very sensitive to the challenges of “doing development” well. Our flight is clearly filled with well-intentioned mission groups and aid workers, but how effective will any of us be?  I picked this program because I think it is has a sound methodology and is striving for the kind of long-standing relationships and collaborative, sustainable ventures that I believe in. I haven’t even thought about what kind of business we’ll be working on because I want to make sure the ideas are coming from the community members themselves. Still though this remains the hardest question for me both personally and intellectually.

I’m watching the plane tick closer and closer to our destination on the monitor on the seat in front of me, and I’m hoping we break through the clouds on our descent before the sun gets any lower in the sky so that I can get my first glimpse of Rwanda from the air. My next post will be on the ground in Kigali!

You're doing what???

June 17, 2012

These days my Facebook news feed looks like a real time edition of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego. Every time I look, my classmates have checked in at another exotic location around the world from Machu Picchu to the Kremlin and everywhere in between. Yet people still ask me, "You're doing what this summer? Rwanda... really?"

I got similar responses about our trip to Haiti last December with the Darden Haiti Development Project (DHDP). Then shortly after we returned, Darden Dean Bob Bruner posted a blog entry about his four aspirations for management education for 2012. It is for the reasons he described that I think it is important to use my last summer as a free agent to do something totally off the beaten path.

So, why go to Rwanda?

In Jerusalem with Darden, May 2011

1. To extend the reach of educational content and engagement beyond the border's of my home country. The classroom experience at Darden is incredible, but my travels to Israel, Jordan, Haiti, and, yes, Barbados (for my Darden roommate's wedding) through UVA have enriched my education immeasurably. I have never visited Africa, and the Think Impact Innovation Institute provides a unique opportunity to engage with a local community in a substantive, purposeful way. Every time I travel somewhere new, I come home with another lens through which to see the world, and I sense that I ask a different set of questions of myself and others as a result. These types of experiences are invaluable both personally and professionally and will improve my ability to contribute to the dialogue at Medtronic later this year and beyond. 

2. To learn to accomplish more with fewer resources. While the Dean focused on the use of resources in higher education, this goal appealed to me personally because I believe we as a society must continue to learn to find new ways to solve increasingly complex and challenging problems. In Rwanda, my teammates and I will be collaborating with social entrepreneurs to start new businesses, and this is precisely the kind of project I came to Darden to pursue. I define social entrepreneurship as creating markets and starting for-profit ventures that address social pain points, and I am confident that the momentum of the social entrepreneurship movement will push us all to think about how to use resources more efficiently and effectively. It is my hope that our time on the ground in Rwanda will help me to think strategically about how to do so to catalyze social change. 

3. To practice innovating. One of my favorite MBA classes was Professor Jeanne Liedtka's Corporate Innovation and Design course. The class used the ethnographically-based design thinking methodology to tackle seemingly entrenched problems and to identify new channels of innovation for real companies. The results were powerful for our clients. In Rwanda we will be using a similar approach in the design firm IDEO's Human Centered Design Toolkit (HCD). HCD focuses on using innovation as a tool to address social problems at the base of the pyramid. I am eager to apply the theories we studied in Jeanne's class in a radically different context in Rwanda. 

The DHDP team at a meeting in 
Port-au-Prince, December 2011

4. To speak up for what's right. This is the stuff I believe in. One of the long-lost treasures I found in my recent move was an award from my sorority at Lafayette naming me: "Most likely to save the world." Yet while I've spent nearly ten years pondering what exactly that means and studying international development in different ways,  the timing has never worked out to spend any extended period of time in the field. It's possible that I need to catch up on sleep after 2 years of business school, but this summer provides a perfect natural pause to pursue finally pursue this passion. There will always be a reason to stay home, but I still believe in the often-quoted saying from Margaret Meade: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." I know that now is the right time to make this trip. 


I extend a special thank you to the Batten Institute, the Center for Global Initiatives, and the Initiative for Business in Society for their support of this project and for the enthusiasm of the Darden faculty who encouraged me to go. I'm trying to set realistic goals for myself, my teammates and the program itself, but I am confident that the Innovation Institute will help me to reach for each of these aspirations in the next eight weeks. That's why I'm spending my summer vacation in Rwanda. 

Starting a New Chapter

The view flying into CHO

June 4, 2012

I started this post mid-flight on my last trip back to the East Coast with Virginia as “home.” Having just moved in to a new neighborhood in Northeast Minneapolis, I was overwhelmed with excitement for and anxiety about starting a new chapter of life post-Darden.  I was already feeling homesick for Charlottesville, and I was searching for reassurance that change can be good.

Jasmin at Pleasant Hollow Farm in 2002

As I stared longingly at the regal Blue Ridge Mountains below, I was reminded of the journey that brought me to Virginia the first place. In 2009, I wrote one of my grad school admissions essay about my dear friend Jasmin Edson and how her wise counsel and quiet encouragement helped me to make the bold decision to ride full-time after college in 2005. It was not easy, but that turned out to be one of the best and most powerful decisions of my life. My years riding in Virginia brought so many wonderful people and experiences, and they will forever influence the way I think about the world, people, relationships, and, yes, business.

Sitting on a hay bale in the aisle at Pleasant Hollow, Jasmin had taught me that there is time and space in life to pursue our many different passions.When it was time to leave The Plains, thinking of her during the grad school application process helped me again to find the courage to leave a place I loved to make another major life change in the decision to attend business school. 

The final dinner of Learning Team 38

Remembering this as we landed in CHO, I suddenly felt a sense of calm. When I came to Darden, I didn’t know how to add in Excel, I had never heard of NPV, and my Learning Team was a cast of strangers. I felt a sense of dread driving down 29 South similar to the one I was feeling now. Two years later, Charlottesville had become home in every sense of the word. Change is scary and will continue to be, but reflecting on this experience, I recognize that having the audacity to explore uncharted territory and start afresh and the conviction to pursue my passions has always enriched my life. 

Last week, June 12, marked nine years since Jasmin passed away after a tragic riding accident. Remembering her every day but this week in particular, I can't stop smiling, knowing that I am so fortunate to have had the opportunity to live the dream in Virginia and that I still have the courage to to think big and the ability to make things happen. I will strive to continue to do so in Minneapolis, Rwanda and beyond. Enjoy the ride.  

Welcome back to On the Beat

Friends,

It was strange to revisit this blog and read that the last time I wrote was in the heat of competition season in 2009. How things have changed since then! Despite the best of intentions to document life in Charlottesville, I was drowning in all things business school for the last two years, and I am just now resurfacing to the outside world.

I've just completed the second year of my MBA at the University of Virginia Darden School, and I will be joining Medtronic in Minneapolis in late August. First though, I am taking advantage of my last student summer to travel to Rwanda with the Think Impact Innovation Institute.

Please check back to follow the adventure from Charlottesville to Minneapolis to Kigali and beyond.

Cheers,

Emily