Daniel's blog

>I’m the boss, I’m the king,
meeting, briefing, brainstorming..

That’s how one recent Czech song describes the life of a busy nowadays manager. We live in a very fast-paced world and in our daily quests to do as many things as possible, we sometimes forget to slow down, to take a step back and to think about what we have recently been doing and what have we learned from it. To take some time off for debriefing!

We make lot of our decisions subconsciously using our intuition or we often rely on others to make decisions instead of us. By asking the right kind of questions debriefing allows us (and the other people around us) to understand what has just happened more in depth and to use it as a valuable experience for our future. It can also be a great bonding exercise.

I debrief often just on my own, with my team or, when running a seminar, with a large group of people.

Debriefing your own.
After an interesting experience I like to take time just for myself and to reflect of what I have just done and heard, to try to understand things beyond their face value and to try to put them down. My friend Sebastian likes to draw mind-maps of his leanings, somebody else writes a diary (or a blog!) and other people just sit down and think in their minds. The bottom line is that we draw simple and memorable conclusions of what we have just experienced so that we can use them in the future.

Debriefing with a team.
Regular debriefings are in my opinion one of the most important signs of well functioning teams. I like to take a time off with my team when we just sit down together somewhere quiet and we reflect our past experiences. We try to create a relaxed and supportive atmosphere in which we can openly share how we felt, we give each other feedback and at the same time we think how we come across as a team and how much impact are we having. It is very important to understand each others opinions on these issues and each others working styles as it such understanding can easily prevent future conflicts.

Debriefing with a large group.
Debriefing with lot of other people you do not know very well can be a powerful exercise if done properly. It is again important to create an open and supportive atmosphere in which people will feel comfortable to stand up and share with others what they have learned and how they felt/feel.

In AIESEC we often organize conferences where we run sessions for our members to inspire them and to develop their skills set. One of my favourite ways of structuring these sessions is to let the delegates play a game which puts them them in a certain situation – e.g. tests their team-working, leadership and time-management skills – and than let them debrief by giving them a set of questions to answer firstly in small groups and than with everyone.

This is very effective for three reasons. Firstly, as I mentioned earlier, people do not often realize what they have just learned – saying it out loud forces them to think about it and to therefore draw some specific conclusions about it. Secondly they might not be sure if their learning is the right one – they are self-doubtful about the experience they just had. Than it is very useful if they hear reflexions of others. Finally, debriefing in a large group can get very emotional and therefore it contributes a lot to bonding among the group.

And a final tip, it’s best to ask open questions for the purpose of debriefing. That is questions starting with How, Why etc.

So next time you will be busy with meeting, briefing, brainstorming try to find some time for debriefing as well!

>It is now exam time at my university. Some people are studying more, some less and some people gave up on getting good grades all together. Here is what I think about it and here is the general lesson I have drawn so far from my experience:

If you decide to do something, give it your maximum – otherwise you are wasting your time and often also time of other people around you. If you succeed, it has paid off. If you fail, you will fail with pride and with a good feeling that you did the best you could have done. If you have never failed, it means that you have never stratched yourslef, it means that you have never taken up challenges that were bigger than you.

If you failed doing what others would not have even dreamed about and if you gave it your maximum, you still have the right to be proud of yourself. Than it is the right time to move on to another big thing! Good luck!

>Or rather, what are your tribes? Because we are all members of several tribes, may be we just do not think about it in that way.

I came in touch on several occasion with the concept of ‘tribes’, got to like it a lot and therefore I would like to write a bit about it today. As far as I know the term was first coined by Seth Godin in his book Tribe (you can google him, he is a really famous blogger) or by David Logan – see the video bellow.

A tribe is a social group with certain attitudes, opinions and more or less well defines membership criteria. We are all members of at least couple tribes. A tribe can be our close friends, our colleagues, a sports team or an NGO we are part of. Our tribes and the people in them define us, shape us and in my opinion they to a large extend predict where we will be going in the future.

How do they influence us? Each tribe has certain attitudes and mindsets that shape thinking of its tribal members. And I think that the right mindset is the most powerful asset one can have. It defines our personality, our ambitions and the impact we want to have.

David Logan distinguished five main types (stages) of tribes according to the attitudes of their membership.

1. “Life Sucks”
2. “My Life Sucks”
3. “I’m Great (But You Aren’t)”
4. “We’re Great”
5. “Life is Great”

Have a look at this video:

I thought couple questions would help to debrief on the video. Here they are:

1. What tribes am I part of?

2. How are my tribes influencing me? What kind of attitudes am I getting, what am I learning, what is the impact they are allowing me to have?

3. What is my impact on my tribes? How am I contributing to them, how am I adding value to my tribes / would they be any different without me?

4. What tribes do I want to be part of? Where do I want to go and what tribes will help me get there?

>I am now studying for my Financial Statements Analysis and Security Valuation exam. And I just found this good comix strip…

>Have you ever thought what can you do in one minute?

Probably not much… but that is often enough to start something big! Every great idea and every great action had its first one minute…

…and once you have started something it just becomes a continuum of single minutes, one after another…

Have a look at this cool video that I found on YouTube’s channel of AIESEC Brazil!

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What do you see when you look at countries on a map of the world? Do you focus on the black lines determining national borders or the blue lines showing rivers? Or are you trying to locate the small dots representing capital cities? And how about all the green/brown space in between those lines and dots? Have you ever thought about what is going on there?

I had yesterday a nice skype chat with my friend from AIESEC Kenya. We were remembering the great time we had at IPM in Tunisia, an international AIESEC conference, couple months ago. There were 250 young people from 107 countries across the world and one afternoon we did a really cool exercise which showed us the map of the world from a different perspective.

Imagine a big rectangular room representing a map of the world. And now imagine people from all those 107 countries sitting within that room according to where their countries are located. I was representing UK so I was sitting in the middle of the room, near to the top. Only the guys from the Nordic counties were sitting behind me, slightly towards the left. Oh, and than there was Teitur from Iceland, he was sitting alone behind me, more on the right. When I looked in front of me towards right, I could see my friends from Latin America sitting in their respective positions. Right in front of me, well behind the guys from Spain and Portugal, the black continent was sitting. When I looked more towards the left, I could see the Europeans and than little bit lower, my friends from the Gulf were sitting in the middle of the room. Further away there were all the delegates from Asia and Australia.

I did not see any black or blue lines, I did not see any dots. All I could see was just people, people just like me. When looking at the map of the world, we often focus only what we see on the paper. But behind that piece of paper, there are nearly 7bn of people living their daily experiences, just like me or you!

>The Economist has designed a new map of Europe! It has changed location of countries taking into account national stereotypes, current realities and other interesting issues.

Have a look here for full commentary: http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displaystory.cfm?story_id=16003661″>

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In other words, how to turn lack of resources into an advantage?

The Economist has recently published a special report on innovation in emerging markets. I had a chance to discuss it with an alumnus of AIESEC India who is now doing his MBA in LBS and he told me more about the concept of Jugaad.

Jugaad basically means a solution in Hindi or as The Economist puts it – making a do with what you have and never giving up. Indians are often faced with lot of resources constraints but most of the times they manage to overcome them by radically reengineering the process or the final product.

This phenomena is starting to be called a frugal – constraint-based – innovation and jugaad is starting to be coined as a management term. The Economist compares this to a nowadays equivalent to the introduction of mass production by Ford at the beginning of the 20^th century or to the ‘lean’ revolution which took place in Japan in the 1970’s.

So next time you are faced with lack of resources to realize your idea, what is going to be your Jugaad?

Just for illustration:

A good example of frugal innovation is Tata Nano. A bunch of recently graduated engineers who have never build a car before was asked to design one. The result was the world’s cheapest car.

There is quite a lot of leg space actually…

>This post is dedicated to my MC team and to AIESEC UK.

I believe that every one of us and every organization has inside a great potential. There can be two main reasons why that potential is not realised. Firstly, we might are not be aware of potential that exists within ourselves or within organizations and therefore we are not even trying to unlock it. Secondly we are aware of the potential but we do not have sufficient resources or the right attitude to unlock it.
My team will be leading AIESEC UK in the 10/11 year and we have chosen Unlocking potential as our team motto. I will therefore describe my thoughts on the topic using this example. In general we can unlock potential in three main domains. Firstly in ourselves, secondly in others and finally in organizations.

How to unlock it?

See it.
Believe it.
Achieve it.

This is the second part of our MC mottto. Firstly we need to be aware of the potential we would like to unlock. Once we have discovered it and defined it, we need to believe that we are capable of doing so. This means to plan how are we going to acquire the right attitude and the resources needed and to get a buy-in into this plan. Finally we need to execute that plan.

Unlocking potential in youself.
I always think what is it that I would like to develop. I just got back form an AIESEC conference where my team presented our motto to the members for the first time. We run there a session on this topic and me and my team shared there what potential we would like to unlock in ourselves over the next year. As for myself, I would like to go and chair a conference abroad which is something I have not done yet.

Unlocking potential in others.
It is a big satisfaction for me if my actions contribute to development of others. This is also one of the main reasons why I applied for the MC of AIESEC UK. I like creating an environment where others can unlock their potential. We are responsible for the experiences people around us are living and we should always ask ourselves how are we facilitating those experiences so that people are getting the most out of it. My focus next year will be to unlock potential in my team members and our team focus will be to provide the members of AIESEC UK with experiences which will allow them unlock their leadership potential. This will not only equip them with skills for their future lives, but it will also drive AIESEC UK forward.

Unlocking potential in organizations.
I want to be a strategy consultant in the future so this is something I am passionate about. In addition to what I have already mentioned in the previous paragraph, management often keeps running organizations so that they do not fall apart and can sustain themselves in the near future. But because they are constantly pressing the panic button, management sometimes does not take time to look at the bigger picture and to develop a robust strategy for three or more years ahead. My objective for the coming year is to facilitate development long term business model that will allow AIESEC Local Committees at universities to be financially independent on the national headquarters.

Unlocking potential is about making things better. It is about thinking what can we do that would add the most value to ourselves, others and to the organizations we are part of. The things mentioned above are my plans for my year in the AIESEC UK office. What is the potential you are going to unlock?

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I have recently realized how important it is to be a good listener. I think it is actually one of the most important skills one can have, both in personal and professional life. But from my own experience I can tell that there are many different ways of listening. Let me think about the main types.

Type 1

You are listening, but not with the intention to understand the other person. You are thinking what to say next or how to ‘steal’ the conversation and take it to a topic you want to. I was like this for quite a long time but I have learned that this is not the way it should be. It is disrespectful and it does not lead anywhere.

Type 2

You are listening with the intention to understand the person, but you are not genuinely interested in understanding what the person really thinks about the subject. You just want to build your arguments against what is that person saying. I disagree with this way of listening as well. People will sooner or later be able to tell what is actually going on in your mind while you are listening to them and they will start building negative feelings about you. Again it is disrespectful and it does not lead anywhere.

Type 3

Finally a good one. You are listening with the intention to understand the other person. I know this can be sometimes difficult. We enter every conversation with already formed opinion. That opinion is based in the information set available to us at the moment and on our ability to interpret that information. Once we have our opinion formed, we tend to compare any new information against it. This can often result in dismissing the new piece of information just because that one isolated piece of information does not comply with our ‘fixed’ opinion.

Two things have helped me to overcome this. The first one is called tabula rasa. It means that when we listen to a new opinion, we forget everything we knew about the topic before and we approach it with a blank page – tabula rasa. That means we do not question things as they are being told to us, we firstly try to understand the whole idea and only once we are sure that we understand it well, we start thinking about it critically. An idea often makes sense only if it is understood properly, individual elements of that idea often do not make sense to us. Therefore it is important to understand the whole idea before we start questioning it.

The second thing that has helped me is the concept of thinking hats. What it means is that when we are listening to somebody, we take off our own personal ‘hat’ and we try to put on the ‘hat’ of that other person. We for a moment forget about our own preconceptions and we try to understand things from the other person’s perspective. If I was in the same situation as that person, if I had the same kind of feelings, what would I be thinking about the topic that is being discusses? Only once we fully understand the issue from the perspective of that other person, we can start thinking about it from our own perspective. It takes effort and lot of patience, but the insights and the level of understanding we than get is amazing.

Closing thoughts

The third type is the most polite one because it means that we are not only listening, but we are also genuinely trying to understand that person. I know that it might be less convenient and take more time than the first two types. But what I have realised is that while it might take more time in the short run, it can save us lot of time in the long run.