Seminar in Review: June, 2012 – Chimoio, Mozambique

The Insight Seminar here in Chimoio is wrapping up, which gives me an opportunity to reflect on what’s happened, good and bad. This is the third seminar we have held in Mozambique and the second Portuguese seminar. It is the first seminar in which I did not act as presenter—instead, Leonard Chetechsi took on the role of presenter. I acted as assistant and coach during and after the seminars. My main rule this time was to coach Leonard on seminar presentation and debrief with him after each session. Leonard is one of our co-workers in Mozambique and was the interpreter for last year’s Portuguese seminar. When I leave, he will be responsible for organizing and leading seminars for the next year.

So how has Leonard been doing? Overall, he’s doing a fantastic job—he’s a natural presenter, and will be invaluable in helping Mozambicans understand the new concepts we are introducing. But generalities are only worth so much, so let’s get into seminar details, what they mean, and why they’re important. For ease of reading, I will break this down by point of interest (this will probably take several blog entries to completely cover):

Point One: Schedule

 We originally were planning for me to present/oversee four to five seminars while I was here. Unfortunately, due to limited funds delaying my departure and car trouble, we ended up with three and a half weeks in Mozambique instead of our original three month plan. This left us with enough time for one seminar. In keeping with our theme of “new scheduling plans”, we decided to implement an experimental seminar schedule—instead of holding the seminar for five eight-hour days, we thought we would try weeknights and weekends. This would give participants time to work during the day. This meant we had to extend the total time of the seminar to two weeks, but we thought it was a fair trade-off.

The result was mixed. While the participants were certainly able to get more work done during the week, the cultural attitude toward time meant that each session started almost an hour late—over ten days, that drops ten hours. In addition, they participants weren’t really keen on coming over the weekend, which meant we lost additional time. Between the two, our total seminar time was cut in half. On the plus side, the participants did have extra time to think through what they were learning. In addition, the participants indicated they wanted to complete the seminar as soon as Leonard gets back from traveling with Al and I back to South Africa. Overall verdict: while the five-day schedule is inconvenient for people, it seems to provide a more complete learning experience with the fewest difficulties.  Leonard wants to conduct the next seminar using the standard schedule.

 

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