Enchanted and inspired — Getting started at Isla del Encanto
We have completed the first 48 hours on Isla del Encanto, enchanted Puerto Rico. The enchantment seems to be contagious and so is the energy of our client organizations and of the Pyxera consultants who ran us through a packed kick-off weekend.
Despite some jetlag we now juggle full day schedules, meeting preparations and follow-ups, team dinners, personal reflection, communication with family and friends as well as social media contributions. And eventually some sleep.
What’s been happening so far
The twelve of us who make up the social sabbatical team named ¡Wepa! fly into Puerto Rico on Saturday, February 2. After reaching San Juan airport we are picked up and taken to our home for the next four weeks which turns out to be a fairly nice hotel almost at the beach of San Juan. What a treat!
Almost everyone reaches the hotel by late afternoon so that we can start our joint adventure with a first team dinner. Coming from the European winter I am thrilled to realize that for the next weeks we will be able to have our dinners outdoors. Over the first Puerto Rican beers and pineapple juices there are plenty of stories to exchange about some skeptical immigration officers who were questioning that people travel to Puerto Rico for a whole month for business meetings. But here we are!
On the next morning, Sunday, we plunge into an intense day of team building among us twelve ¡Wepa! people. One of my favorite activities on this day is an icebreaker exercise with Lego where half of the team is given a Lego structure and the other half is given a bunch of Lego bricks and the task to build a copy of this Lego structure. The communication between the two groups is limited to verbal exchanges with some further restricting rules. In the end, none of us achieved a correct copy of the Lego structure, but we took away a lot of learnings in terms of making assumptions and asking the right questions. Hopefully, this experience will help us avoid making the same mistakes with our social sabbatical clients!
Monday is the day we get into serious business: It’s the kick-off day together with our client organizations and our first personal encounter with them. The kick-off takes place at a co-working space called Colaboratorio which is an elegant blend word made up of colaboración and laboratorio. My sub-team’s client Centro para Emprendedores happens to reside here.
We start with an introduction session where all four client organizations present themselves, their work and the challenge they have identified for us four ¡Wepa! sub-teams. It’s more than impressive how much engagement, optimism and dedication these four organizations contribute to the start-up scene in Puerto Rico.
After the presentations we split up into the sub-teams and the real work begins! Our task for this first week of the social sabbatical is to clarify, refine and rework the initial “scope of work” as it was defined for us by our clients. It feels like a thousand questions will need to be discussed throughout the next days.
It is an intense afternoon with Centro para Emprendedores and our sub-team returns to the team reflection meeting at the hotel, overflowing with impressions and information.
