The Middle Overs are here! — Team G.A.P on an “Explore” and “Realize” ride with Design Thinking!
In the limited overs’ version of cricket, it is the middle overs that usually decide whether a team wins or not. For a batting side, it is important to keep the score board ticking, convert those singles into twos, watch out for that loose ball in the over and dispatch it to the boundary and always play the ball on its merit. Not losing too many wickets in the middle overs means the team gets a license to go hammer and tongs in the slog (last few) overs. And what is most important is not to lose focus on the target the team wants to achieve by the end of the innings.
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On our Social Sabbatical in Ho Chi Minh City, our G.A.P sub-team within Team Mekong, continues on its journey to enable and empower G.A.P Institute to take a leap of faith aligned to its vision and powered by its strong values. The future of students in Vietnam having access to institutes like G.A.P definitely looks bright.
The SoW agreed with the G.A.P leadership team helped us to set the focus for the project. Having 8 clear deliverables ensured we could focus and streamline all our energy to topics which matter most. In the Explore phase of the project, we took an approach of Tell me and Show Me — in the form of interviewing employees and founders and also attending team meetings and All Hands’ Meetings to help us get to the depth of the problem we are trying to solve. What followed next was a series of design thinking workshops to help G.A.P institute to identify tangible improvements based on human desirability, technical feasibility and economic viability. Helping G.A.P to re-brand their strong values, developing an elevator pitch for the organization, charting out a path for an effective communication framework and protocol, and helping G.A.P to understand what they would need to achieve a centralized database have been some of the focus areas initially taken up for design thinking. Having experiences in HR and Management within the team has meant we have been also able to enable G.A.P to manage different phases of the employee life cycle better. Running a Predictive Index and Myers Briggs’ personality assessments helped them understand themselves and each other better for effective collaboration and teamwork. Leveraging design thinking, we also enabled G.A.P Institute to develop required marketing and sales collateral for specific courses. All the workshops involving group work have been tremendous fun in executing and G.A.P Institute founders and staff have ensured the success with their enthusiasm and active participation. Our focus during the project is not to build something like an ivory tower for G.A.P which then they can’t use after the project, but rather to enable them to build what best works for them and to ensure it can be sustained.
Other significant and enriching experiences last week outside project
Visit to Hear Us Now
We visited a Hear Us Now (HUN)class for deaf and dumb students and observed how they are taught English using a combination of slides, video and sign language. Vietnam has a high percentage of population with physical disabilities especially due to the ill effects of the Vietnam War in the last century. HUN is the brain child of Mr Hieu, the CEO of G.A.P Institute and he along with a few members of the G.A.P staff have been actively involved in the running of the organization with support from a Catholic Church which provides premises for the school but no corporate support so far. It’s inspiring to hear that each member of the G.A.P Institute is allowed to contribute up to 10% of their time every month for charitable and social impact work. Here is a link to a video of Mr. Hieu speaking about HUN.
Visit to Noir — Dining in the Dark
Most of Team Mekong members visited Noir Restaurant for dinner on Wednesday, 19th April. It was a unique experience as this restaurant specializes for Dining in the dark and all waiters at the restaurant are visually impaired. The experience started by getting blind folded and then playing a game of putting the shapes in the right slots. We were then asked to deposit all cell phones, wallets, watches, etc. in a locker and then we were led to a completely dark room for our dinner. Initially, we were not sure how we will be able to manage having dinner in the dark, but it really worked out and we enjoyed every bit of it. Not being distracted by cell phones, we concentrated on figuring out what food were eating and talking to each other in the group to know their opinions on the food. It also brought some old memories back — as many years back I used to lead a a team at SAP working for enabling Accessibility, i.e. for ensuring even disabled users including visually impaired users can use our software. So as we struggled to find the spoon and the fork and the bowls on the table, it reminded me about the predicament of our visually impaired users to use our software if there were no accessibility support. At the end of the dinner when we came out, we were shown pictures of the actual food that we had eaten and to our surprise we were not able to guess correctly half the dishes while eating! So, does the sense of taste also stop working in the dark?
Visit to the AO Show at the Saigon Opera House
Team Mekong attended the AO show at the Saigon Opera House in the evening of 20th April, a unique way to experience Vietnamese Culture. The show, on similar lines to Cirque du Soleil, presented Vietnam’s contrasting portrait — a peaceful country life as against the hum and din of urban life. It was a rare mix of bamboo cirque, contemporary dance, acrobatics and live music by folk musicians on their folk instruments — and all these with a delicate touch of humor. The team thoroughly enjoyed the performance.
That’s it for now. Watch out for my next story titled: It’s the business end of the game!
