Time is flying: Social Sabbatical is already half way over…

Quito Conders teams is again on their way to explore new things in Ecuador. We are currently sitting in a minibus heading towards Otavalo. More on that later.

It is now already two weeks ago when we arrived in Quito. This also means we have just two more weeks to achieve our goals at our client organization. I would like to tell you about our really great client organization “Lab XXI”.

During our first week at Lab XXI we practiced “active listing” and had interviews with all team members of them. In addition we had the chance to visit a school in Cayambe where they are executing the “Young Potential Development”(YPD) program. We were able to speak to teachers on their impressions on the program.

Lab XXI CEO Titi started their enterprise 5 years ago. It started around the “YPD Box”, which contains interactive material for training students on 21st century skills. These are soft skills in the area of Leadership, Collaboration, Communication, Creativity, Articulation and Self-Assessment. The box contains videos and other materials which can be use to teach these skills.

The way Lab XXI uses the Box is to train and coach teacher on how to use this box. Their goal is to let teachers become “agents of change”, by changing their teaching style and teach the students 21st century skills. This should first limit their drop-out rate at school on one side and should give them more chances to find a fulfilling job on the other side.

Dropping out of school is really a serios problem in Ecuador. Out of hundred kids, only 97 start with primary school. Only 70 start highschool(grade 9–11), and only 60 finish high school.

In the last year Lab XXI colleagues, who call them self “Captains” trained 19 teachers a year long. They have the vision to train 600 teachers in the next 3 years. This requires that they change their YPD program drastically as they cannot increase their workforce by factor 10. Currently they are having 4 captains. They are switching from a one year coaching program to a 3 month coaching program, where they are only in the first and third month onside in the class. During the second month they are coaching the captain via phone. It is important for them that the quality of the program does not get effected by that change.

But where do they get the money from to do all these activities? Currently the “Ministerio de Educatión” is only sponsoring a third of the program, the over two-third are coming from private companies, which are seen for them as their “clients”.

Lab XXI offers more program besides the YPD program. The most important one of those is the YPD 4Business program. There the Capains are teaching employees of their clients during a four hour workshop in 21st century skills.

Lab XXI typically is selling a package to their client consisting of sponsoring the YPD program for a certain amounf of teachers and a certain amount of workshop in the client’s organization. This should have the following advantages for the client:

• Increasing the efficiency of their current workforce by increasing their 21st century skills
• Ensuring that their future workforce is well trained in 21st century skills
• Their reputation of a social engaging company increases

To prove the impact of the YPD and the YPD 4Business program, they are currently using surveys to measure the success of the the two programs. But the results are not that meaningful as they would like them to be.

This is were we are coming in to the picture! We, that means Melani, Sabari and myself. We tried to find out in our first week how their programs work. We asked all the team mates on what are there requirements on a measurement process and how that could help to ease their job and to make Lab XXI more successful. The results of the survey are currently not used to increase the YPD methodology and the captains skills.

We finished this phase with a design thinking workshop friday a week ago where we covered the following topics:

• Current Process of measurement
• Characeristics of the main steakholders (personas analysis)
• They listed their pain points with the current process
• We clustered the pain point together with them and came out with for clusters: Content, Process, Communication and Learning.
• They voted about which of the clusters are the most importants for them to improve. The result was that we should focus on Content and Process
• They brainstormed about two “design challanges” where they phrased two sentences how a new solution should look like for content and process

This week we worked on designing new survey which are easier to understand, which measure the impact of the program better and which can be used to improve the program.

We had the chance last thuersday to let our teachers survey to be filled out by 5 teachers which had been in the Lab XXI for their program kick-off workshop. We got really helpful and good feedback!

The next week, we will focus on the process of analysing the surveys and defining a keyfigure framework.

Beside the work at Lab XXI, the Quito Condors group is doing much together. Last weekend we went “down” to Tena (Tena is only at 400m altitude) and had an impressive weekend in the rain forest!

Today we are driving to Otavalo to visit their handicraft market and some of the creater lakes around… Stay tuned for more pictures and infos of our current trip :-)