CCL Seeks Affordable, Accessible Publication Offerings in East Africa

See the full article by Jesse James Deconto in the News & Observer:

http://www.newsobserver.com/news/story/1558820.html

Excerpt -

So, for example, Africa Rising helped to connect Greensboro's Center for Creative Leadership with Kwani, an organization that aims to nurture African writers who can portray their continent from an insider's perspective. The center wanted to expand the reach of its leadership training materials into East Africa but needed to cut the consumer price by about 80 percent.

"There's a hunger," said Steadman Harrison, a senior innovation associate with the center. "You have to find a price point that meets their pocketbook."

The center needed publishing partners who could translate their intellectual property into new languages and cultures at a low cost and without abusing the organization's copyrights.

"We don't have people on the ground in places like Nairobi, Kenya," Harrison said. "We have to work with an organization we believe we can trust. ... Africa Rising was a good vetting organization."

Leadership Development for the Majority

Originally posted on Lamp Post Reports - August 17, 2008 - by John T. Vaughn

The Center for Creative Leadership (CCL), based in Greensboro, NC over the past forty years has established itself as one of the, if not the, premier leadership development institutes. CCL’s specialty, historically, has been providing leadership development to Fortune 500 & 5000 type companies, the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Special Forces among other top clients. CCL has written and researched extensively on the subject of creative leadership, defined as “the capacity to achieve more than imagined by thinking and acting beyond boundaries” (from HBS case study on CCL). Currently, they have satellite offices in Colorado Springs, Colorado; San Diego, California; Brussels, Belgium; and Singapore. Dissatisfied with reaching only the 20,000 or so clients who annually pass through CCL training programs, CCL launched the Global Voice of Leadership (GVOL) initiative roughly three years ago. The GVOL initiative was launched with the intention of providing forty years worth of knowledge capital in leadership development to the majority (some like to call it the base of the pyramid).

CCL has been working on this initiative in a number of ways, but the one I can speak most knowledgeably of is their effort here in Ethiopia. Back in February I attended CCL’s first ever Leadership Beyond Boundaries course, a two week course to provide leaders in the developing world with the necessary tools and training to take what they learn about self awareness, direction, alignment, commitment and giving feedback back to their staff (most located in the developing world). The first course was hosted at CCL’s headquarters in Greensboro, NC but leaders based in Nigeria, Lagos, Kenya, Sudan, Uganda, India, the Caribbean, the US and other areas attended. Needless to say, it was quite the diverse group and I learned a tremendous amount.

Since that time, CCL has been engaged in a more intimate, though informal, relationship with Cherokee Gives Back. Gives Back’s presence in Addis provided CCL a base from which to recruit attendees for a Leadership Beyond Boundaries program held in Addis Ababa in mid-July. The workshop turned out to be quite a success. During the last two days of the workshop, the primary attendees (eleven in all, from various countries in East Africa) were required to practice what they learned by delivering a Leadership Essentials workshop to nearly forty local leaders (again, with the hope that these leaders would then train their staff or colleagues). These forty local leaders were from various sectors including non-governmental organizations (NGOs), the private sector and university students. The feedback from the program was generally quite positive, but that was only the tip of the iceberg.

Since the completion of the Leadership Beyond Boundaries workshop, Steadman Harrison and Dou Fall of CCL have been meeting with various organizations throughout Addis Ababa. These meetings have included a range of organizations and institutions from faith based youth programs, to Midroc (the largest private corporation in Ethiopia), Addis Ababa University, various NGOs and other grass roots organizations.

Even CCL, it seems, has been a little surprised by the high demand and prior knowledge of their organization and expertise here in the Horn of Africa. Steadman and Dou have proposals that, if signed, will keep them busy in Addis for at least the next few months.

As well, discussions have been initiated with community leaders around the topic of bringing leadership development to the majority, or base of the pyramid. This is certainly a challenge, as nearly 80% of the population is located in rural areas (costly to reach), and a large portion also do not read or write. At our first brainstorming session, the idea of broadcasting a leadership development series over the radio was mentioned as a possible distribution channel. At first glance, this idea appears to have potential as it is very much an orally based society and many people have radios, or at least access to them. As well, start-up costs should be minimal, but legalities may prevent such a series from ever launching.

One thing is clear, the demand for CCL’s expertise in creative leadership development and creative solutions is very high among the private sector, academic community, NGO sector and at the grass root level. With any luck, the contracts signed over the past few weeks will allow CCL to continue its focus on leadership development in the Horn, with the ultimate goal of providing their expertise not just to those capable of paying traditional rates but also to the majority, the base of the pyramid.

Be the Change

Thanks to James Perez and Marie van Vuuren for helping our
Global Voice of Leadership initiatives with the "Be the Change" video.

Boundary Spanning Leadership

by Christopher Ernst

In his recent Newsweek article What People Will Die For, the influential columnist Fareed Zakaria wrote about a growing global phenomenon – the persistence and intensification of the boundaries between subnational groups. With the waning influence of the battle of ideology (liberalism, communism, socialism), humans’ oldest identities have moved to the core of intergroup relations. In Pakistan, the societal rift that most deeply envelopes the life and loss of Benazir Bhutto is the divide between the country’s various regions. In Kenya, the tragic events associated with the recent election stem from a break-down along tribal lines. In Iraq, intractable divisions of religion continue to stall efforts toward a more peaceful future.

While the pull of old identities is currently most visible in developing nations, Zakaria notes that this trend is alive and well in the developed world. While Belgium went six months without a government because of the harsh divisions between Flemish and French speaking populations, Scotland elected a party whose central platform pivots on independence, seeking to unhinge the 1707 Acts of Union that established the United Kingdom of Great Britain, Scotland, and Wales.

Leadership research and practice has traditionally focused on the need for leaders to manage and protect group boundaries. As the events Zakaria describe make clear, the opposite response is increasingly called for – the ability for leaders to reach across, span, bridge, and bring groups together across boundaries.

Through the Leadership Across Differences project, (http://www.ccl.org/leadership/research/lad/index.aspx_), CCL is currently seeking to understand the increasingly important and necessary role that boundary spanning leaders play in bridging divides between groups in service of a larger vision, mission, or goal.

Critical challenges in Pakistan, Kenya, or Iraq will not be solved by leaders working only within a single identity group. Likewise, this holds true for any of the most pressing issues of today including poverty, education, human rights, healthcare, and the environment. The implication for leadership is this – as ancient identities work to pull groups apart, the role of leadership will increasingly be to create the context and space for these groups to come together. When group boundaries are successfully bridged, pent-up breakthroughs and innovations are unleashed. This is both the challenge and the opportunity for boundary spanning leadership.

Give One, Get One or Got One, Give One?

You may have heard about a recent initiative entitled One Laptop Per Child (OLPC). The mission of this non-profit association is to develop a low-cost laptop that could revolutionize how we educate the world’s children. Our friends at Continuum, a Boston-based design firm, helped create the actual laptop. Recent articles in Newsweek have shared a marketing strategy called, “Give One, Get One”. The idea is that when someone purchases a $188 laptop for a child in a developing country living in a community that represents the base of the economic pyramid, you are also able to purchase another machine for someone in your own household or community for the same $188 price. What a wonderful idea!

The Center for Creative Leadership is considering a similar idea. CCL has the privilege of training some 20,000 leaders each year. These individuals are given the incredible opportunity to step out of their work roles for as much as a week to focus on developing their own leadership potential. This is quite an investment on behalf of their organizations. We believe that many of these individuals and possibly the organizations they work for would be willing to ‘pay it forward’. Some call it moving from success to significance, others talk about giving something back. Would you be willing to sponsor a leader in a developing country? Would you be willing to provide resources, tools, or workshops for our global neighbors to help them on their leadership journey? Perhaps there will be a CCL-sponsored opportunity in the near future for those in the leadership development community who Got One, to Give One!

Leadership Essentials for Youth

A group of youth leaders / camp counselors came together on August 18th for the first local YMCA-sponsored prototype of a CCL Leadership Essentials for Youth Workshop. We are calling this the Lead Now! workshop design with the intention of creating one-day, two-day, and three-day curriculum for youth leaders with a detailed facilitators guide and tool kit. Joel Wright, Paula Morrow, Matt Hall, Dou Fall, Tim Burress, and Steadman Harrison facilitated the design that included an Introduction to CCL, Leadership 101, D-A-C, S-B-I, MBTI, Experiential Exercises, and Visual Explorer. The youth that attended each shared how this workshop design impacted their understanding and practice of leadership. These youth represented late high school and early college age students. They were all current employees of the YMCA and selected on the basis of their positive leadership over the 2007 summer term of work. This was an exciting step in the exploration of youth leadership models at CCL. We appreciate the YMCA's partnership and funding.

When the participants first arrived (teenagers from 15-19 years in age), some of us were feeling a bit skeptical about what we would be able to accomplish with them. They seemed too laid back, reserved, a little too ‘cool’… these were a few of our first impressions. However, the CCL modules that we used are so engaging that soon we all found the room full of energy. The quiet and reserved kids came out of the shells and took on the leadership roles time and time again. The young women in the room really surprised us the most. One of these women was one of the younger counselors in the group and she stepped up to articulate the needs and initiated a plan of action on behalf of the group several times during the course of the day. The mix of experiential exercises and a ‘lessons from life’ type overview connected with these youth. They rated their appreciation for S-B-I and the MBTI overviews close to the top of their list along with Visual Explorer and the experiential exercises.

The workshop close really caught some of us off guard. We were remembering our first impressions and trying to figure out where these kids came from as they went around the room receiving their certificates and sharing their ‘take-aways’ from the day. Each of them described important lessons of impact like how they had a new vision of leadership, or how they were prepared to give feedback to the kids that came to their camp, or how they understood personality preferences for the first time, or how they planned to step up to opportunities in the future. We were really blown away by how far they came in the course of 1 day… it reminded us of the same sort of impact we experienced with the 1-day workshop in Jinja, Uganda.

The goal of this GVOL youth work is to create a workshop design and toolkit that we can put in the hands of youth leaders around the world. Our prototype from this initial design will be going to South Africa later in September and on to Singapore in October.

Eastern Africa Leadership Exploration

In November and December of 2006, CCL sent a team of five to Uganda and Kenya to conduct interviews, prototype new leadership development models and test preliminary concepts that were aligned with the design considerations guiding an initiative entitled, Global Voice of Leadership (GVOL). A second visit took place in July 2007. Our initial work was to translate the Center for Creative Leadership's content and knowledge base into meaningful tools for leaders working in a diverse African context. The team used story-based interviews to hear from local NGOs, CBOs, and FBOs how work was accomplished at its best and what the challenges organizations, teams, and individuals faced day-to-day. Our team developed what we now call a CCL "Leadership Essentials" workshop.

Workshops were hosted in Jinja (Uganda), Nakuru (Kenya), and Nairobi (Kenya) with groups of 20 to 40 participants attending each workshop. Experiential exercises were tailored to the language and context of East Africa. Hand-score assessments were chosen to provide participants with information about their personality styles when approaching change. CCL feedback models (Situation-Behavior-Impact) and leadership models (Direction-Alignment-Commitment) as well as our approach to development (Assessment-Challenge-Support) were utilized and tested at each of these workshops. The workshop was led by one trainer with no power-point screen shows, limited handouts, and no assessment pre-work. While CCL typically delivers a high-tech, five-day program, the CCL team delivered a high-touch, one-day workshop with similar impact.

One participant shared the following comment at the conclusion of our first workshop in Uganda.

“This training is very important and you need to understand why we say to you, you need to come back. You hear us saying come back soon and it is for a reason. Where you come from this leadership teaching may result in better management, better business practices. But here, here in Uganda this teaching has the ability to save lives. This region, these governments have been at war for many years. If they heard today what you were teaching us I believe we could end many of these conflicts. We could see an end to these wars.”

In July 2007, CCL returned to East Africa to train a group of 50 NGO partners for CHF International and to assist ERMIS Africa with the launch of the Eastern Africa Leadership Forum. CCL returned to East Africa at the request of these NGOs who provided a small amount of seed money to partially offset the expenses of the CCL team.

We invited LEAP Africa to co-train these workshops with us and they accepted the invitation. We want to explore a formal affiliated partnership with LEAP through which they may continue delivering CCL content and materials for a royalty fee. In July, we worked with a LEAP trainer and with very limited ramp-up in order to test the “Grassroots trainer kit” providing the appropriate materials and instructions for the delivery and facilitation of CCL workshop modules. This concept test was tested with the safety net of having CCL there to support the work. Based on our 2007 experience in East Africa we believe that it will be possible to create a training of trainers workshop through which we will can increase the training capacity of multiple organizations and extend the reach of our program content and materials.

The Eastern Africa Leadership Forum is a non-profit entity stemming from a synergistic joint initiative between CCL and Environmental Research, Mapping and Information Systems in Africa [ERMIS Africa] that focuses on promoting leadership and leadership development within the region. It draws from shared principles and experiences by the two organizations on the need to create partnerships, networks, and communication mechanisms towards development of leadership skills and resources. The forum envisions individuals and organizations within the Eastern Africa region applying creative leadership tools to solve complex leadership challenges towards sustained development within the region. The mission of the Forum is to advance the understanding, practice and development of good leadership practice for the benefit of society within the Eastern Africa region. This concept came about as a direct result of requests from the participants of the leadership workshop hosted in Nakuru, Kenya in 2006. The 2006 work included participants from diverse backgrounds representing NGOs (n=10), government offices (n=4), educational organizations (n=5), and businesses (n=6).

We are actively seeking opportunities to extend these initial field tests to further illustrate how the Center for Creative Leadership can create and sustain viable models and tools to bring affordable and accessible leadership development and organizational capacity to base of the pyramid economies. Please comment on this blog entry if you have creative ideas or suggestions for how we can extend this work further.