A meeting-management manual for table 4, please!

(this is a long one – hang on in there)

It was my second time at a meeting of the “Consejo de Negocios”.

While the “Junta Directiva” oversees the most important decisions at UPAVIM, there are several “consejos” underneath it that manage the different activities of the cooperative from a day-to-day operational point of view. The “Consejo de Negocios” is in charge of the bakery and soya production – my “adopted children”. Other “consejos” run the arts & crafts centre, the kindergarten, and the school and scholarship programme.

So, you are at the meeting. You sit down with around 10 well intended and dedicated women for what should be a 1 hour meeting – it ends up lasting 2 hours. Two of them bring their kids over as they’ve just left school and there is nowhere to put them. It’s tough to keep the children quiet for long, so I spend half the meeting with both of them on my lap – one on each leg, so that I can stretch my neck between them and look at the women in the few situations when I felt I had to say something. They entertained themselves drawing on my notebook, with a few occasional fights for the possession of the pen. Result: I’ve very few blank pages left; Jeffrey, Conchita’s grandson, had already taken care of half of them…

There are important things to be discussed and decided today. More collaboration from the all group is needed to help run the bakery on a daily basis, so that the work doesn’t fall on only some of the women. They need to agree on what to do with the soya production, which is halted because of 1001 different reasons, ranging from lack of capital, to equipment upgrades that are needed to meet regulatory requirements.

A taskforce by the Ministry of Health is offering to provide free support to the registration of new soya products and coach the women on that legal process. It’s help being offered for free, so the idea sounds great to everyone, even if the group is somehow clueless about what it implies. Getting samples of the new products for laboratory examination – while there hasn’t been any production for almost 3 months and there isn’t much in place to get it started again – for instance.

But the discussion grows long, and in tangents most of the time. A lot of talk about the past, little time spent discussing the future. Sometimes there is a consensus that the conversation in being pointless, but it continues anyway.

The hour that had been planned for the meeting is almost over, and the first agenda item is far from finished. Not that anyone knows of what is left in the agenda to discuss, as the meeting plan seems to be shared by two women who, of course, haven’t talked about it beforehand.

As always, it is at the end, when everyone is rushing to leave, that the most important questions are raised. Decisions are needed, people have to raise their hand to volunteer and help. Silence and exchange of eye contact take place.

Eventually, the bare minimum number of decisions that had to be made are finally passed through. Quickly, and without too much discussion. Oddly enough.

I bet we just need to wait for the next meeting so that the hidden part of the iceberg comes to daylight, and all the important things that should have been truly tackled today become urgent. No, not urgent – late, I should say.

What do you do in a meeting like this?

I felt I needed to strike the right balance here… Observe a lot, learn how things happen before you start having ideas on how to improve them. It’s a cooperative run by the local women – it has been so for the last 20 years. And it’s still standing. Still growing. Somehow chaotically, somehow miraculously it seems to me, but still standing, and still growing. So…

All the good stuff I’ve learnt over the years – agenda setting, meeting management, moderation skills, etc. – has to be well thought through and acted upon with moderation. You can think of a million ways of making the processes leaner, the businesses better and more profitable. But you cannot really rush through those ideas. You might well take the steering wheel of a meeting and make it more efficient and focused, but what’s the point if next time around it goes back to the old way of running things? This is ONE meeting, amidst the hundreds that happen every year at UPAVIM. These women will see each other again and again to discuss other topics. In this consejo or in any another. With this audience or a different one. To discuss these issues or new ones. So, if the change doesn’t happen through them, by them, you’re hardly touching the surface – so far away from changing the course of the water flow.

So you wait. You touch here and there, just to keep things barely on track. You hope tomorrow you can speak to the women who were running the meeting. You hear their thoughts. You pass by them a few ideas on how to do things differently. You wait and see. And you do it again. You wait. You touch here and there, just to keep things barely on track.

I hope now we’re in conditions to make the process move forward with the Ministry of Health during the upcoming month. With me helping out, but under the coordination of an (almost forcedly) appointed leader amongst the group. And with the help of everyone around the table at the meeting, as finally agreed to.

But the taskforce of the Ministry of Health is only one of the pieces of the strategic-plan-to-save-the-soya-production jigsaw, which is so often talked about and asked for by everyone. Ironically, this in a place where documents are barely looked at, and where discussions are far more often based on hear-say than on solid facts. What will be the end of such strategic plan when I leave? What decisions will be informed by it?

I’ve been talking in the last few days with one of the few men that work at UPAVIM. He’s kind of a strategic advisor to the cooperative. He’s an economist and lectures at the university in the city centre. Once in a while some of his Business & Administration students do practical projects at UPAVIM, putting in practice what they’re learning while they also try to improve things around here.

He has been visibly happy for being able to speak business jargon with someone for a change. I looked at some of the papers he has done over the last few years – strategic plans, project proposals, templates. Most of them abandoned and barely read through, to his (hardly hidden) frustration.

I’ve to confess they seemed to me overly complex, long and wordy for the audience they’re targeted at. Somehow too academic, should I say? (Apologies to the academics who might read this!) No surprise he feels like he has hands tied up, and his only chance is to give suggestions and ask the right questions to the women here and there, and then let them decide. With a vague hope that some of the plans, proposals and templates may be put at some use eventually.

After these conversations I’ve been left thinking how much benefit could accrue from him being coached on some aspects. On how to adjust his documents to this audience, for instance. On how to influence decisions more strategically, slowly over time, instead of one-off strong-push efforts in written documents and occasional meetings. Or on how to help the women with implementation, instead of just setting strategies that few seem to pay real attention to.

But I’ve been also left thinking where and how exactly can I add value. I mean, I could see many of the ideas that I’ve for the bakery or the soya project already written down in his documents. Some of the processes I’m trying to implement have been tried out before by him too – and failed.

It’s not so much my business knowledge that can make a change here, I think. I mean, given the average educational level of the women in the organisation that’s a great asset to bring, but that’s something this college professor and his students can also bring – and have been bringing – to UPAVIM.

What can add value is following through all those strategic initiatives and coach the women on the implementation. Walking the walk with them. Trying and failing, so that you can try and fail again, and so that finally all those skills are eventually learnt through practice. And can endure.

But that’s not something you do in just 1 or 2 months. Not even in 6. It’s work to be consistently done over years. Consistently: with continuity.

So, I’ve to confess, I’m a bit lost about what’s the best thing for me to do around here…

Any ideas, please?



Post-Scriptum:

I’ve returned to Reforzamiento this Tuesday, to work with the kids in the afternoons.

There is also a lot – I mean, a lot – that can be done to improve the effectiveness of this after-school tutoring programme. All volunteers violently agree with this statement, from what I could hear.

But I’ll leave those sorrows for a later post. Only to say that there’s some joy back from playing with Lego and helping out with long divisions again.

Tomorrow, Friday, is “play-day”. I mean, all days are half play-days anyway, as you can only keep 20 kids focused on “school work after school” for so long, but Friday is officially just for the kids to hang around and enjoy their time.

I’ve set up an acting workshop for the afternoon, from 2 to 4pm. I’m genuinely and utterly curious to see how it will go…