Building a garden beyond your comfort zone
At the end of a demanding first year of the Executive MBA and an intensive International Consulting week in Colombia last month, a group of fabulous Cass Executive MBAs, staff, alumni and members of the Cass MBA Expeditionary Society found the time and energy to spend a day working with teenagers from a school in downtown Bogota to build a garden - and a hydroponic garden at that.
Why did we do this? We call it a "social adventure", an opportunity to get out of the relative comfort of a business environment into a much more unfamiliar one - in this case another part of the Colombian community - secondary education.
Our consulting week had been a great success, with EMBA teams rising to the challenges of businesses in many sectors of the Colombian economy ranging from coffee - of course - to sophisticated tools of smart manufacturing and cyber security. Long-lasting and life-changing economic development in Colombia however will ultimately be driven by the education system and although government plans are making progress, there is a discrepancy in access to education for different age groups. There has been much more success in expanding access within primary schools than secondary. Professor Casas Herrera, at the University of Los Andes Education Research Centre, notes “out of 100 students [who] start primary education in Colombia, only 40 will finish the 11th grade [age 16 or 17]. Out of those, 10 will enter university and only five will graduate.”
For Cass MBAs, the project to build a hydroponic garden for the Camilo Torres' teachers' science lessons by working collaboratively with about 25 teenage pupuils of the school made sense for several reasons. Our benefactor, Sir John Cass, a 17th century City of London merchant and philanthropist, founded a school for fifty boys and forty girls in buildings in the churchyard of St Botolph's Aldgate in 1709. He was a forward thinker who recognised the role of education in social progress. As a group of Londoners - perhaps the first these Colombian teenagers had ever met - we felt our rich diversity might inspire them to see that it's a big wide world and staying in school is worth it. Our group truly represented London's global mix - and when the garden was finished it was fun to celebrate by sharing some of the traditional treats and foodstuffs that meant something special in each of our cultures.
Beyond these reasons, of course, we knew we'd learn something too. We were immersed in a downtown secondary school in Bogota - not something any of us had done before. We were tasked with some seriously practical and physical labour to finish the garden in time - completely different from an MBA curriculum (and admittedly calculation of angles for roof struts did cause some challenges after a long night salsa dancing). Few of us spoke Spanish and our young Colombian team-mates' English was variable - communication needed imagination. For many of us it was indeed somewhat outside our professional comfort zones - so what do such experiences bring?
Embarking on a social adventure increases confidence in communication and rapport building skills - making it easier next time
Being prepared to step out of our comfort zones heightens a sense of "productive anxiety" without which we lose the ambition and drive to stretch ourselves to achieve more, learn new things and become more creative
Taking a risk in a controlled fashion and challenging ourselves to do things we normally wouldn't do, helps us experience uncertainty in a controlled, manageable environment - making it easier to manage next time when we might be forced by circumstance into an unfamiliar situation