First, I would like to salute Tong, May and the rest of ALA team for having the gut to take on such an important and complex challenge of building next generation of leaders. I happened to attend a talk this morning given by Chris Bradford (co-founder of African leadership academy) and a South Sudenese who recently graduated from the academy. It was an amazing talk and I'm not surprised that many were inspired enough to try modeling after that success.
As many of us know, especially from the first meeting with Thais today, the devil is in the detail. Leadership is an important ingredient of success; yet, it is an abstract concept (you can say the same for honesty, perseverance, etc.). Moreover, "building the next generation of leaders" is a huge project with so many moving parts and can span over a generation. I think the team made the right decision that it has to start doing "something" in order to move forward; keep discussion high level ideas forever won't get us anywhere.
I have only one suggestion for now. Whenever I go after any project that is important (in general to many people) and has a lots of moving parts to take care off, I like to "build from past examples." If the project is important, many people probably have tried to do it to various degrees in the past..most of them were probably succeeded in some aspects but fail in others. Now the question is how we should tap into these past experiences that other people have already learned. A big mistake many people make (including me sometime) is to only grasp the inspiration (and maybe some high level ideas from past works) and then start almost everything else by themselves from scratch. I think the right way to do it is to start from studying the concrete/detailed sets of actions that have been executed (some people call it 'history') of the past work. For example, as I have suggested during the meeting, Asian leadership academy team should have in hand the calendar of what African leadership academy founders have done, especially the first year or two after the conception of the idea to the first few deliverable services. How did they test the idea? Did they make a camp? if so how? what did they teach the very first group of students? How long? What's the outcome? all such info, in my opinion, can serve as a very valuable concrete plan which we can then start tweaking here and there to meet our own constraints and goals. Also, I would suggest that we start from multiple examples..(not just African leadership academy). I bet there are tons for programs out there in the past aiming at building leadership to someone. None of them would match perfectly to what we want..but we can start to cut and paste the parts that we like. Also, I don't think we have to limit ourselves to those examples that explicitly say their purpose is "to create leadership". If ALA is decisive about having one week pilot program, why don't we gather any cool example of one week programs first? I bet most of them will at least inform us about how they create bonding experience among participants or encourage them to think differently. Most valuable info is probably not available online or through low level staffs; we gotta talk to those masterminds who conceptualized the ideas and turned into deliverable programs. I have contact Chris and my other friend who ran LeAP, I hope we hear back from them soon.
Practically, I think it should take a couple more weeks to gather relevant examples, get in touch and ask for advices from founders of past programs. Next meeting, maybe the core team can present a few most relevant past examples(not just ideas but series of executions + outcomes) and how they think these past programs should be tweaked to suit the goals of ALA. Then we can start a more productive discussion...with concrete "first version" of plan in hand.
1.10 am 15 Oct 2012, Palo Alto CA 94306
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