Management development in Haiti and Burundi
It’s been a very rewarding month with trips to both Haiti and Burundi for the second of the Pathway workshops for Concern Worldwide, which I’m doing with INTRAC. Pathway is a management development programme which runs over 6 months and includes two workshops – the second workshop builds on the experience of putting into practice the skills learnt in the first workshop. I’ve been running the workshops in French-speaking countries, while the consultants who developed the course for Concern have been doing it with English-speakers. One of the first things that happens in workshop 2 is that each person gives a presentation on how they’ve applied what they learnt in workshop 1. The presentations were often moving and inspiring: the struggles of personal change, re-examining long-held assumptions, taking on more responsibility, handing over control, and sometimes even (already) triggering positive changes in programmes.
Last week all six of us, consultants and Concern staff, met in London to review the impact and learning from Pathway during 2013. It was a really rich day of sharing and planning for next year. This is unusual for me: as a consultant I am rarely involved longer term in a programme, especially not after a training workshop. But that’s the whole point of Pathway: it’s a development programme, and we have all been learning together. Next year Chad and Niger!