Footprints on the Mountainside

I am just back from another ISABS lab. This is the second time I did my ALHP. This event was very special and very different in many ways.

This was a low budget initiative aimed at making ISABS and the T-Group processes accessible to sections of society that cannot afford the high budget programmes that usually happen in resorts and are willing to live in basic comfort.

This was completely different from previous experiences for me. Normally, participants live in comfortable air-con rooms on a twin or triple sharing basis, with separate areas for dining and laboratories. Here, the entire community was accommodated in four dormitories, which also doubled as labs and one of the dormitories was used as the dining room as well.

All through the duration of the community, there was a constant churning of participants among the group. You sleep with some of them, meet different people at meal times, attend your lab groups with still another set of them, prefer some of them for company in the evenings……. a constant shuffle of people you’re with, but no such thing as an isolated space for anyone.

I had been very apprehensive about this lack of space, but got so swept in the flow, that I don’t remember what exactly it was that I had been apprehensive about.

Ok, the food could have been better, the fans could have worked, and small comforts could have been missed by some, but the phenomenal community feeling was….. indescribable. People had just knitted together so close, that we had turned into one big family.

It was also an amazing experience to have such a large representation of people from the NGO sector in the community, and a valuable insight into perspectives we had never really been very close to.

I may write more about this eventually.

Just returning from another programme for Patni Computers. It went well. Far better than we expected actually, considering the size and difficulty in managing the group we had experienced the last time.

It was a two day thing. We had gone in expecting a recreation programme, but when we spoke with their representative, we discovered that there were specific expectations from the programme and it would be need to give it a training slant to the proceedings.

It was a difficult call for me to make, as it being a fun programme, participant expectations would not be toward learning. Particularly considering that some of the senior members seemed determined to take the whole thing as a joke. Honestly, I have no clue how we managed it, but somewhere down the line, we figured that fun and learning are not mutually exclusive, and then we took off into true experiential mode. I had a blast, and from the feedback we received, so did the participants.

And it was productive. For a quick two day thing with limited time, we managed to go through quite a bit in terms of behavioural learnings.

And I learnt a new lesson. An unruly but enthusiastic group may be difficult to handle, but once channelized, the potential for learning, even amidst chaos is huge as compared with a obedient but cold group in terms of energy.