Rohit Gupta is updating us on the real situation from Jaipur on Twitter.

Share This

Stuart’s becoming quite the expert on mobility in urban India!! He was here end-April for a little over a week and we did a lot of learning around the mobile phone space in Mumbai. Next time, small towns too!! Its really cool to see how he can really get to some deep immersions despite so obviously being a foreigner - chatting up kids in a slum, hopping into an Andheri local, getting trade to reveal all, sharing his curiosity openly, completely comfortable sitting on the floor in a tiny home where he has to bend over at full stretch, and drinking sweet chai - despite his tall overview on things. I mean that literally as he is 6′5″. It’s really funny for me to see people’s reactions to him - here, where average male height is 5′5″ - they look up in such awe - and then realise he is human when he smiles, when they touch his arm tentatively and he responds by touching their arm back briefly.

Check out his prolific posts on his learnings, which I have collated here because it’s a great collection of observations, images, artifacts, insights and foresight:

• India World’s Fastest Growing Mobile Market- recent statistics on the mobile phone market in India and the need for all-in-one phones
• “China Phone”” Beats Nokia N95 in Boombox Test- BOOM. We are really psyched by the volume on these phones and feel sheepish when we try and compete with our N-Series Nokias!
• The Emerging Indian Middle Class- beginning to question what is the middle class really, after visiting with folks at Dharavi - our largest slum
• It All Comes Out in the Wash- one of Mumbai’s showcases for tourists - hmmm. Intriguing nonetheless in how they organize themselves and the truckloads of laundry
• From the Mouths of Kids - Mobile Insight- meeting some really smart kids from Dharavi who educate us about China Phones despite not owning one themselves!
• Manish Market and the New Mobile Ghetto Blasters - discovering and observing Manish Market - an alternative wholesale, retail, repair and service culture all of its own
• Prince A950 — My China Phone - Think Different where he reviews his spanking new China Phone
• Emerging Market - Research to Action- are you learning from countries like India? Stuart makes the case for companies to not just rely on focus groups and interviews, but to get out there on the field. They insights come out of understanding the “friction” between different needs and environmental factors.
• Repairs, Tweaks and Choice - Mobile Phones- aaah check out our friendly neighbourhood computer and mobile guys - we trust them more than the “companies” to solve our problems!
• Modding the 3G iPhone - Cracking the Case - there’s a whole hardware market for the iPhone coming from Asia

Share This

We’re now working with another tech company on a research project which will include blogging and the use of twitter for both participants and researchers who are located all over the world.  Some issues we’re grappling with:

• how much coaching and of what kind is required for those participants who are not actively using blogs or twitter; or even those who don’t have 24/7 access to the internet?
• the balance between being broad or narrow in our focussing of the space - the issue here is we don’t want to lose out on spontaneity, and yet we do have a research agenda we need to meet
• also the balance between an informal space and a formal space;  data-collection vs. data collation
• how do we guide the content without biasing participants - would intermittent telephone calls be useful?  home visits where the benefit could be that as observers, if we see something interesting and we say take a quick pic and point out to respondents that this is the sort of thing she could be blogging - would that bias the research?
• the balance between allowing respondents/participants to literally ‘own’ the space vs. our curating it so it becomes more ‘usable’ for the client, and works as a reporting format too
• linked to the above point - should it become a presentation deck for the Client (and hence neat ‘n pretty ) or is the Client willing to take the risk of letting it emerge as it does in its natural flow?
• how do you encourage participation between participants - should we? Would an open discussion page work?

Hmmm. More issues and questions we should be asking? Experiences? Opinions?

Share This

Ok … the blog gates have opened for me ( I hope) and I am yet to open Google Reader after almost two months (scary proposition!).  Have to send out three proposals this week (putting them off until I can’t anymore) and am flying out to Sukabumi, Indonesia on Sunday to attend a few days of Transmission Asia-Pacific.

It’s been a crazy crazy period for me at work, and I sorely miss Shubhangi who is away in Japan, doing an advanced course in Japanese - do check out her amazing pictures here!  So I’ve been handling projects mostly on my own - I’ve had Aparna come in on a couple of them and she’s been a tremendous help.  The parts that really bug me about handling the entire project is the logistics end - clients, participants, field agencies.  One of my field agency heads (someone I have known and used for the last 20 yrs) and she tends to be quite sassy with me told me the other day “when is Shubhangi back - she is much better than you - she has so much patience with us unlike you!!!”

So yes - have been going a little nuts.  The interesting thing is most of these qualitative research and ethnography projects coming to us are now more technology focussed - mobile phones and extensions, computing - both hardware and software.  So I really want to do them!!!  One project in 4 small towns in India with 5-6 days each in these towns.  Another which saw us doing 8 interviews and 4 group discussions in 3 days, with reporting in 10 days time.  Setting up yet another one for the end of May.  Then onto 8 groups  in Delhi and Hyderabad between June 1-5th.  Another with 6 groups mid-June.  And yet another one that’s commissioned just today - really interesting project involving learning journeys, ethnographies and participant blogs which will take place June-July.  And in mid-June have a trip to Tblisi, Georgia for an OSI sub-board meeting.

Then Stuart was here for little over a week and we did some amazing stuff around mobile phones and emerging markets.

Apart from work … hmmm not much really.  I did a yoga retreat a while ago with my friend and fellow qualitative researcher, Tracey Rankin from Australia  - was a lot of fun - we took two weeks off work!

Have changed my internet service provider from Reliance to Tata Indicom.  Reliance and my building society just didn’t see eye to eye and there were several problems - result - interrupted connectivity.  I tried to get this resolved between them (some issue on how much rent the society was expecting from Reliance who was using our building as a hub) - didn’t happen.  So if you can’t beat ‘em - exit.  Am thrilled so far with the speeds and very low downtime I am experiencing with Tata Indicom!

And there are repairs on at my building - I just don’t get how disorganized these guys are.  They come in to paint grills, inner walls of the balcony section — and never do it all at once.  So each time, I have to bring in the plants (have more than 25 now) and its all pretty messy.  My house is a mess, my maid’s on leave this month, and I’m hardly ever here.  These guys work so hard and I hate it when I lose my patience with them, which I do quite often - and then make them a cuppa sweet chai to appease my own guilt.

Much chaos, some creativity and huge blobs of life.  Makes me think of Rob and Johnnie who have this amazing blog called The ‘Phoric - its all about life and its many facets - check it out if you haven’t yet!

Share This

Thought I’d share something we worked on last year - almost at the same time Twitter came into its own. and before we thought up Twitter for Ethnography.

We spent some time developing an SMS-Blog research prototype with Srinivas Mogalapalli at Netcore (Rajesh Jain’s company), built upon the MyToday SMS platform.

This was a module in a larger research project among youth, designed to meet the following broad objectives to:

• access and connect to consumer learning and conversations around the patterns for both one-hit fads and enduring trends
• capture insights in the following areas – lifestyle, fashion, relationships, careers, music, technology (gaming, mobile, internet) consumption/retail, entertainment.
• engage customers in ongoing conversations with us
• prototype new formats for research using mobile and internet environments

The research process was designed to include the following modules:

Living Diaries
Focus Groups
Personal Inventory/Character sketches
Virtual Ethnography β

Massive changes in the way youth live their lives today, provide the opportunity to augment traditional qualitative research methodologies. To understand where youth is going, new dynamic, flexible, responsive research approaches are required that more effectively capture their attention. Combining conventional methods like focus groups with methods borrowed from ethnography (that include contextual inquiry with the youth in their personal spaces), will allow us to explore their personal spaces and generate a range of possibilities for deeper dives into their minds and spaces.

We will target a) leading-edge segment of college students and young working people, who are ‘ahead of their times’, differentiated from bleeding-edge consumers, who tend to be atypical, mavens and sometimes a little over the edge. And b) regular upscale consumers to assess brand equity in specific.

This research process will adopt the target group’s own culture-of-use (SMS, MMS, Internet), both to get closer to them and speak their language, and to enhance flows of information.

The objectives of the Virtual Ethnography β module were to:

a. To capture real-time, real-life moments and thoughts as they occur – both written and visual. None of the other research techniques delivers this level of spontaneity, immediacy and ‘realness’ in responses.

b. To test this system out as a prototype or precursor to further assessing how we can make effective use of a networked panel in the belief that it will greatly enhance the way you listen to and engage with your consumers, as you will have access to the information as it flows in.

c. Long-term, we would like to help build, and facilitate making continuous consumer conversations possible. These could also be used further as a playground for new ideas, testing solutions, feedback mechanisms.

The Process and Tools:

We will use SMS, MMS, Blogs and an online email group as the key tools to capture data. 25 participants within the target segment will be recruited per city. They will be at different life-stages and of different gender. They will be required to participate for a period of 2 weeks. There will be three components to this process:

a. SMS-Blog
b. MMS-email/flickr-Blog
c. Blog QOD (question of the day)

We propose the following activities with them within each component:

SMS-Blog

• 4 questions will be sent to each participant every day. The questions will be common to all. These will be quick questions, requiring short immediate responses. We will need to identify close to 60 questions for the two-week duration in conjunction with you. For instance, “where are you now .. who is with you?” or “ did you think of sex today? what triggered the thought?” or “what 3 words best describe why you listen to music” or “take a picture that will show us where you are now and send it to us” or “how would you describe your mood right now?”

• Their responses will be automagically pushed onto a Blog set up on Wordpress. Each participant and question/answer will have a unique identifier code which will allow us to read the data separately by segment, and by question.

• Blog categories will be built as the data comes in with the help of tags; demographic categories will be pre-defined as per the recruitment criteria.

• At this stage, we recommend that the participants cannot directly publish on the blog, rather they use SMS to publish to it. This is to keep biases in responses out of the research process.

MMS-Email/Flickr-Blog:

We will ask them to send in pictures to a common Gmail/Flickr account, with 6-10 word descriptors for each image. A private group at Flickr will be opened, where these pictures will be posted. These pictures and tags will be sucked back into the Blog.

Blog Question of the Day (QOD):

For the two weeks, we will have one question of the day. We will post the question on the Blog and send out the link to the group. Their responses can be captured as comments at that post. The questions will typically require longer responses than the SMS questions and will provide us rich data in a very easy format. We could even run some quick opinion polls at the Blog. While they will be asked to comment for each of these questions, we will ensure that they cannot see each others’ comments to ensure that the research process isn’t biased by one comment influencing another. Each commenter would have to drop in their respondent code, so the comments can be sorted by segment.

Unfortunately, although we got the prototype for this up and running, we couldn’t really put it into actual field research then for reasons that had little to do with this module.

Am now wondering what refinements it needs - and would love to hear your own experiences of using the target audience’s “cultures of use” (mobile phones, sms, social media in this case) as a research tool. Do drop in your thoughts and suggestions please

Share This

…. to break my blogging hiatus. How helpless we are under the force of nature’s fury. Myanmar Cyclone 28,458 deaths & 33,416 missing. China Earthquake almost 10000 dead & mounting. All of this in less than 10 days.

There’s been a huge load of blogging and tweeting live as the earthquake and its aftermath unfolded, with first accounts - reports, images and videos from those in the zone, as it happened.

The Worldwidehelp group blog and wiki sprung back into action on May 4, with the Myanmar cyclone - there’s a huge load of information on aid resources available at the Nargishelp wiki now. Many of our contacts on the ground are saying that it’s been difficult and very political trying to get aid quickly through to those affected in Myanmar. We’re also blogging updates on the Sichuan earthquake, and will try and put up information on help required and aid agencies as we get the information.

Tags: Asia, China, Earthquake, Myanmar, Cyclone, Nargis, Floods, Breaking News, Disaster, Emergency, Humanitarian, Relief, Rescue

Share This

• Indian Blog Directory
  New Indian Blog Directory set up by Amrit Hallan of Writing Cave
  (tags: India blogdirectory blogs indianblogs)
• Wii.com - Iwata Asks: Wii Fit
  I want!!! Can do workouts, ski, yoga ….
  (tags: wii wiibalanceboard)
• InnovationTools - Business creativity and brainstorming articles
  8 suggestions for better brainstorming and idea generation in groups
  (tags: innovation creativity brainstorming)
• Edge 238 - Social Networks are like the Eye
  “..empirical discoveries about the nature of contagion within networks. Also, in the latter case, with respect to how networks arise, we imagine that the formation of networks obeys certain fundamental biological, genetic, physiological, sociological, & t
  (tags: communication facebook marketing research socialnetworks identity)
• agencyfaqs! > digital news > How SMS marketing helped Misra win Lead India
  “Misra says, “The message provided the option for immediate action and it was useful for a lot of people who cannot access the Internet on the mobile. The SMS acted as a reminder for action for a person who was willing to vote.”
  (tags: smscampaigns sms socialmedia mytoday smsmarketing)

Share This

• YouTube - 12 Days of Christmas
  this is absolutely hilarious!!!!!!!!
  (tags: india humour indianculture christmas desi)

Share This

Am off to London today .. will be there 6th - 12th, en route to New York where I’m participating in the Open Society Institute Information Programme Sub-Board meeting (I’m one of the new sub-board members).  It’s going to be so cold - packing’s been a nightmare - had to go buy a larger bag!!!!

London’s just a holiday … let me know if you’re free to meet up!

Share This

Hmmm. Was just chatting with Rajesh of Blogworks about working together on a potential social media project. We were trying to work out areas of competence between his company and ours. He made this observation and used a fine phrase to describe Mosoci - he said it is the Future of Research.

I think I like :):). What do you feel about it as a tagline???

Share This

Rob Paterson alerts me to Jeremiah Owyang’s social media experiment in a comment at my post a few days ago on Twitter for Ethnography:

From Rob’s post at the Fast Forward blog:

This is how Jeremiah framed it:

I’ve created MicroMedia events before, this time, I want to frame it as an overlay to the multi million dollar advertising event, the Superbowl.

[TwitterBowl is a real-time social experiment where the audience rates million dollar advertisements in real time using Twitter]

Are you a superbowl ad critic? Of course you are, everyone is. Even if you don’t watch the superbowl, those pervasive ads will end up in YouTube, Digg, and your cousins blog and your best friends Facebook profile. Tired of others choosing which one was the funniest/stupidist/biggest waste of time? Well this year, you can rate your own superbowl ads using Twitter, and see what everyone else in Twitter thinks too.

How did it go?

Check out the results here. Please also look at the comments - they tell us even more.

Josh Bernoff, another Forrester analyst has compiled and analyzed the responses to ads during the SuperBowl Jeremiah helped evoke.

Very very cool!    A good example and validation of my thoughts on Twitter for Ethnography on Feb 1, a couple of days before the SuperBowl

Share This

• Why Use Twitter When You Can Make Your Own Microblogging Network With Wordpress Prologue? | Gauravonomics Blog
  Wordpress Prologue - Gaurav shares his experience in setting up his own private Microblog. A Twitter alternative? Interesting set of RSS feeds from Twitter on the right panel
  (tags: gauravmishra wordpress wordpressprologue twitter socialmedia)
• ‘if’ .. Dancing Freely
  beautiful imagery from Raymon in this little poem
  (tags: poetry raymondmontalbetti if)
• International Journal of Design
  Published and available free online - 3 issues of Volume 1 (2007). Also, call for papers - Cultural Aspects of Interaction Design. Full paper due on Feb 28
  (tags: design designresearch usability research journal)
• Scenarios For the Future - EPO
  “The project was meant to consider what the patent system might look like in 20 years time, in order to gain greater clarity about the threats and opportunities the future might present. “
  (tags: epo scenarios future patent)

Share This

Mahatma Gandhi once said: “We must be the change we wish to see in the world.”

My recent experience with the Learning Journey we organised for Clients actually reinforced to me that given the right balance of content with experiential immersions and a focus on ‘how’ learning would take place, learning-to-be can begin even with just a week’s exposure.

One of the instances that brings such a smile on my face is the sight of youngsters lighting up one cigarette after another, while chatting with 13 older persons who were all non-smokers from North America all in an enclosed area in a coffee and hookah bar! And not one of my clients complained or even minded, although I was so conscious that this could potentially be quite uncomfortable for them!!! You can keep talking about how the youth is confident, irreverent, etc, you can build models based on consumer insights and on all sorts of qualitative and quantitative data, but when you actually observe their manner of ‘being’ and they actually draw you into their world into which you walk in openly and begin sharing yourself, how much easier and more effective it is to understand and learn!

So many other experiences ….

we’re all observers together

lunch cooked by a family in a village on a traditional stove over firewood.

new best friends from the village

with dabbawallas understanding how grassroots self-organising systems work

renovation underway

a variety of food!

with bloggers

[pictures from Flickr group and Elena’s flickr page]

This comment from a senior member of the group actually reinforces how a Learning Journey can really create a ‘we participate therefore we are” learning framework:

Each of our Team members has been changed for life as a result of our experiences – and we are most grateful. The experiences of our recent Learning Journey has been woven into the very fabric of my soul. More than ever I understand more personally that we are all citizens of the globe bonded together by the common threads of our humanness. Many thanks, again, Dina, to both you and Shubhangi for shaping experiences that touched our lives so profoundly.

Share This

vs

Great piece on Social Learning titled Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0 by John Seely Brown and Richard P. Adler. The supercool text illustrations are by Susan E. Haviland.

Some snippets I really enjoyed:

What do we mean by “social learning”? Perhaps the simplest way to explain this concept is to note that social learning is based on the premise that our understanding of content is socially constructed through conversations about that content and through grounded interactions, especially with others, around problems or actions. The focus is not so much on what we are learning but on how we are learning.

There is a second, perhaps even more significant, aspect of social learning. Mastering a field of knowledge involves not only “learning about” the subject matter but also “learning to be” a full participant in the field.

In a traditional Cartesian educational system, students may spend years learning about a subject; only after amassing sufficient (explicit) knowledge are they expected to start acquiring the (tacit) knowledge or practice of how to be an active practitioner/professional in a field.⁹ But viewing learning as the process of joining a community of practice reverses this pattern and allows new students to engage in “learning to be” even as they are mastering the content of a field. This encourages the practice of what John Dewey called “productive inquiry”—that is, the process of seeking the knowledge when it is needed in order to carry out a particular situated task.

Although this article has been written in the context of education, there are some great learnings for researchers, ethnographers and for business too. One of the greatest challenges and often a dilemma is how to leverage social tools into research and marketing that would create a shift from a much hyped must-do model based on explicit learning (yeah - lets go build a social network or lets start a Facebook community for our brand) to a more intuitive method grounded in tacit knowledge and real experience.

One reason why we believe researchers experimenting with these tools should immerse themselves in using them first, one reason why we believe all brand managers should build their own social media toolkits through actual experience! One of the problems with this is the time commitments required for these personal explorations, which could then morph into professional insights. I cannot emphasise more the importance of being touched at a personal level for developing a learning-to-be mindset. That’s what good Learning Journeys can accomplish.

Share This

There’s a discussion on at the anthrodesign group around how best to approach a diary project. An excerpt from the initial query:

“We’ll be fielding a diary study trying to understand people’s initial experiences with a new mobile phone, particularly understanding the set up experience and the first few days of use. We are interested in what they are doing, barriers/successes, feelings during the process. “

There have been some thoughts and ideas around using voicemail, online diaries, digital voice-recording. Voicemail and digital voice-recording may present problems in analysis I feel. Also, would the participants be comfortable with it?

Something I feel that could work, and here’s what I sent:

Have you thought of using something like Twitter for this? You could set up a private group or channel there - where you could ask participants to send in short (140 character) messages. These updates could be either via SMS from phone, IM, or web-based. Advantages - you would capture feedback in real time as it happens, if youth is your target group then you’re enabling them to utilise their own culture of use (sms/IM) and hence a more natural and spontaneous capture and flow of responses. A few times a day you could send out specific questions. Here’s a link to a hack for this.

Likewise, if you need visual representation too - a private Flickr group could be set up too - and there are tools like Shozu to upload pics straight from your phone onto Flickr with one click!

An alternative to this is an SMS/MMS to Blog option, which is more controlled - where you could set categories like cribs/delights etc. Send out short questions over the week to participants - their responses come into a blog site via SMS or MMS. You could also consider a more detailed QOD - Question of the Day - if required, where they log into the blog and post their responses.

Last year, we had set up a prototype for an SMS-Blog system for trends research - unfortunately, the client - a youth TV channel wasn’t quite ready to run with it at that point in time. I’d have loved to have used Twitter itself even then, however, we didn’t have a short code for India specifically and hence, would have been too expensive for users. Now we do, and am eager to test it out as a research tool!

Check this post by Leisa Reichelt - Guerrilla Techniques - Does inexpensive research have to be ‘quick & dirty’ where she raises a “whole lotta questions” about using tools such as Twitter for research - my favourite question there is “Are we getting to the point where, perhaps, we can do better research outside of the lab than inside it?”

Any thoughts on how we could refine our research methods and the social tools available today for more formal research? I don’t think it’s really about being ‘quick and dirty’ - the real value is in being able to use these tools to set up long-term and robust research solutions that encourage participation in real-life and real-time situations. This is one of our key areas of focus at Mosoci and we keep experimenting!

Share This

• YouTube - Google Maps
  Nice one from Vacationeers - more google big brother paranoia - is fun!
  (tags: googlemaps google youtube humor vacationeers)
• Beauty Blogs Come of Age: Swag, Please! - New York Times
  as more women turn to blogs for advice on bronzers or facial scrubs, and magazines like Allure and Glamour have started their own beauty blogs, the cosmetics industry has stopped seeing bloggers as bottom feeders.
  (tags: blogging bloggerrelations beautyblogs beauty)
• Silobreaker: Welcome
  Looks interesting - search and news engine. I like the visualizations in ‘Trends’
  (tags: journalism media News search searchengine aggregator visualization)
• The Kala Ghoda Gazette » Events
  9-day arts festival in Mumbai - gallery & pavement shows, exhibitions, literary events, film screenings, music concerts, dance, theatre, workshops, heritage walks, a food fiesta, & a buzzing street festival. Peter and gang are liveblogging
  (tags: kalaghoda kalaghodafestival caferati blog)

Share This

Aaah finally …. a Twitter shortcode for India which means we don’t pay international SMS charges! Nice. Thanks to Moksh Juneja for pointing this out. The shortcode is 5566511.

“Twitter asks you to verify your phone so we know that you’re you. You’ll never be signed up for mobile updates unless you really want to be. To get mobile updates, add your phone number to your Twitter settings page, and verify your number. Here’s how:

1. Log in to Twitter.
2. Click the Settings link in the top navigation bar.
3. Click Phone&IM.
4. Enter your phone number in the field provided.
5. Wait for the verification code to pop up and text it to Twitter at 5566511 (for India). In the US, use 40404. In Canada, use 21212. Anywhere else, use +44 7624 801423

Bonus Tip:

Also know that you can shut text messages from Twitter off at anytime by replying with “off” (and back on by sending “on”). And you can even specify that it turn off automatically at night.

More ideas on what you can do with Twitter at the Big Juicy Twitter Guide and at Mashable’s Top 12 Twitter Apps on your Phone.

So I tried it out - sent the sms - I see it on my twitter homepage on the web. However, I got this strange sms back from “55665 Reply cntr.defined” which says “This service is not yet enabled” - what gives???

Other thoughts - given recent Twitter outages and timelags, I wonder what’s going to happen when about 240 mn Indian mobile phone users start using this! Also, anyone know how much each SMS will cost?

Share This

• 9 Benefits of Twitter for Bloggers
  Research tool, reinforce & expand personal brand, promote content, extend audience, network, preview ideas, speedlinking, story-gathering, get honest views& feedback, Apart from Speedlinking which i personally find annoying, a great list of benefits.
  (tags: twitter socialmedia socialnetworking community blogging research problogger)
• The Next Evolution of Social Media Measurement
  John Bell of OglivyPR talks of the need for an ad equivalency model in measuring social media marketing activities. One of the key problems is how to factor in qualitative measures which are perhaps more powerful in this medium than any other.
  (tags: measurement socialmedia metrics marketing advertising web2.0 johnbell)

Share This

• peterme.com :: Personas 99% Bad?
  So on the morning of the second day we dove into a discussion of personas — those archetypal users of the product. We had three personas (Casey, Jessica, and Eric), and we talked about (and occasionally argued about) them for quite a while, until we arr
  (tags: design archetypes personas petermerholtz)

Share This

I am just back from a week-long Learning Journey my colleague Shubhangi and I organised for a group of 10 very senior health-care professionals from the US who are on a Futures Task Force … it was intensive, immersive and really very rewarding. It’s been a Learning Journey for all of us - we formed a community of open minds and hearts, in our journey to shared understanding, and we learned so much from each other as a result.

The objective was to immerse them into a culture and people that provide such a wide range of healing traditions, and to understand models, not just in healthcare but otherwise too, that are serving a diverse population of more than a billion people in India. Some of the areas we covered:

• base-of-the-pyramid and top-of-the-pyramid models
• community projects in slums and rural areas - health, education, microfinance, govt and non-govt - the concept of self-help groups and decentralized bottom-up projects that empower women and other communities to understand and solve their own problems given societal pressures
• holistic approaches to healthcare
• innovations in telemedicine and ICT
• healthcare immersions at several levels - urban elite including medical tourism, urban poor, rural areas
• culture, religion and history
• immersions, conversations and screenings of films which let us view notions of Indian-ness and of a global India through different lenses: business, politics, society, culture, economics, environment, time, space …
• deep dives into villages and slums
• Indian healing traditions
• conversations around pop culture, including Bollywood
• youth and technology - the leapfrog generation perspective
• social media which is being used for collective action

It was really exciting, although fairly exhausting on the organizing of content and logistics for a group this size. Our greatest challenge was to balance real immersion and free-flowing conversations with more formal content; to get them to experience as much of the real India as they could within a week, in all the dizzying contradictions it presents - and not one side of the coin that is often presented in Western media - that of urban India shining.

In Shubhangi’s own words, which I echo fully:

“I think I experienced such ‘dizzying contrasts’, met so many wonderful people, listened to experts in different fields and soooo much more in those 7 days that I’m still quite overwhelmed and it will take time to come to grips with everything I learned.”

I know our clients feel the same. Most of all, we had a lot of fun, and we were really blessed to have a group with us that was so open to all experiences, so humble, despite being CEO’s, CTO’s, Medical Directors, Board Members of several hospitals in the developed world, and who didn’t wince once when we got them to have a meal cooked by villagers or walk through the narrow alleys of Dharavi slum, or sit on bumpy cycle-rickshaws in Chandni Chowk.

Somehow I felt there was a soul connection with those they touched during the week - one of collective hope and renewal that is so empowering and essential for action. It’s difficult to articulate - how can one explain that warm smile right from the heart, that respect and humbleness they showed and which was returned everytime in full and more, from their hosts in India who were so gracious and open and honest in sharing parts of their lives with them. Blowing all our stereotypes about divides and differences to bits! Images that stay in my mind are of the group chatting with villagers - despite language barriers - of children giving them big hugs while sending them off as if they were old friends! Thank you to my Clients and to all the folks from India who shared with each other so freely and openly. [Pic: one of Shubhangi’s many wonderful pictures at Flickr].

It’s been fantastic too and such a privilege to have worked with Nicole-Anne Boyer of Adaptive Edge, a friend from my Worldchanging days who is really the Learning Journey expert [pdf file] and is leading this project. I loved the way she let us loose and yet micro-managed the project when required! We learnt so much about the processes, and most of all about the presence of mind and the heart that’s required in the balancing of provocation with gentle guidance, of surprise within a tightly scheduled itinerary, of energy with silent presence, of taking them to the edge of chaos and allowing them to guide themselves back gently, of experiencing groundedness with visions of the future. Thank you Nicole for trusting in us, and allowing us this immense experience together with you.

Thank you too Shubhangi, my colleague at Explore Research and Consultancy, and good friend over the last 12 years, for her quiet support and amazing patience with me when I was losing it, for all the work running up to the Learning Journey and during it, taking care that the content was just right, for plodding through all the planning, for the warmth and guidance she displayed towards our visitors - always with a smile on her face, and without once showing any annoyance at me even when I was at my bossy best!!

What a journey! I should be tired, but I feel such energy and hope. I’ve done several modules of immersions and deep dives and learning journeys as part of qualitative research and ethnography projects before - this was the first time we did such a comprehensive one - with just the one objective. I am now convinced that this is one of the most powerful ways of getting groups out of their comfort zones and into really deep reflections in reframing value, innovation and when considering their own future in a very real and human way. It’s something we have to do more often, even at Mosoci - its so good for the soul!

Will put up pictures and images from this in later posts - well over a thousand pictures taken by the group thru the week.

Share This