COMING NEXT...

in this category of "My main challenges & advices"


The accelerated development secret
The I care but I show it how I want anymore
where is let's Do it stand up ?
The seniority mind block effect
Make a contribution now impact everyday ?
Professional personal life gap
The transferable skills
Facilitation of meetings
Legislation in AIESEC is usefull
When board meetings make sense
Network & friends
Criticize makes u feel good

The “mistake is ok” culture

Dear reader,

I wish here to share with you what have been my experience, surprises in moving from AIESEC to the real world. Most of it are personal perspectives and opinion based on my own experience, not data analysis or empirical findings. However I believe it can still be valuable for anyone who wants to reflect back at his experience of leaving AIESEC, or get ready to do it soon, or even just discover more about my story.
I hope you enjoy and I hope to consolidate this 1st imputs by an interactive participation of future bloggers as rating the things with a "I LIKE" system to vote and "ADD" for introducing new challenges or solutions.

in AIESEC 4 years agoo I was be invited to chair a conference with more than 100 students in Siberia in Russia. This while I had almost no experience in attending conferences in other countries, never had cultural interaction with this part of the world, nor was ready for this extremely cold temperatures. How can you realisticly expect a young inexperience person to deliver high quality on this case, no experience in agenda management or facilitators coordination and not yet confident at public speaking.

This was an experience that will stretch my learning in all the directions at the same, putting me in a real unexpected territory where I now I will do mistakes, people around now that I will do mistakes and we are all ok with that because of the culture and the environement. The logistics director as well as half of my team have never done it before and most of the delegates never attended such conference. We are all equals and very few people could critize or judge there but we can all give feedbacks to each other in our learning journey together.

Now working at the Open University, I discover the Institutional risk register and the other approach of looking at the risk of not going for something except if not doing it is dangerous. This makes sense based on our stability and 40 years of sucess and even in changing times like now we have no reason to make too dangerous moves. How can I compare it to my case and how affraid I was to go for this opportunity ? what will be the risk of me not going there ? If I was thinking in terms of risk, I will never have taken on this life changing challenge.

At an individual level here is similar and the opporunities are incremental to make sure we minimize mistakes. Why is this such a fundemamental different approach ? I believe because our main focus in our mission and in the ability to sustain our operation and pay the salary of our 5000 employees not in their own development. As much important as it is for us staff development could never be as much as in the center as it is in AIESEC as part of its mission enabling their members to discover and develop their leadership potential.

Should we learn something from this for AIESEC also and the fact that we allow our members to go interact with external audiences sometimes without approving and quality control and this being our leverage in moving fast and making things happen on time ? In the real world we might not let people represent our brand without comitees approval and appropriate trainings validated.

It all come the question of accepting mistakes or not and to wich degree ? AIESEC is the SAFE place and I will say that is visible even from the outside and this is also the basis of our ambition sometimes to try to make it better.

The degree of accepted mistakes in the real world is quite visible from a typing mistake in client powerpoint by consultant to not delivering milestones on time in a project, the empirical experience show us what will happen. In AIESEC there is almost no empirical experience and we want to better than the previous one, if not at least as good but what happen in case of big mistake that close our entity ?

The mistake can still be accepted and it will depend on the reasons and the effort you have put into it wich will be impossible to apply to another organisations just because of the salary needed to sustain the families of the employees, a CEO or leader in this case will never be allowed of mistake.

From now on, I try to target the area of devlopment I am looking at for the specific project and build on what I know and where mistakes will not happen to get more similar opportunities than I use to get. I will also use my selfconfidence to reinsure people that are affraid of the consequences of my potential mistakes, and build a relation of trust using my emotional intelligence. Something that most AIESECErs should be able to do ?