By Fred Swaniker.
Ready for a sneak peek into the week we had? I always say that the African Leadership Group’s culture is our secret sauce, but experiencing it in person? One word: magical!
Day 1
On Day 1 of our staff retreat in Kigali, we’ve managed to bring almost 200 members of our team to Rwanda to meet for the first time since 2020.
We enjoyed taking the team to see a bit of our history/DNA in education and leadership development. We visited the campus of The African Leadership University in Rwanda as part of our week-long retreat. Attendees experienced first hand how we have been developing world-class African leaders over the last 18 years. It is that same DNA that we are now using to develop and connect the digital leaders of the future, as we train thousands of software engineers at ALX. Imagine a software engineer who also has a foundation in ethics and values, can think critically, can communicate, work well in teams, manage complex tasks, and is driven by purpose to solve big challenges for society. That’s what we mean by a “Digital leader”.
Day 2
This morning, we had a remarkable session at our All Staff Retreat for The Room Global team. Across African Leadership Group, we develop our future leaders using the “ASHIP” learning philosophy. “ASHIP” stands for Active, Social, Holistic, Integrated and Personalized (or Playful- depending on who you ask). Cognitive research shows that this is the best way for adults to learn, so we apply this not only to our students (aka future leaders) but also with our staff when we gather.
In line with this learning philosophy, we tasked our people to come up with a song or rap about our key company objectives for 2023. Each team had only 15 mins to prepare. There were several mic dropping moments! If they weren’t so talented at their day jobs, I would be taking them on tour!
Day 3
In this virtual world we live in, we feel it is important to periodically gather in person. There are some things that are just not possible on zoom and after only one day I am convinced that when like-minded people gather, magic happens! The power of real human connection cannot be underestimated and I’m looking forward to a productive week with these rockstars!
Here’s how we ‘conspired’ on day 3 of our all-staff retreat: We explored how all 200 of us are going to work together to achieve our ambitious goals for 2023. We also got down to some good vibes and composed some rap songs to help everyone remember our targets. It’s important to bring ‘soul’ and fun to the work of doing hard things!
Day 4
The theme for Day 4 was ‘Perspire’. We explored the blood, sweat, and tears it takes to do hard things by having immersed our 200 staff into one of the world’s most complex challenges: how to bring healthcare to rural areas in Africa.
We started the day by visiting some rural ‘health posts’ in Rwanda, which are run by these cool ‘nurse entrepreneurs’. Before these health posts were set up, people had to walk 3-4 hours to access the nearest healthcare facilities. Now people can access excellent care for things like childbirth, minor wound operations, lab tests, malaria treatment and basic pharmaceuticals by walking only 17-30 minutes.
Then we visited Zipline, which was one of the first companies in the world to deliver emergency blood, drugs, medical disposables and other supplies to clinics by drone. Zipline demonstrated two things to us: 1. How technology can radically transform access to healthcare. 2. How world-changing innovations can be born in Africa. (Zipline started in Rwanda but has now expanded to other countries across the world like the US, Japan, Nigeria, Ghana, etc.)
We ended the day back at Norrsken where we unveiled a project we are working on to digitise the 200 clinics run by Societies for Family Health (the NGO that set up the health posts we visited).
We will leverage our top talent from ALG, as well as AI-enabled, cloud-connected diagnostic devices, electronic healthcare records, drone delivery (by Zipline), and remote consultations with doctors sitting thousands of miles away to allow patients in some of the most rural parts of Rwanda to access world-class healthcare. The digitisation will also allow the management team of SFH to have real-time insights about what is happening in their network of 200 clinics, so they can make better decisions, allocate resources, and drive continuous improvement in patient care.
One special treat for me during the Zipline visit was seeing one of my former students from The African Leadership University, who started out as an engineer but is now leading global recruiting for Zipline. She gave us a tour of the facilities and I felt so proud of her.
As you can imagine, it was a very long day. But we believe it is critical for us to experience first hand the challenges we hope to solve with our talent and our technology.
Afterwards
I am still on cloud 9 from our all staff retreat last week! We truly have the most amazing people and I’m excited to take on 2023 with them!
