Day 3

Day 3

The first session on this wonderful winter South African day (clear blue sky, gentle warm breeze, dry air) involved doing a brain plotting exercise. Although many leaders will have done similar things in the past, the exercise was done with good humour and gusto. The room of leaders had a variety of the four main types: people who nominally work with facts, feelings, form (structure) or the future. (guess which one I am?) The following exercise, taking our overnight task of predicting what the future should look like, in our mixed brain types enabled a creative, collaborative picture of the future for different people in the world ( a young girl, a teenage boy, a young mother, a primary teacher, a school principal, etc) which was optimistic and compelling.

Each group were asked to envision the future as a story and then depict the story in a motif. After listening to another real life story (from the male perspective) we took aspects of our different stories to see how we can create the road map to make them real. This was facilitated by suggesting actions in three categories for both our schools and associations. The categories are:
Identifying immediate actions
Building momentum system change
Creating a compelling sustainable future

Immediate actions were very easy to fulfil; each person's position and place in their world dictated the calibre of the responses. This first section was 'be the action', and what we as individuals could do.

The last section was the hardest, but this was the aim of the ICP conference in reality.
(As well as this arrangements were being made for leaving!!) We were encouraged in this to be visionary, exciting and challenge ourselves to be brave. A room full of post-it notes were left on the wall for the leading team to try to structure before our return in the morning.

The evening ended with a formal dinner and a presentation by some of the returning OWLA girls. Highly professional and entertaining; it was lovely to talk to the girls at the end of the evening.

Regards