So I came back from my service-learning trip to San Francisco and the Silicon Valley in the United States, which happened from 27 June to 8 July. During the journey, I visited new organizations which are solving complex social issues, met new friends and learnt new things from them almost every day. I also walked and biked a lot through the hills of San Francisco to visit tourist attractions such as the Golden Gate Bridge, Fisherman Wharf, Maritime Historical National Park, Lombard Street and the California Academy of Science. This was the most exciting experience I’ve ever had this year!
Christy (GLE Program Director) and GLE participants (from left to right: me, Leo (from Tokyo University), Yocky & Poppy (from HKUST)) at the Golden Gate Bridge
My two most important goals when participating in the GLE program are:
To obtain project implementation skills from visited organization and then apply them to my current REDbird Project as well as to make friends with leaders of those organizations
To understand the success and the source of creativity behind companies in Silicon Valley
I think I achieved these goals with my learning about the “Leadership Framework”. This framework was obtained by Kouzes and Posner, two university professors who have researched hundreds of thousands of “best leadership experience” stories around the world, and was introduced to me and other GLE participants by Christy at the beginning of our journey. The framework, which consists of 5 practices: Encouraging The Heart, Model The Way, Challenge The Process, Inspire A Shared Vision and Enable Others To Act, summarizes the sets of actions which a leader should do in order to ensure the success of their project. At first, I didn’t see the meaning of this concept but after visiting several organizations and then doing some reflection in my mind, I started realizing how the “Leadership Framework” was applied in those organization and made them become successful. Especially, some organizations are better at a specific practice than others; thus, I would like to talk about different practices in the framework through the stories of different organizations:
Encouraging The Heart: Faithful Fools
In order to encourage people to help a community, we should first let them feel empathetic to members of that community. Faithful Fools, an non-governmental organization which provides help for homeless people in Tenderloin, San Francisco, has conducted this practice in an effective way. They educate people about the poor conditions of homeless people by inviting them to “immerse” in those conditions. Because our GLE group only visited Faithful Fools in one morning, we only walked around the Tenderloin area and observed the everyday life of homeless people but didn’t try sleeping on the streets overnight. However, during that time, I could obtain real understanding about homelessness in the US. I saw homeless people wearing very thick jackets, having an unbalanced diet (most of the time I saw them eating snack and eating Coke, which made them fat) and smoked a lot. I also talked with some homeless and realized that many of them have unhappy childhood (adoption, broken family, illegal immigration, …). Like Christy said, this was the first time I saw “homeless” as an issue of each individuals out there instead of as a general social issue. I understood why Faithful Fools tried to address personal issues of each homeless individuals in the area instead of applying a common strategy to the whole homeless community in Tenderloin.
Model The Way + Inspire A Shared Vision: Delancey Street Foundation
Nice and tidy houses at Delancey Street Foundation, all cleaned and managed by Delancey Street community members
From left to right: Hirona (VIA staff), Christy, Poppy, Yocky, me and Leo. At Delancey Street Restaurant
Our GLE group visited Faithful Fools and Delancey Street Foundation in the same day: the former in the morning, the later in the afternoon. Although Faithful Fools “encouraged my heart” to think more deeply about homeless people, I still felt quite disappointed after leaving there because I couldn’t see any sustainable solutions to help homeless people to escape from their poverty: What Faithful Fools is doing now is just easing their situations. However, after visiting Delancey Street Foundation, my mind were full of hope again. This organization has done extraordinary jobs to build a self-help community of former substance abusers, ex-convicts and homeless. Together they manage a block of houses, a café, a restaurant, a car garage and a moving company. Their distinguished leadership practices are:
Model The Way: Newcomers at Delancey Street (e.g. ex-criminal who’s just left prison, …) are given the simplest jobs first (keep houses, corridor in the area cleaned). The people who instruct them how to do the job and also take care of their wellbeing are experienced members who used to have a perverted background but has successfully found the way out at Delancey Street. This gives newcomers great motivation to change their lives. Moreover, if they can keep good manners and do well in their jobs, they are promoted to higher level jobs which are, again, always be taught by people inside Delancey Street.
Inspire A Shared Vision: Members of Delancey Street work together every day in a discipline manner. Therefore, they can easily see the improvement of each other and then encourage themselves to behave better as well as work harder. They also eat and enjoy free time together in the common room, which give them much time to share their stories, build empathy among each other and thus strengthen the bonds in their community. Another special point about Delancey Street is that all members are not get paid, instead
Challenge The Process: Google and YouTube
From left to right: Michael (Google staff), Leo, Poppy, me and Yocky. At Google headquarter, Mountain View, California
From left to right: Leo, me, Stephanie (YouTube staff), Yocky and Poppy. At YouTube headquarter, South San Francisco, California
One interesting thing I learnt from Google and YouTube (which is owned by Google) was their 20% policy: Their employees are encouraged to spend 20% of their time on their own creative projects. Surprisingly, this is where Google’s famous products were born such as Gmail and Google Maps. This is also the key of how Google does very well at “challenging the process” and keeping the innovative spirit in its company: When people are free to pursue their dreams and passions, they can create breakthrough products.
Besides, the individual-centralized team management style of Google is also worth studying (this is my second goal). Rather than stressing the importance of individuals’ responsibility for the team achievement, Google’s managers tries their best to address each individual’s need in order to make them feel most comfortable and achieve the maximum efficiency. However, in order to ensure effective communication among team, the managers ask each team members to clarify in front of the team what their working style is and, especially, how often other people misunderstand them. Thus, team members will know how to adjust themselves to work with others so that the whole team can achieve the greatest efficiency. Next, the information flow in the team is transparent, which means nothing is secret, even the discussions among top managerial positions about something bad. This helps maintain trust and responsibility among team members. Finally, the management style is always kept to be positive and constructive. For example: when something bad happens such as a team member misses a deadline, the team manager will not blame him; instead, the manager will help him find out what he needs to improve in order to do better next time. Even if it is revealed that the team member no longer enjoys his job, the manager are willing to help him switch to another job. All of these actions just want to make sure that Google employees can work in their most convenient environment and achieve greatest creativity.
I was glad that through the trip, I had chances to make friend with two talented people at Google and YouTube: Micheal and Stephanie. I hope to keep in touch with them and learn more from them in the future.
Enable Others To Act: Stanford Design School and Inveneo
A typical corner at Stanford Design Thinking School
The design thinking methodology created by Stanford Design School was great in freeing people’s mind and opening up their imagination; therefore, it enable people to come up with the suitable solution for the challenging problem in their community. The key steps of this methodology are:
Build empathy with the people who are going to receive help from you
Come up with as many ideas as possible in a short time no matters how crazy it is. Make the process fun.
Express your ideas publicly through various form: speaking, drawing, acting, making an object, … Be creative here.
In order to practice the design thinking method, I and Hirona (a VIA staff) discussed about the design of a cross-cultural experiential program. Before the discussion, we played a short game: We alternately asked each other without thinking to name 3 things which related to a subject and the answer must be given in a very short time. Amazingly, after the game, my mind feel more relaxing and open, which helped me generate an unconventional design for the cross-cultural program: Instead of just bringing relaxing experience to students, divide them into teams and give the experience out in form of competitions among these teams. This design didn’t only encourage students to practice cross-cultural communication as much as possible (because they needed to win the competitions) but also strengthen their friendship.
From left to right: Sam, me and Robert. At Inveneo headquarter
Unlike Stanford Design School, Inveneo is an non-profit IT organization which enables community in developing regions in the world to act for themselves by providing them affordable and durable computers and internet connection. Inveneo staffs travel to those regions, study the geographical conditions there and then offer computing systems suitable to these conditions to the community. Next, they train the community how to maintain the systems so that after they leave the area, the local community is capable to sustaining these systems and knowing how to use them to improve their lives.
In Inveneo, I had chances to meet two interesting guys: Robert and Sam. Robert quitted his job in a big company in Silicon Valley to co-found Inveneo while Sam has long experience of working for non-profit IT organization. I asked them what motivated them to do this job, why they didn’t like high-salary jobs at commercial tech companies. Their answer was simple: happiness. They felt happy with their current jobs, despite lower salaries, because they knew they are directly utilizing their skills to create a better future for many people. This answer really inspired, “enabled” me to think about my future career as an NGO staff who does meaningful jobs like them.
Besides associated moving stories, the Leadership Framework mentioned above has given me some ideas of how to improve the implementation of my project at HKUST. I plan to introduce Design Thinking Methodology to my project team and apply it in order to improve the quality of our project. I also want to try Google’s positive and constructive management style by maintaining a free, transparent flow of information among us (with the help of WhatsApp and Google Drive documents as it is not always easy for us to have a meeting) as well as asking all members to publicly clarify how often they are misunderstood and how they would like to communicate with others. Finally, I will practice “Encourage The Heart” by giving more encouraging actions to other team members so that a good friendship and a motivating environment are maintained among us.
At the end, I would like to share with you some of fun moments in my free time in San Francisco:
Maritime Historic National Park
Lombard Street
Street artist at Fisherman Wharf in US Independence Day (4 July)