I am a hiking-lover. I went hiking a lot with my family members and my friends when I was in Vietnam and I wanted to continue that habit in Hong Kong. One thing I noticed is that when people are hiking, they like talking with each other, perhaps to break the quiet atmosphere as well as to forget about their tiredness. From that observation, I came up with an idea: Why not using hiking as a platform to make new friends? Unlike traditional workshops where people just sit and talk inside a room, which might make them feel tired and inactive after a few minutes, hiking brings people in touch with the nature and keeps their body proactive throughout the journey. Believing that this idea had potential to grow, I pitched it in the Facebook community page of the REDbird 2nd Year Program and called for co-organizers. Finally, I teamed up with Sam and Willis to implement the project.
These are our inital plan for the project:
Every 1 – 2 weeks, a group of students gather and go hiking together. The group will consist of some local students and some international students (preferably 50% local and 50% international)
During the hiking, students will be divided into small groups (2 – 3 people per group)
Members of each small group will talk to each other about a topic (such as personal inspiring stories, life in Hong Kong, life in their home countries, …)
If the hiking trail is long, member rotation/swapping will be applied
At the middle or the end of the hiking trip (depending on the hiking trail), the whole group will take a rest and have a big gathering to share what interesting things they know from each other
After finishing hiking, the big group will have lunch/dinner together.
It was November 2015 that I initiated this project, however, not until late-February 2016 did I and my team started planning for the first hiking trip. Looking back to that period of delay, I felt regretted because during that time, I tried to accomplish quite a lot of things (preparing and working on my research project, identifying internship opportunities for summer, etc.) and thus did not fully commit to the project. According to 5 leadership practices (proposed by the book “Leadership Challenge” by James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner), there were two practices that I violated:
Model the way: As the initiator of the project, I should have set up milestones for it right after the organizing team was formed. I believed because I and my teammates did not come up with a fixed schedule in mind, all of us felt reluctant or uncertain when anyone did anything.
Enable others to act: I tried to execute a community project but I did not allocate a considerable amount of “energy” to the community. That is, I did not spend a lot of time communicating with people about the project, asking for participation and more importantly, keeping my organizing teammates constantly engaged to the project.
So what did I do to solve the above problem when I and my organizing team had the meeting in February to plan for the first hiking trip? First, we quickly established the working schedule: report about invitation situation on 6 March, first hiking trip on 13 March, in case of bad weather, move it to 20 March. Second, I started communicating with my friends about the hiking trip and invited them (I was in charge of inviting international students while Sam and Willis were in charge of inviting local student). In additional, we also worked on choosing a suitable hiking trail. Because the purpose of the hiking trip was to facilitate sharing and making friends, we intended to choose medium length (3 hours of walking) and flat trails so that our participants could walk in a relaxing mood and spend more energy talking with each other. Finally, we chose the Wilson Trail that runs from Yau Tong MTR Station to Hang Hau Station.
Our first hiking trail
Due to bad weather condition and HKUST midterm exam period, we could only invite 4 participants (2 international, 2 local) and also had to delay the trip until 3rd April. However, the most unfortunate thing that happened to us was: In the morning of April 3, three out of four participants called me and told that they could not go hiking because of some personal issues. Although being surprised and a little bit disappointed, I still decided to do the hiking trip with only 1 participant. In total, there were 3 people in the trip: me, Sam and Hana (the participant). We started from Yau Tong MTR Station at 10:30am and reached the end point, Tseung Kwan O MTR Station at 2:00pm (the chosen end point was Hang Hau MTR Station, but we had to make some changes based on the real situation).
After all, the trip was joyful, full of conversations and also full of laugh. Sam and Hana shared a lot of interesting things with each other, from family, school life, hobbies to Ching Ming Festival (yes, our trip was on the same day with the festival and we saw a lot of Hong Kong people going to the cemetery nearby). For me, I learnt a few things about this very first step of the project:
The ideal number of people in a small group seemed to be two: As presented in our project plan above, we divide participants into small “discussion” group of 2 – 3 people. During the trip, there were moments when I, Sam and Hana tried to engage in a talk at the same time but due to the walking nature of hiking, we could not maintain the conversation for a long time. Meanwhile, I noticed that when only Hana and Sam, they could sustain the conversation longer while still maintaining the hiking pace. Therefore, in the next hiking trip, I will divide the whole group into pairs (1 international + 1 local)
3 hours of hiking seemed to be too long: If we just focus on hiking, then 3 hours is probably a short period. However, for a hiking trip that also aims to facilitate talking among people, then I feel 3 hours is too long. During the hiking, I noticed that we talked a lot in the first 15 minutes, but then the conversational intensity was getting lower and lower. After the first hour of hiking, we only talked every 15 – 20 minutes because of tiredness. The situation could have been improved if there had been more than 4 participants so that group member rotation could have been applied. Nevertheless, I think the trip need to be shortened to 2 hours next time in order to keep the active-ness of participants till the end.
We should have invited much more than 6 participants: We could not imagine that our participants called us to cancel the trip right in the morning of the hiking day. Therefore, in the next hiking trip, suppose that we aim to have 6 – 8 participants, we would possibly need to ask 10 – 12 people for participation.
The theme of the hiking trip should have been made clearer and more interesting: In this first hiking trip, I proposed quite a simple theme: Self-introduction. That is, during the trip, participants should share with each other interesting things about themselves. What I observed was that this theme made it easy for participants to initiate conversation, but difficult for them to sustain it and dig deeper, probably because they did not know how to do that. Therefore, in the next hiking trip, beside telling participant the theme, I am going to give them several guiding questions. For example, if the theme is “The person who you admire most”, the guiding question could be: How do you know about that person? What characteristics of that person do you admire? What can you learn from that person? Are there anything from that person that you do not like? etc. Of course, self-introduction will still be an important part at the beginning of each conversation.
Happy Hana and Sam taking a rest together in a sunny day
Happy Hana and Sam walking together in a sunny day
There is one sharing from Hana, our participant, that made me feel encouraged and motivated. She told me that some HKUST PhD students like her really loved hiking but did not go usually hiking. This is not because they do not have much free time, but because they do not know how to go hiking and thus usually wait for being invited. Therefore, Hana told me to consider those students when giving invitation next time. This made me happy because my hiking community project could “encourage the heart” (1) (which is motivating PhD students to do exercising) and “enable others to act” (2) (which is giving opportunity PhD students to go hiking frequently). I did not forget to ask Hana to help me invite her PhD friends to the next hiking trip.
The hiking team at the peak of Wilson Trail
(1), (2): Two leadership practices extracted from the book “Leadership Challenge” by James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner