A couple of weeks ago I learned an important lesson, hopefully for good. When working with clients, you should respect their rhythm and avoid imposing objectives and workplans that do not respond to their own dynamics. Ultimately, there's no point in having a good business plan or a perfect marketing or sustainability strategy if you don't have the skills to implement them. I had concluded this before, but sometimes I find myself learning the same things again and again, without noticing the unlearning that takes place in between.
The Latin American Youth Forum is a group that manages to congregate, with certain religiosity, more than 35 young Latin americans living in London on a weekly or more frequent basis. Their parents, with no exception, are in low-skilled jobs. Half of the youngsters are already cleaning offices or accompanying their parents to work. But they always make some time to come to the meetings. They text each other, share their facebook profiles, they flirt and they socialise. And in between, a beautiful, charismatic young Colombian manages to slip art workshops, coordinate critical thinking seminars, design and carry out consultation meetings and plan fundraising events.
I cannot describe very clearly the strenght that I get from this group every time that I, on a voluntary basis, help them bring to life a business idea they've been developing, an entertainment enterprise. Perhaps is the fact that they are all friends that makes me feel so warm. Perhaps is the fact that this experience combines well some of my passions, namely, social entrepreneurship, ethnography and performing arts. Perhaps is the fact that I identify with young Colombians living in London and that I get excited everytime that I see them opening new windows. Or maybe, after all, is the fact that the enterprise came to us, instead of us looking for it.
This force got me frantic, and I started putting a bit too much pressure on them to take certain decisions and to give certain steps. I needed a website in order to secure them a contract with a relatively big fish. The website took longer than expected, and I was fuming.
Until they finally told me: 'Is not that we are not working. Is not that we won't do it. We will, but following our rhythm. Please be patient'. They even said please.
The lessons that always marked me the most, were thaught with love. Everyone lives, walks, feels and dances at a different rhythm, and for an advisor, understanding and being able to get the best of your client's rhythm is critical. The website is finally here. It is not perfect, but a bit of my heart is in it: http: www.layf.org.uk
Now that it is here, please let your contracts come our way.
This PhD will soon start to take shape, at my own rhythm. In the meantime, I am having fun, am trying to help as many people as possible, am working on the ground and I am having very interesting conversations with enlightened thinkers, innovators and friends. Juan, Martin, Brian, David, Annemarie, Andy, Laura...you make this hell almost perfect.
If Maria must wonder...
If a boy must wonder,
let him recall
not the lightening grace of falcons,
the dizzying aeronautics, Darwin's finch,
the voyage of ancients
who saw farther, whose charts and sails
and bubbly telescopic minds
brought ashore hope
to lift
a charioting god to the moon
but how
even a rogue dream of stars
once birthed the possibility of flight.
(Leon Yuchin Lau)
