Two Saturdays ago, I was in Adelaide taking a late-night stroll by the beautiful, still, River Torrens with 3 member of my Robogals Global team - Mun-Xin, Shu Jie and Makiko.

Eventually, our conversation lead to the organisation and how we could motivate our chapters to achieve more in terms of number of girls taught.

 

 

The Melbourne chapter of 2010~2011 produced amazing work, having taught 279 girls in the past year, with more visits planned for the remainder of the year.  We spoke about our past experiences volunteering with the Melbourne chapter and our observations about their team.

 

The Robogals Rural and Regional (RRR) programme achieves amazing results having already taught 801 girls since it began five months ago - again with more visits schedules by the end of the year.  We spoke about the key drivers that produced that result.

 

The Melbourne chapter of 2009~2010 was the best-achieving Robogals chapter ever, in my opinion.  They taught 206 girls, organised a community event "The Robogals Science and Engineering Expo" that had major media coverage, and held multiple social events for their volunteers to get to know each other and form a community.  We examined the key drivers of success there too.

 

 

Two-and-a-half hours after our walk began, and two hours after we first started talking about the topic, having brainstormed solutions as vast as changing the structure of the roles, putting in different incentive systems and restructuring the entire organisation, we weren't finding any practical solutions.

 

I wasn't going to let our hours of discussion not produce a solid action though, so in the last 15-minutes, we formulated a very simple solution where different roles in the committee are accountable for different statistics; there are 4 key statistics in the committee and our mentoring conversations will focus only on these 4 key areas.

 

We implemented the structure the next day, and I am excited by the fruits of our discussion.

 

 

Today, I learnt why our method of discussion worked.  Rather than focussing on the negatives:  how do we patch up this problem here and there so everything runs smoothly, we focussed on the positives:  what made this project successful and how can we replicate it everywhere with only a few, small, behavioural changes.

 

It's about looking for which works, not what doesn't work - the solution is already in the community.