Amra Notun Network’s training phase started from July 6 with a brief orientation on the upcoming sessions where we promised our participants that how our session will cover the 21st century skills and therefore will develop enlightened citizens who will lead the changes in future.
Our session on Day 3 was about understanding the concept of one of the much-talked 21st skills – leadership. Our aim was to busting some myths of leadership, and then to develop some core ideas of group dynamics so that they can work as a group in the future.
Icebreaking
We designed the day keeping an icebreaking activity “walk-stop”. Participants were asked to follow our command and keep doing what we say. Sometimes we asked them to walk, and after a while to stop, then we reversed the command and asked them to follow us. We commanded them to walk, stop, jump and clap one by one for fifteen minutes.
Leadership and authority
We designed a session on leadership and authority, and allocated 45 minutes for that.
Our objective was to understand their perception of leadership and authority, and explain the concept of both leadership and authority so that they can understand the difference between the concepts.
Our approach was to throw some guiding questions to engage them in the discussion. We asked them when they hear “leadership”, whose face comes to fore in their mind. A good number of them referred Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, followed by Barack Obama, Adolf Hitler and so on. Some even said they think of themselves!
Then we asked them how they define leadership, and most of them related leadership with public speaking and convincing teammates to follow them. Some said they think leadership is about reaching a common ground as a team.
Our next question was on authority. We asked them whose name comes to their mind when they hear authority. Most of them referred Sheikh Hasina, and some of them referred university authority.
Then we asked them if they can distinguish between leadership and authority. They focused more on the matter of convincing when they tried to differentiate between the concepts.
Then we provided them with a case study on Bangladesh cricket team to read it within next ten minutes, and we went dumb! After complete reading the case, they kept waiting for us to speak, but we decided to keep mum for twenty minutes. Eventually after fifteen minutes they started discussing on the case on their own. We actually implemented the Socratic Method to make them understand the concept of authority.
After twenty minutes, we broke our silence and explained them the concept.
Though we claim ourselves as leaders and often boast of our roles, we usually wait for the authority when tension arises. Resorting to Socratic Method, when we created a tension between the room by remaining silent for a long time, initially they were in shock and kept waiting for our command since we were the authority. Eventually when they realized that we are not going to talk to them, they took an attempt to initiate a discussion on their own. This is how leadership can be practiced without holding any position or authority.
Kantor’s four player model
Before explaining Kantor’s four-player model, we invited our participants to form a group of five to six on their own and build police vehicles with Lego.
They formed several groups and we provided one Lego set to each of the groups. They sat on the floor and started making police vehicles. We gave them fifteen minutes to complete the task and kept observing their activities.
In groups we saw them playing different roles: some of them were holding the map and directing others, some of them were putting the Legos together, some of them were noticing if they are doing it right or not, some of them were assisting the members who were putting the Legos together.
By fifteen minutes, almost all the group built their own vehicles using Lego set.
Once the activity was over, we went to explain the group dynamics to the participants.
Oishi apu came with a storyline that included who was Kantor and how he developed the four player model while consulting families as a system psychologist.
The story was:
“David Kantor, while consulting families as a psychologist realized that, members of a family need to play four roles while living as a family: mover, keeper (follower), checker (opponent) and observer (bystander), where mover initiates and directs a task, follower supports the mover, opponent provides critical feedback, and bystander observes and develops a perspective.”
Then we explained how we play these roles while working as a group in family and in organizations. And also, same person can play different roles in different conditions, also each of roles are leadership roles.
Deep question
Since we had a plan to form groups within the participants, our next activity was to enable them to develop a bond individually. So we opted for “deep question,” where half of the participants were provided with different questions, for example, who do you want to talk again but you can’t talk anymore, what is the most defining moment of your life, who do you want to be if you weren’t you, which is the biggest failure of your life.
Then we asked the ones who have the question to go to the ones who do not have it and ask the question. Once they are done with asking the question, they had to leave the question to the respondent and wait for someone to come with a question.
This activity allowed them to open up in person and thus to develop a deeper bond among the participants.
Problem tree
After completing the deep question session, we moved fast to complete our last activity which was on problem tree. The purpose was to educate them on how to identify a problem and go to the bottom of the problem by questioning the causes and effects.
We urged the participants to form group with any five members who were not in their last group for four-player model and work on identifying a problem they see and find the reasons behind the problem.
The groups came up with different problems such as gender violence, education for street children, waste management, depression, lack of opportunity, skill gap etc.
Each of the group was invited to present their problem tree one by one. We provided them with feedback on their problem trees, instantly.
The day ended with a call to unlearn before we try to learn something. Because “the first step stone to learning is to unlearn!”
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