My research fellowship for the Summer of 2019 revolved around a 3-week international fieldwork trip to the Philippines. A team of myself, a mechanical engineer, and a management consulting peer teamed up in the first six weeks of the Summer to prepare for the trip. As much as I would like to say we were well organized to leave, that would be a lie. The best thing that I had going for me was my combination of optimistic faith and lack of expectations.

 

Our team joined forces with a cohort of graduating engineering students from a local prestigious university, UP Diliman. We spent the first day determining shared objectives and benchmark goals. The consequential decision was to divide up from one group into two groups. One focused on venture creation with business model development as their main objective. The other group focused on machine development with the completion of our first order as their own objective.

 

I regret having such a large and opinionated team group the team divisions inhibited me from being able to share my own perspective on what the machine development team was working on. Toxic team dynamics motivated by head-butting type A personalities with different personal agendas made collaboration feel like grinding teeth. I pride myself on being able to rally people towards working on a common goal, yet this division put me between a rock and a hard place.

 

Respect towards the value of each other team’s work was inconsistent and unreliable. When my group went to visit the pilot worker community that our project had been communicating with for around a year, we were met by blank stares. Yet, if it were not for that meeting then we would not be able to properly conceptualize the best way to actually get off the ground and get these community members working. Neither would we have the agency to talk towards the stories of these community members as if they were our own.

 

 

The venture creation team didn’t let these dynamics negatively affect our interest in pushing forward the project. We went on in the next week to develop a theoretically validated business model that is the current trajectory for the entire venture. We did this by meeting with the Philippines Plastics Association CEO at his plastics manufacturing plant, organizing and running a 60-person summit that brought together opinions from government, not-for-profit and industry, and running a machine training workshop for our pilot community workers.

 

Thankfully for the venture, the machine development team also did not let these dynamics negatively affect their interests in pushing forward the project. Thanks to them, we now have specific order details for our first customer, a plan for how to further develop the machines that we were using, and a list of theoretical products that could be made by future entrepreneurs.

 

The last few days of the trip we were forced to work together towards completing an application for a grant. Our inability to work quickly in that time frame highlighted the value of three key concepts that I wish we had internalized at the beginning of the trip:

 

1. Working on a project with ambiguous goals and “type-a” personalities will always favor leadership styles that prioritize balance over control.
2. Agency over the completion of work is only valuable if the individual in charge is able to use the group’s knowledge to their project’s advantage.
3. Backup plans for backup plans for backup plans are necessary for maximizing the effectiveness of time and effort but will never succeed if the group can’t get past the first layer.

 

(see the next blog post for two more lists which dive deeper into these insights, as well as my personal and professional insights).