The pre-work

Today we concluded our 3 months of pre-work with our final Brazil 14 team call. We covered an incredible amount of "stuff" on the 14 calls we've had weekly from May. But before I get into that, a tip on finding the optimal time for conference calls with participants from every time zone, from New Zealand to the US - there isn't one. Early morning for the Eastern United States translated to past midnight in NZ. We tried out the IBM Time Zone Pain tool (yes, there is such a thing) to try to minimize the collective pain...here's a snapshot.

 The higher the bar, the more "pain" it is for the team. All told, lost sleep seemed to be in order for this intrepid bunch.

Our calls were hosted by two CSC alumni - Karin (a Belgian working in Spain, who was part of the Brazil 13 team last year) and co-facilitated by Nada (American / Lebanese, also from Brazil 13). Every week, we'd cover a host of topics in the allotted hour. We started with a discussion on the rationale for "corporate volunteerism" and basic logistics. A feature of each weekly call was mutual introductions - where two team members introduced each other to the larger group. When my turn came about, I introduced Sylvie, a French-Chilean, who turned out to be a Portuguese speaker and had traveled extensively in Brazil ! Here's a page from my intro to the group !

We covered alumni experiences, basics of consulting (for the non-consultants on the team), Brazilian culture and business mores, health and safety and developmental economics. We discussed our clients and our projects. We talked about weekend travel plans.

All in all, the pre-work readied us to a reasonable extent - but we were cautioned that the reality on the ground is likely to be dramatically different. I guess I'll find that out soon enough ! My flight to Sao Paulo leaves tomorrow night.

#ibmcsc brazil