My blogs have fallen off with all the busy days we've been having. Between long days at the client, tracking a restaurant down at night and getting to bed at a reasonable time it's been an effort to find time to blog. Our client is about a 2hr trip one way and the travel has worn us out abit and used up workable hours. I thought that not having the responsibility and time requirements of family would have made this activity a breeze but that has not been the case. I thought I would provide a summary of the past week to catch up.
From a Morocco perspective the country continues to reel me in. The people seem genuinely happy, more so than back home in Canada. As you walk through the markets people are smiling. When you strike up a conversation they look to see how you like Morocco as they are proud of their country. People are very hospitable and friendly. The climate is nice; a dry heat with clear blue skies about 80% of the time. Moroccan food is delicious and very accessible - nothing is too spicy or strong in the flavour. Kebobs, tajins (stewed meat in clay pots) and couscous are the main dishes. Portions are always generous yet the population is on the lean side.
The IBM team here are a great group of people from all over the world bringing different skills and approaches to the teams. I'm on a team with a Brazilian, Japanese and American women. We have had a few challenges as our client communicates in French except for our main interface, Fatimah, who spent 2 years in the US as part of her university degree. We've had to very consciously be aware and pause and translate conversations into English. This has helped the non French speakers stay abreast of the conversations. In Morocco business is based on relationships and we were able to make some in roads this week by having lunch with Fatima. She took us to a local restaurant where we had one of our best meals so far. I had a local specialty, an avocado smoothie which was DELICIOUS. We are going to spend next Saturday with her touring the city of Rabat which she lives near and where we have been working. She is bringing her 2 year old son along which is also a good sign that we have a good relationship with her. Work relationships transcend the collegial very quickly here.
Our project has evolved to a point where we are doing a business process mapping exercise of their tourism project life cycle. As we do this we are capturing the sustainability inputs and outputs through each part of their value chain. Sustainability in this context is about ensuring tourism projects have a non-impact / positive impact on the environment, socio-cultural and socio-economic conditions. We are also separating out sustainability indicators/criteria from sustainability measurements. We will include these as part of the process mapping exercise. As well we will provide some organizational change management recommendations with regards to putting some teeth in their mission statement that sustainability is the heart of any tourism project and the Moroccan Tourism looks to have sustainability as a key differentiator from other countries in the battle for tourist dollars.
Finally a shout out to Nabil our contact from IBM and Imane from DOT, the company who works with IBM to find these projects and get IBM on the ground. These individuals display the skills and behaviours that we are looking to learn on this experiences. They are open, approachable and are able to calibrate their approach to the situation. Imane has made calls to executives to remove roadblocks and Nabil has advised us on our approaches from a cultural perspective. So far that has been the key learning experience for me in making the cultural adaptability exercises real and not text book. I can myself approaching my global colleagues differently now that I'm not in my western context.
Over and out.
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