1st day – 18 June

It all started Monday morning with coming together in a circle and listening to the few thousand year old story of Ulysses and his long journey told by the Ralf Schneider (head of Global Talent Management), who mainly designed and developed the Ulysses program.

It really was exciting to put myself back in time and think about this famous king from Ithaca who set sails going to help Agamemnon in his battle about Troja probably believing he would be back in a few month or so and finally found himself in a journey which lasted over 20 years and took almost all his life – and I realized, that I found the name of the program very well chosen…

The overriding theme of the following week is first slowing down from the work experience and creating an environment of openness, sharing, and trust to encourage and enable us to change and grow as leaders.

We then were introduced to the program coaches and our team will work together with Anna from Sri Lanka who will coach us on the foundation and review week as well as during the field work Ethiopia, where she will be coming over to approx at the end of July for 3 days

Dialogarchitecture
At this first day Wwe were introduced in a ‘thing’ called Dialogarchitecture, which we then were using throughout the whole week – So what is Dialogarchitecture ???
Broadly speaking, it is an alternative our well known Word-Documents and Powerpoint presentations for communications and involves drawing symbols, bubbles, arrows etc and key words to communicate more clearly. You can see the results in some of these photos. I have also attached above the drawing of the story board, which Hans-Jürgen, the expert in this field, has drawn for me based on the notes which Anna (who will work as both our team and also my individual coach for this period ) took during our initial discussion. I had this discussion with Anna via telephone about 2 weeks before I started the program and I found it indeed impressive, how much more a drawing could tell than just a few words only...

As he did for me Hans-Jürgen has created a story board for each of the other 18 participants based on notes taken by our coaches during the individual phone based coaching session. The story boards reflected our core strengths and values and areas we wish to develop. We were all given 5 minutes each to talk to the group and tell our personal story and what our view of leadership is. I was not feeling too good and much rather have been giving a IAS 39 presentation than talking about myself. At the conclusion of each story, everyone posted a sticky note on the person's story board providing a supportive comment or wish. We learned a lot from each other; in particular that even though we have all come from very different places and cultures, we do have some commonality in wanting to become better people and grow both personally and professionally.

Just after the classe finished I climbed with Frank (you remember – the German guy) the wall - How amazing to be able to walk 15 minutes from your hotel room and be standing on top of THE WALL - which at its best time was over 10.000 km long …. This particular piece of the wall is "private" as it is on the hotel grounds and the piece is significantly eroded but, at the same time very quiet and peaceful without the hordes of tourists and hawkers.

more photos are available at: http://picasaweb.google.com/Guenter.Blog/1stDay18June