Let’s assume you are a high level manager. Can you imagine to run – in a rather spontaneous and very pragmatic way- a goat training in a tribal village? To get in very close contact with women who conduct a completely different life and where the daily family income is around 200 rupees ( ca 3 EUR) per day only? Where goats are the main income source and accessibility to services of all kind is difficult? Where the lack of knowledge and often the financial situation limit the people even to learn because the costs for Internet and bus tickets are too expensive?

Ten managers from Boehringer Ingelheim, active as Animal health experts and working normally in offices and laboratories rather than going to the fields, participated in our first “Making More Health in Action week” in the rural areas close to Coimbatore, South India.

The aim of this week was to

• learn from the farmers about their needs and wants
• get insight into disruptive social entrepreneurial thinking
• stay out of the comfort zone of business thinking and processes
• deliver some practical win for some village women who are organized in a self help group.

For 5 days in sequence two groups prepared the one hour training – with a lot of enthusiasm, passion and – of course – question marks on how to do it while being under specific time conditions: in the very late evening they were preparing the training session as the agenda did not permit it during the official program time.

It was amazing to see all this energy and – besides making a real training happen which is much more challenging than just writing a concept – they had a lot of fun.

Part of the task was also to develop a two minutes video to explain their approach and to exercise how to convince potential investors about their idea.

Finally, today we went to the village where the self help group women were already waiting and welcoming us.

“It was an incredible fruitful experience for us to understand the needs, to develop the program and finally also to run it. The practical experience was so helpful and although we had a lot of time constraints, we have made it. I will never forget these learnings and emotional moments we passed through. It was a win- win for all. For the women, for MMH and – maybe even much more than anything else – a big win for us,” said one of the managers. “Often we think in a much too complex way, want to develop all and while doing so we miss a lot of possibilities and opportunities. We think too big instead of starting and learning by doing!”

Just have a look how these training sessions went.

Video: When managers run goat trainings

Watch the VIDEO , for more insights just click https://youtu.be/v9a0rnQhvTE !

For sure this training will be just the starting point of a series of upcoming practical and direct exercise!

Related content

Find out more on our Indian activities at www.makingmorehealth.com

Making More Health Insights – a disruptive leadership training https://goindiagofuture.com/2015/11/30/impressions-from-a-disruptive-leadership-training-with-corporate-managers-in-india/