Design Thinking at Casa Liberdade

On Monday, we met at Casa Liberdade (the Freedom House). This is another creative co-working space in Rio Branco, a great residential area in Porto Alegre with tree lined streets and huge hills providing some great sunset views. The building is the home of a few different incubators including Engage and Semente. Semente is an entrepreneurial education company and innovation consultancy. They help entrepreneurs transform ideas into sustainable businesses using methodologies such as business model design, lean startup, customer development, etc.

Another of our 4 teams here, is working with Semente to help build a strategy roadmap and software toolkit for the entrepreneurial education of early stage businesses. Additionally, they are leading workshops and discussions on various aspects of business development. The SAP team members involved are Nabil Al-Azem, a Syrian living in Montreal, Amy Hammond, an Australian living in London and Francois Silvain, A Frenchman living in Boston. SAP folks just cannot stay in one place! They are a great team, well suited to their task. Francois, for example, has already built 3 companies, selling the last one to SAP.

The workshop they hosted was an exercise in the Design Thinking approach. This is a structured approach to brainstorming and ideation, where you alternatively expand and contract the possibilities between the ideal and the realistic to zero in on the best approach to the problem. The exercise was to consider FIFA as the client and try to come up with ideas to generate additional fan revenue inside and outside the stadium during World Cup Events throughout Brazil and specifically in Porto Alegre. It was an interesting evening filled with a lot of great ideas and enthusiasm.

Google Translate, FTW!

Today has been a fascinating and fun experience. 

We have narrowed down our recommendations for volunteer management software to two candidate applications that we feel are the closest fit for the Junior Achievement's workflow: Volunteer Squared and Volunteer Matters. Like any off the shelf solution, both have gaps between what JA needs and what is available, but they are full featured enough for us to start the evaluation.

Daneiele (bottom left)
and Rogerio (bottom center)

We have two evaluators - Rogerio and Daniele. Both are experienced administrators for Junior Achievement. Both have limited English language vocabulary. Darren and Annette and I have *extremely* limited Portuguese. 

So we have communication issues. Fortunately for all involved, everyone is excited and engaged about picking a new tool for JA.

Conceptually, everyone understands what we need to do, but it is a little confusing as we have to play two different roles to evaluate the software - the volunteer and the system admin.

The tasks that we set up are pretty basic for today - we start in the admin role and we create a new volunteer record (as opposed to a volunteer self-signing up via the website). 

Next we need to create and schedule events. The two events will be a training class at the JA office and then a program at a participating school. Unlike, say, a paint-a-thon, where volunteers can just show up and participate in the event, for JA, you must be trained before you can go to the school and teach a class. So there are qualifications and scheduling dependencies that need to be considered.

Easy tasks, right? Create a volunteer record, create a couple of events and schedule them. 

Enter the language barrier. Fortunately, Google Translate is just a wonderful tool for making the world a smaller place. It really is magical. Even when it doesn't get the words quite right (um, practically always), the ideas come across pretty clearly. So we have been going back and forth, typing in our words and phrases, simplifying them when needed to make the idea easier to comprehend and in general having a blast while we are doing it. It is a slower process than we estimated and we cannot monopolize Daniele and Rogerio's time as they have other responsibilities, so we will do what we can in the time we have.

Village of Brotherhood

On Saturday, we had the opportunity to volunteer during SAP's Month of Service. Fernanda arranged for the group to meet at Aldeia da Fraternidade (Village of Brotherhood), a children's center that houses and cares for 300 local children. They have also extended their mission to assist at risk families with programs in education and social welfare to help promote stronger families.


There were two activity rooms in need of repainting. We provided a fresh two-toned look that hopefully will be appreciated by the kids - plus it will give them a new opportunity to make colorful handprints on the wall again.

When we finished, an impromptu soccer game broke out, until we kicked the ball over the fence.

Afterwards, we met for lunch and our respective clients and their families joined us. It was a great opportunity to meet everyone in a more informal setting. Brazilians place a lot of value on relationships in the workplace and socially, so this was a valuable time to make a lot of new friends.

Hot Dogs with Peas and Snoring Straws

Our team is working right downtown (in fact just 2 blocks away from the team that is working on the City Government project). This is an exciting area of town as it is filled with people commuting to and from home in the morning and evening and during the day it is fun to people watch when we go out for a quick lunch (We consider a quick lunch against Brazilian standards - we go out for an hour, while the locals may spend 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 hours at lunch)

Darren's expression is a direct result of
 a bad choice to put ketchup on a hot dog.

Yesterday, we decided to try the local hot dogs which, of course, are going to measured against the gold standard in this culinary category  - the Chicago style hot dog. The place we went to offered regular style dogs as well as Linguiça, a tasty pork sausage seasoned with garlic and paprika. We all opted for that. The buns were generously sized and I saw why on the menu - if you are ordering a regular dog, you can have 1, 2 or 3 of them in one bun.

Next come the toppings - we got (mostly) everything, of course. Steamed mashed peas and corn, some kind of red sauce, cilantro, cheese, oil, mayo and mustard. They tried to put ketchup on my dog, an abomination of course, so I put a stop to that immediately. Final evaluation - messy and tasty!

Other lunch (and dinner options) include buffets. *everywhere*. It is hard to use some self control when food is delicious and abundant and meat-intensive. One interesting custom about most of the restaurants and bars we have visited - you get a receipt that will be marked with whatever you order, both food and drink. You obviously use it to pay for your meal, but it is also your proof of purchase to get out of the restaurant. DO NOT LOSE THIS! If you do, there are some establishments that will charge you an exorbitant amount to cover the loss - like $200US!  Another thing to watch out for is if you leave your ticket on the table unattended, people will grab it, charge a bunch of drinks on it and then slip it back where it was. Guess who gets to pay that? (This happened to one of the guys in our program last year - needless to say, we are holding onto our tickets…)

Daniel and Dannielle
share chimarrão with us

We had another food/beverage custom that we had the pleasure of experiencing today. Daniel and Dannielle (I know, right?) brought out a treat while we were doing a software feature prioritization exercise this afternoon. There is a strong sugarless tea drink that is popular in southern Brazil called chimarrão. Like many cultures, Brazilians have a ritual around drinking their tea. From filling the cup (made from a gourd), to the presentation and enjoyment of the drink, it is a nice friendly communal experience. Everyone drinks from the same cup using a metal straw or bomba that also acts as a filter. You drink the whole cup, slowly, then it is refilled for the next person. Daniel says you "drink until the straw snores", meaning you are slurping the last bit of liquid from the cup through the straw- I love that.

Time to roll up the sleeves...

On Monday all 4 groups met together with our respective clients at Nós Coworking, a creative space for small groups and entrepreneurs to share office infrastructure and creative thinking. Nós is also one of the 4 clients for #teamGuaiba.

My project is on the Junior Achievement Brazil Team. I'm working with Annette Bazin (@annettebazin) from Vancouver and Darren Louie (@darrenlouie) from Palo Also, both highly energetic and effective team members. The picture here shows up with Daniel Fernandes, the Executive Director of JA Porto Alegre and our client. 

For those not familiar with JA, it is the world's largest organization dedicated to educating students in grades K-12 about entrepreneurship, work readiness and financial literacy through experiential, hands-on programs.The programs help prepare young people for the real world by showing them how to generate wealth and effectively manage it, how to create jobs which make their communities more robust, and how to apply entrepreneurial thinking to the workplace. 

Students put these lessons into action and learn the value of contributing to their communities. Here is a picture of some of the projects and products created by the JA Brazil student participants.

Our work scope is to "develop a volunteer recruitment strategy, coupled with an effective automated database platform system that will secure in matching volunteers interested in embracing JA programs and its teaching methodology on a more sustainable basis with schools and other learning institutions".

There is an interesting difference in culture in Brazil as far as volunteerism is concerned. It is much harder to recruit and retain volunteers where people are working long hours and are trying to establish a better standard of living for their families. Still there are many people willing to help out, so the JA group wants to better understand the motivations of those who do step up. They also want better tools for scheduling and management as it is a difficult challenge here, especially with the public schools that often have strikes impacting schedules for the kids and the time the volunteers have allocated to come and teach in the classroom. We will be going from a prehistoric paper based system to some modern cloud based tools, so this will have positive impact on JA Porto Alegre, even if, in our limited time here, we cannot fully implement a solution.

Team Guaiba finally meets in person

After a long travel day yesterday, we finally arrived in Porto Alegre, via Sao Paulo. MK and I came in from Chicago, but Annette, traveling from Vancouver went through Chicago as well so the three of us made our way to our hotel where we rested and then checked in with the rest of the group. This weekend is going to be a social time, getting to know each other and getting an understanding of the work ahead of us for the next month. It was great to finally see people in person that we had been meeting with virtually for the past 7 weeks.


Daniel and Fernanda, our program hosts from Pyxera Global, took us out for a great evening of traditional Brazilian food, drink and music. It's is going to be a protein rich month of deliciously seasoned meat if our first night is a good indication! This is the group - I'll introduce everyone over time.

The drinks are a lot of fun - we started caipirinhas, which, if you haven't had them, are like a mojito, except the base liquor is cachaca, a sugar cane based South American liquor.  While mass market cachaca can be a little boring and bitter tasting, there are a ton of artisanal labels and we sampled a bunch of them. You not only get great flavor profiles from the different ingredients blended in with the sugar cane, but the different types of wooden casks used to store the cachaca during the aging progress definitely influences the taste. As we sampled different varieties, we would cleanse our palettes in between with little bits of a local cheese, dipped in honey.


All the while we were enjoying each others company and conversation, a great local brazilian trio composed of a guitar, drum box and flute player was playing cool chill music that set a great mood.

Great way to kick off the Team Guaiba meet up!

Month of Service

My employer, SAP, has as part of its Corporate Social Responsibility program, a "Month of Service" that usually takes place in October and provides many volunteer opportunities for employees to give back to their local communities.

I have been selected for a program that takes the month of service literally - I've been chosen to participate in SAP's Social Sabbatical program where teams of SAP employees travel abroad to collaborate with entrepreneurs in emerging markets for the entire month of October. The program this year has projects in Shanghai China, Bangalore India, Johannesburg South Africa, and my destination - Porto Alegre Brazil.

This is going to be a great opportunity to give back to others as well as develop some business skills in areas outside my expertise. It's going to be a *lot* of fun as well.

I haven't really blogged before, so this will be a fun new thing to try as well. I'll post a lot of pictures I take once I am down there, so whatever I lack in written eloquence, I hope to compensate for via dazzling imagery :)

Lots more to come...