19. The OLA Stratethon
One woman’s traction is another child’s passion.
“So what are you doing to gain traction?”
“Oh, I’m going to do research on how these benefits exist already to prove that the Academy would be a viable direction — “
“No. How are you gaining traction?”
That conversation with a potential board member back in April was the first time I realized that it wasn’t my business alone that needs proof; I need it too.
The Stratethon was designed to accomplish three strategic goals: 1) to gain visibility for the Academy by promoting our ethos to a larger audience, 2) to gain a sense for the quality of ideas that young people in this age range could come up with in a relatively high-pressure situation, and 3) to gain insight into the responsiveness of this age range in this cultural context to opportunities for problem-solving and critical thinking.
The event itself was a lot of work to conceive, let alone design. I was able to work with an incredible education consultant Kwasi Adi-Dako to gain clarity around our goals and the potential way this would work out, and then with UX Researcher Mirandy Kim in order to create a focus on our target audience and build our promotion targets. We ran a prototype of the event with friends and family, including Ken Ovienadu, a talented engineer who was once my student and now is integral to the program’s development. The overall feedback and experience for the students was enough to prove to me that we had something worth promoting. And so we began.
Given that we’re currently an unknown entity, my metric of success was to have a working platform and at least 3–5 teams competing. I gladly can report that we’ve hit those minimum requirements, and are looking forward to the launch of the event on August 7th. It’s been a multi-initative effort, as our marketing was mostly through gaining partnerships with existing programs to spread the word, gain feedback, and develop the case study the students will be competing to solve. Difficult cannot begin to describe this effort, but it’s been extraordinarily satisfying.
One thing surprised me — with all the work I had put into developing the program and designing the content and reaching out to potential partners and praying for participants, I didn’t expect to really hear from the students much outside of the program platform, although I did invite feedback from them. Then yesterday, I received this email (anonymized and shortened for brevity):
I am so excited to be deemed fit for the opportunity.
Truly, there’s no harm in trial.
I’m glad to take part in this and look forward to the material as this seeming interesting competition unfolds.
I and my team are happy.
I’ll also let you know whenever I’m experiencing some difficulty or something of sort perhaps while advancing to the portal.
Once again, thank you Odiso Leadership Academy.
This more than anything has assured me that not only is a small competition like this viable, but necessary. We have two weeks left until the opening ceremony, and you’d better believe I’m going to put everything I can into making sure this one student gains all he expected and then some.
