Reflections on the UN Challenge

Around a month ago, TKS sends us this video and expects us to be okay. A lot of ALL CAPS and !!! were exchanged.

For the entirety of March, I pretty much devoted every block of free time I had into this project, reading hundreds of pages of google translated Spanish (very traumatic experience btw), forming omega brain strategies to outreach faster, and giving too much data to the FBI agents behind my google meets. Heck, I even dreamed about finding a statistic we were looking for. But at the end, everything just amounted to a hastily put together slide deck 😔

I remember the first major project TKS gave us -- the AI hackathon. After last minute submitting everything, the adrenaline rush was insane, my team's discord was blowing up with shared sentiments. But for this challenge, after uploading our slide deck that we just finished to the drive at 1am, I felt nothing at all. Maybe even something similar to - I feel like I just wasted the past month?

But now, taking some time to think about it, there's a lot I can learn from this challenge. I probably wouldn't have this depth of perception or drive to make the next challenge better if everything had gone perfectly well. Alright here we go.

Timeline Recap (feel free to skip this) Week 0 (before notion hub drop):

• reaching out to gender equality companies & cool people from the Malala Fund

• Sualeha made a notion hub

Week 1:

• picking a country (giant spreadsheet with all countries that were developing but weren't LDCs & eliminated)

• left with mexico, laos, cambodia, turkey, jordan lebanon

• didn't really have a burning desire to help refugees

• found that laos and cambodia had political issues or something? but mexico ended up being the best option (also bc sofi lived there)

Week 2:

• found out that there wasn't gender disparity in education, but there was in employment

• thought of maybe targeting new mothers/ indigenous ppl

• hmm we didn't really achieve anything else this week

Week 3:

• almost picked informal economy bc high impact (50+% of population)

• with guidance from Michael, decided to look into the overqualified, underutilized population & create a global teleworking pipeline

Week 4:

• not really sure what we got done, I think we were confused on where the line was between lack of skills & job market saturation and we also were questioning our solution bc of potential legal issues

• but then we figured everything out

• tbh i don't really know what happened days before the deadline

• klara and I mostly finished the slides precariously close to the deadline and got no feedback

Organization Everything mostly was on our notion hub , some things on google docs because notion was garbage at having multiple ppl edit at the same time

But there were many problems with our organization

• a lot of unnecesary things which cluttered the hub

• having everything hidden in pages that tbh no one was going to find or look at

• since everything was hidden in pages, once it came to actually building our deck, we had nothing to build off of and a lot of our stats and notes turned out to not even be used (we just regoogled)

Not everything was bad, the contacts management for ppl we were actually met with, reach out template & countdown to 3 days earlier than the due date were actually useful.

But now, inspired by the wisdom of some wizard named Matt Espinoza and Izzy's kidogo notion hub, I propose this revamped template

• instead of having a giant kanban board for all our tasks, condense them into a linked database called projects

• also have linked databases for projects, resources & meetings/events

• then literally put these linked databases everywhere and filter based on relavance so that nothing gets left behind in some obscure pageception

• less=more, only put in notion what gives you insane value, if you end up needing something you didn't put on notion, you have chrome history

moral of the story: linked databases are the goat

for note-taking, while we were writing on the same page, some of our notes even got deleted bc notion is bad at multitasking therefore I propose: use google docs when multitasking like when taking notes for external meetings!!!

as well, since we'll be putting everything on a google slides anyways, why not just take notes on a google slides under titles?

additional ideas:

• have a place just for statistics

• immediately turn case studies into playbooks with the main points if they are relavent

• don't just send resources, send takeaways from them

Working with a Team autonomy.

in my opinion, it's the second most important trait to have as a team member (first is obviously communication)

even with a PM, everyone should be responsible for 25% of the work (everyone doesn't have to do the same things but they should be putting in the same amount of work). That means that everyone should make decisions and take initiative to GSD, not just finish the tasks the PM assigns and that's it. To create a group dynamic where everyone is building off each other, autonomy has to exist, meaning that everyone understands the situation, has a vision, and break down that vision into goals. Group meetings should be for discussing & aligning with each others' visions, not for doing work on call.

The not everyone should be doing the same things was inspired by Michael Ye. I quote, "what if someone in your team has childhood traume when they open figma?". The concept of production–possibility frontier supports this too, everyone should be dedicating their time to their comparative advantage. Izzy's team did it by assigning different parts of the solution & presentation to different people. In our case, I think we could have split it up by having 2 people make the content for each slide and 2 people actually create the slides and make everything look nice. Slide-making looks simple but is actually very time consuming. Data collection & synthesis looks simple but is very time consuming. Some people are quicker at slide-building, some are quicker at content synthesis.

I think autonomy was something my team and I didn't fully achieve, We were having many calls so we relied on the calls to get things like research & outreach done while not having many meaningful discussions. Reading articles and telling your team members a cool stat you just read isn't going to make a lasting impact. In addition, sometimes a team member would say something that had to be done but take no initiative to get it done. Instead of telling someone else to do it, just doing it yourself is so much easier, you're the one with the vision after all.

For next time, I'm thinking of having less calls but before each call, each team member sends notes or a loom recording to get everyone else caught up on their research and what they want to discuss during the meeting. Having an agenda always helps

Oh and communication. Your idea is only as good as how you communicate it. On some instances, the research was done but since it wasn't really communicated to the rest of the group, we were all in the dark and waiting even though the information was already there. Slack (or discord or whatever platform you use) is the best way of communication because people are voluntarily forced to read what you have to say. Overcommunicate.

• rule of thumb: use notion for things that you will go back to use slack for things with a short lifespan but need immediate attention

on the topic of communication, sending one-pagers instead of loom videos to directors would be an interesting. Having deliverables such as a one-pager or short report to send to external meetings would be super helpful as well. It increases credibility and on two occasions the people we talked to asked for documentation of our project to send to the ministry of foreign affairs & some female CEO connections or something but since we didn't have any written plan and no one took the initiative to make one, we lost those potential opportunities.

and one last thing for teamwork, we're all lazy potatoes. If it is a lot of work and no one wants to voluntarily go out of their way to do it (ex. weeky reflections, reading every page in the calendar), it probably won't happen. Next time try to reduce friction by sending tasks in slack or changing them to be easier/ more fun to do

reward & punishment works in teams as well :) I SHOULD UBER EATS PPL BBT FOR FINISHING TASKS ON TIME

how to spend our most valueable asset -- time like always, there are 2 ways to spend our time -- investing it, or working on deliverables

investing: doing smth like reading a 100 page report to gain an intuitive understanding of the situation but you're not looking for any information specifically

deliverables: ultimately what matters. Things like the slides, playbooks, calculations, etc.

If you feel like what you're doing isn't aligning with either of those objectives, question how much value what you're doing will actually contribute.

• personally, I defintely spent a lot of time reading reports I really didn't need to read and just forgot about later

To summarise, here are 3 steps for success:

1. overcommunicate with team

2. make the final presentation/idea concise but detailed enough to be clearly executable

3. get feedback

So was the past month worth it? Even though it didn't end as well as I would have hoped, I got to meet sooo many cool people (like the OECD Chief of Staff and one of Forbes most influential women!), worked really hard, built confidence & urgency in getting stuff done and overall just learned so much. I can probably give a lecture on all the problems in employment & higher education in Mexico :')

I wouldn't trade this month for a normal one.

Till next time!