Focused Flexibility (or... Blundering with Purpose!)

Shortly after departing for Rwanda, Dano and I adopted a mantra: “Focused Flexibility”. We had just ten days in Rwanda to evaluate the merit of our proposed plan, and we needed to know if “on the ground” reality would support such a concept (or if we needed to put our energies into finding work elsewhere!).

By March, 2009, we had created a plan for addressing the needs of a people and place we did not know. I had never even been to Africa! As a marketer, this violated many of my own prescriptions for talking to the patient before prescribing a remedy. Still, we had asked enough wise people and done enough research to know there was a “missing middle” in the Rwandan economy that may be addressed by well-qualified and well-intentioned managers. We had to be focused on the particular need of building businesses that could employ many, but we had to be flexible enough to do it in a way that made sense to people and places we did not yet know. We could only figure out if and how we could best remedy such a need by learning and being pliable enough to adapt as local conditions required. While this may seem a tall order, we took some comfort in the fact that we had the right motives and might figure out the rest as we went. In the words of Friedrich Nietzsche, “He who has a why can endure any how”.

After over 45 meetings with entrepreneurs and others interested in building Rwanda and her economy, we boarded the plane to return. In just ten days, much had changed:

• we began targeting proven companies (employing more than 20) rather than start-ups
• we began partnering with the Government of Rwanda to serve promising companies
• we established new, like-minded strategic partners (and stopped working with others)
• we identified potential clients who wanted, and could pay for, what we could offer
• we changed our name to signify the ambition of our clients (Karisimbi volcano is the tallest point in Rwanda) and partnership with promising entrepreneurs
  

In short, we re-wrote our plan to sync with the reality we found, and the result was more compelling than we’d hoped for or imagined. With this confirmation, we proceeded to quit our jobs, sell our houses, and move our families to Kigali, Rwanda. Given how much we have yet to learn, we are sure to blunder with purpose for many years to come…

Onward & Upward,
-Carter