Worlds Apart: Cross-Cultural Leadership in an African School Project

  PM Network  

The The project plan was quite remarkable from the get-go: Take 10 Norwegian volunteers who’d never met one another, send them to Africa and put them to work building a school for orphans and poor children in the slums of Tsumeb, a small mining town in Namibia.

It was also prime fodder for a reality show. And indeed, viewers could tune in to watch the story unfold on Project X, which aired last year in Norway.

Traveling nearly 6,000 miles (9,656 kilometers) from the rugged fjords of northern Europe to the dry sub-tropics of southern Africa, team members weren’t prepared for what they experienced. Not only were they forced to adjust to a vastly different language, climate and cuisine, but only one of the 10 had previous construction experience.

And only one person had project management experience: Merete Munch Lange, PMP, project manager at Vidvinkel Media, a production company in Oslo, Norway.

The team also faced a brutal deadline: The project, a partnership between not-for-profit SOS Children’s Villages International and Norwegian television station TV 2, had to be completed in just 30 days.

The marketing blitz for Project X played up the drama with an intriguing tagline: “Can they achieve the mission?”

Spoiler alert: The answer is yes.

But the team first had to battle culture shock and communication issues—…

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.