On top of the nice piece in the Economist demystifying (or mystifying, depending on your perspective) the workshops we do in North Korea, and blog posts by a workshop leader on the March Women in Business and fiscal policy training, Maaike has now weighed in with her perspectives. Maaike led a workshop for the Women in Business program in August, focusing on Corporate Social Responsibility and Business Ethics. Her workshop brought a new innovation: role-playing, which led to adult participants collapsing into giggles. Her topic also tied in well with another speaker's presentation on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Some excerpts in her words...
The introduction to CSR and the Western perception of CSR was interesting for them, but as this was my first time teaching in North Korea I had only some ideas of what would be relevant for them to hear, and what to talk about, and based on their reactions I could divert from my topic if necessary. This was much to the frustration of my translator who had to improvise, sometimes would summarize or simply add material if I didn’t explain it well enough, and started asking me questions as well. Topics we all could relate to were; responsibility of the Manager for his/ her employees, a Caring attitude, a safe workplace, etc. . State Owned Enterprises in North Korea have quite good labor laws, their maternity law was better than that of the United States we all agreed. And that was interesting for them; I was a Westerner, teaching them Corporate Social Responsibility, but I would easily take a negative example from the West and tell them what I would think of it; I showed self-criticism and how this works in a training environment. I told them this was a conscious strategy: I wanted them to learn from this self-critical Teaching style, and apply this self-criticism to their own way of thinking and decision making...
The rest of the day I gave them three different Case studies with role plays to work on, it took some time to understand them, but then they greatly enjoyed the material. There was a lot of laughter and giggling going on, because the situations (which I had taken from real life situations from companies I talked to) were unusual to them; they had the opportunity to talk back to a superior, which was a very new situation, and it was a good session.