CLIENT: AHA Bolivia

DATES: December 2013 - September 2014

COMPANY
AHA Bolivia is an ethical manufacturer based in Bolivia, working to provide designers and retailers in the US, Europe, and Asia with high quality, handcrafted knit garments and accessories. The organization holds fair trade production practices and principles at its core and works with local artisans to preserve age-old knitting techniques, using largely local, sustainable fibers.

CHALLENGE
The often contentious political and business environment of Bolivia means that small enterprises like AHA Bolivia must weather policy and trade changes nimbly. Sometimes that means changing internal structures and sometimes that means rallying to secure new clients due to a drop off caused by trade barriers. AHA Bolivia had survived for 15 years, but largely based on ad hoc processes that focused on ‘putting-out-fires’. They needed to understand, in partnership with the ICCO Foundation, the internal challenges they had control over so that they could create a more efficient and effective enterprise able to weather changes and keep their artisans employed.

APPROACH
To kick off the project, I conducted in-depth interviews with all key staff members as well as collected and reviewed documents and other assets. Based off this data, I built and facilitated a week-long design thinking and gamestorming workshop for all key staff members in Bolivia (in Spanish). The workshop included values mapping exercises to expose assumptions, process mapping activities to build empathy and discover pain points, and ideation sessions to co-create solutions to the challenges identified.

I participated in some additional remote ideation sessions with more plugged-in key staff members to ensure a diversity of solutions that included technology as well as cross-cultural thinking. I frameworked all of the solutions against a 2x2 matrix and created a plan of action based on the feasibility of each of the quadrants in the matrix.

We launched the prototype phase in Bolivia together and then I remotely coached key staff members responsible for solutions. We had bi-weekly check-in calls to distill learnings and work through additional hurdles. We were able to test all short-term solutions together but additional longer-term ideas were left for staff to test on their own.

RESULTS
A robust efficiency and workplace culture plan that was implemented by staff members to decrease errors, increase on-time delivery of product, and create a better working atmosphere.

LESSONS LEARNT
Taiichi Ohno’s 5 Whys proved instrumental to this project. Cultural norms in Bolivia dictate the telling of white lies when the answer is not known. Using a combination of ethnographic research, process observations and the 5 Whys gave us a clear picture of the organization's pain points, which otherwise had remained hidden for the last 15 years.