Two Saturdays ago, I was in Adelaide taking a late-night stroll by the beautiful, still, River Torrens with 3 member of my Robogals Global team - Mun-Xin, Shu Jie and Makiko.

Eventually, our conversation lead to the organisation and how we could motivate our chapters to achieve more in terms of number of girls taught.

The Melbourne chapter of 2010~2011 produced amazing work, having taught 279 girls in the past year, with more visits planned for the remainder of the year.  We spoke about our past experiences volunteering with the Melbourne chapter and our observations about their team.

The Robogals Rural and Regional (RRR) programme achieves amazing results having already taught 801 girls since it began five months ago - again with more visits schedules by the end of the year.  We spoke about the key drivers that produced that result.

The Melbourne chapter of 2009~2010 was the best-achieving Robogals chapter ever, in my opinion.  They taught 206 girls, organised a community event "The Robogals Science and Engineering Expo" that had major media coverage, and held multiple social events for their volunteers to get to know each other and form a community.  We examined the key drivers of success there too.

Two-and-a-half hours after our walk began, and two hours after we first started talking about the topic, having brainstormed solutions as vast as changing the structure of the roles, putting in different incentive systems and restructuring the entire organisation, we weren't finding any practical solutions.

I wasn't going to let our hours of discussion not produce a solid action though, so in the last 15-minutes, we formulated a very simple solution where different roles in the committee are accountable for different statistics; there are 4 key statistics in the committee and our mentoring conversations will focus only on these 4 key areas.

We implemented the structure the next day, and I am excited by the fruits of our discussion.

Today, I learnt why our method of discussion worked.  Rather than focussing on the negatives:  how do we patch up this problem here and there so everything runs smoothly, we focussed on the positives:  what made this project successful and how can we replicate it everywhere with only a few, small, behavioural changes.

It's about looking for which works, not what doesn't work - the solution is already in the community.

We had the chance to visit one of the previous YAN Fellow's projects in Mexico.

I chose to visit "Deport-es para Compartir" (or "Sports to Share") because I was intrigued by its connection to the United Nation's 8 Development Millennium Goals.  Deport-es para Compartir aims to teach kids good morals and values through the UN Millennium Development Goals by engaging them in fun games and sporting activities.  It targets children and youth, aged 6 to 14.  It was founded in 2007 by Dina Buchbinder Auron, who was part of the 2009 YAN Fellowship and then joined the UVM Fellowship (the national version of YAN in Mexico) the year after in 2010.

We drove to their offices where we were introduced to the staff, then we walked across the street to a school they were working with.  Each of us introduced ourselves, where we were from, our projects, and how we greet each other in our respective countries to the kids.  The kids absolutely loved it!  Then we went outside, formed a huge circle, and played partner (the kids and us all paired up together to play) duck-duck-goose, but with a water bottle with water where you drip water onto everyone's head as you pass them.  Then we did some Q & A's about different ways you could use different objects (like buckets, hats, etc.), and before I knew it, it was over, and we returned to the Deport-es para Compartir office across the street for a delicious Mexican lunch, another presentation, more introductions and a free shirt.  A video of the day was made by Deport-es para Compartir.  It's funny how what I remember about the day isn't exactly what's shown on the video.  :)  (The bit where we all have our eyes closed and our hands in funny positions is when we were told to imagine ourselves getting on a plane, flying the plane through turbulence, etc., and then landing in an unknown destination, which was described to us, and which we had to guess.  We played the game twice, once in the classroom and once outside.  It's a game the kids play to experience the world!)

So that's the story, but here's what I love about the organisation.

1.  They have 36 staff, they're 4 years old and over 32,000 kids have taken part in their programme.  32,000!  Amazing!

2.  They have 2 Fulbright Scholars who will spend the year there in order to do further research on the programme and ensure the programme is effective in achieving its goals.

3.  The founder is just so passionate about her project and has done a YAN Fellowship, followed by the UVM program (the national version of YAN in Mexico), the year after in order to work on creating the best project she could.

4.  The projects aims to reach 6,000,000 children by 2015.

Her commitment, passion and hard work for the project has led to these amazing results.  It was so inspiring to see what's possible.

The first day of the "YouthActionNet Fellowship" program began with a welcome email read out, written by Bill Clinton!  How exciting!  I've always had it that I'm here and Bill Clinton is over there with no overlap.  So to have him (or his entourage) write to the International Youth Foundation the day before our retreat to welcome us was incredible for me.

The first day was about leadership.  My biggest insight of the day was that the most important factor that differentiates a successful leader between an unsuccessful leader is their ability to "inspire and motivate others to high performance".

As soon as we were told that, my first thought was: "but how do we train leaders in our organisation to be that?"

They didn't divulge on that though, unfortunately.

But here's what I'm going to do with my team as a result of my knowing this.

Inspiration

Inspiration is intangible - you can't measure it.  It's more like a feeling or a sense.  So I'm going to work with my team and get them to generate "inspiration" - however they make sense of the world - in their day-to-day interactions.  If they generate it within themselves, then it will radiate outwards.

High performance

We set big goals goals in Robogals Global and ensure that our focus is always on achieving our goals.  If the Robogals leaders radiate inspiration and keep the conversation about their team's goals in existence and are always looking at finding new and creative ways to reach them, then a whole generation of the best kind of leaders in the world will be created.

What about your thoughts about how we can inspire and motivate others to high performance?  What are your thoughts about how we can train others to be this kind of leader?

Today, the most interesting part of the day was a session called "Open Space", where some people wrote topics they were interested in discussing on a flipchart, and then everyone ticked the topic they were interested in discussing, so that we could divide up into different interest groups.  It was like one of those crowd-sourced conferences.

I'd been dying to know the size of everyone else's organisations - how long they'd been doing it, their budgets, and whether they have any paid staff.  So we went around the group and shared just that.

Robogals is so close to who I am, it was like I was shedding another layer of skin to the group and letting them see who I was.

What struck me the most about this exercise is that amount of amazing things this group has been able to achieve on the leanest of budgets.

Some of the amazing projects include:

• Hoja Blanca, an international magazine that allows for a more meritocratic system for journalists to get published.
• World Faith, an international non-profit with 21 chapters in 9 countries that aims to create understanding between different faiths by facilitating volunteers of different faiths working together.
• Mentortogether, an incredibly thorough and well-researched Trust in India that matches poor urban children with corporate mentors, who serve as their mentors.
• Ecosan Club, which promote simple, low-cost solutions to health, sanitation, and soil fertility problems in the rural community in Mindanao, Philippines.
• Techamos una Mano, a project based in Mexico that works with high school students and teaches them about sustainable housing by having the students build houses (yes, houses!) out of recyclable materials.  Post-edit: It recently (in late November 2011) won the National Award for Youth in Mexico, presented by the President of Mexico!

These are just a sample of amazing projects that the under-30 year old, 2011 cohort of YAN Fellows spend tens of hours of week on, for no pay, because they are passionate about the cause.

So next time you think, "I don't have the money or resources to implement my idea", look to the YAN Fellows for inspiration.  There's a whole database of them here.  With a lot of heart, and a lot of hard work, you can achieve anything.

A month ago, I came up with a list of the things I wanted to consider during my YouthActionNet Fellowship retreat.  In the 24 hours that it took me to fly and transit to Mexico, I've already come up with a solution for all 10 points.

My rationale behind it is that if I'm going to be spending a week talking to 20-odd people about all these issues, the best way I can prepare is to come with an already executable plan mapped out to build upon... or to completely tear down and rework.

Just by coming up with a "best plan" means that I already needed to think through a number of scenarios and justify to myself why some of them won't work, whereas others may stick; which puts me in a very strong position to answer heaps of questions about all those points, as well as quickly recognise what I don't know about those areas.

My plan I've created is the "best plan" I could have created with all the knowledge that I knew at the time...  Which means that there could still exist a "better plan" that can be created through the addition of knowledge that I currently don't know.

I think it's important to come up with a "best plan" by yourself before asking others for suggestions to help you create a "better plan", as it shows your commitment to the project, shows that you've done some research, and shows that you've thought things through.