The beauty of it all

Back on the web! End of May and we’re well into our second period, which I am spending in Telenor Serbia. But last week we all met up in Oslo to have our third trainee seminar.

Culture shock: Norway
Sweden and Norway are considered to have very similar cultures, and after living in Oslo for six months I generally agree. But there are exceptions to every rule, and the National Day is supposed to be one of those.

Coming from Sweden, where the national day became a public holiday only three years ago and we are still trying to figure out what to do with the free time, the prospect of spending Norway’s widely celebrated ‘May Seventeenth’ in Oslo had the promise of being more of a cultural shock than moving to Serbia could ever hope for.

The day both did and did not fulfill that promise, but it was definitely an interesting experience. And to be fair; Norwegians are not only good at flying their flag but also know how to throw a good party:)

Frustration and confusion
The first day of the week included presenting our trainee projects, which we were handed in KL in January. Since then we have learnt a lot about the difficulties, frustrations, and confusions that you inevitably come across in a group with people who have never worked together before, are from different cultures, and at the moment happen to live in Pakistan, Norway, Serbia and Malaysia.

And to be honest, I think we also learnt about some frustrations that perhaps weren’t all that inevitable…all I’ll say is, if you have a project- have a project manager!:)

The beauty of it all
With the projects finished, we relaxed and focused on the ‘soft’ side of the program. This week it included sessions on personality types, cultural understanding, and reflecting upon the process of the project work.

And that’s when we saw the real beauty of the projects: discussing personality types and culture made so much more sense when we were able to apply it to the concrete situation of the projects; and trying to decipher the ups and downs we experienced during the projects made so much more sense with the help of these ‘tools’.

And that’s also where the beauty of the whole program lies. We are thrown in at the deep end somewhere where we get hands-on and often very frustrating experiences, we are given tools that help us discuss and reflect upon these experiences as well as an arena to do it, and we come out with a bit more insight than we had going in.

It also makes us cry sometimes, but that’s normal, right?