How the “silly cow” exercise helped to solve business uniqueness in Kenya

I have just returned from Kenya where I was teaching business courses with the Sauder Africa Initiative. Upon reflecting on my two amazing months in Africa, I decided to share one of the most memorable moments in one of my classes.

When you teach business courses in Kenyan’s slums, there are no fancy rooms, Power Point presentations or internet resources. You are lucky if you get a small chalk blackboard and if you get a white board, it is a luxury. This year, Sauder Africa Initiative introduced a new module, SE201 to mid-college students and we did have a whiteboard at our premises!

To my big surprise, students really wanted to learn about new trends in business. I introduced them to design thinking. There might be lots of discussion about design thinking in Europe and North America but hardly anyone has heard about it in our classes. Of course, theory and resources are nice but to really understand the whole design thinking concept, you need to get your hands dirty. And so we did.

The biggest problem the students experienced was uniqueness of their business. In Kenya, most of the students emphasize “fair price” as their main asset and point of difference. I thought to myself: “If I ever hear the term fair price again, I am going to scream and really fail as a teacher”. After the first check of the draft business plans, I said to myself: “That is enough. Let's do something about this”. We used a simple “silly cow exercise” creating lots of ideas of what the uniqueness of each business could be. No idea was a bad idea, quantity over quality. Finally, people started to think beyond fair price and outside of the box. Victory! The buzz and lively discussion of the groups was one of the highlights of my teaching.


This blog was also posted on https://d-studio.sauder.ubc.ca