Learning that Matters, for Africa and the Middle East
Big things are made up of many small things aligned in the same direction.
The next small thing we are introducing is Jebel. Jebel’s mission is simple: to equip high-performance professionals in Africa and the Middle East (AME) with the four most important skills required to start, build, and scale successful organizations. These skills are growth, innovation, effective management, and brilliant strategic execution.
Why Jebel? Is there a need?
Imagine if every high-performance professional working in one of the following job areas: revenue and non-revenue growth; product and service development; team management; and strategy implementation; in private, non-profit, and public organizations in the AME, had all the skills and competencies needed to keep their organizations performing excellently. What would that mean in terms of social and economic progress from Kuwait City to Cape Agulhas?
Organizations have to (re)design their business or operating models based on end-user needs, apply technology to scale outcomes, and continue to recruit and develop people capable of refreshing this process as often as required. It is only by doing this that an organization can claim to have moved the innovation needle.
It is like operating at the level the Spartans did in the movie 300, but as warriors for socio-economic development in the AME…
Shortly after we started Gumi in 2018, we shared our equation for unleashing innovation (find the original post here). The simple version reads thus:
Design thinking + Technology + Human capacity = Innovation
In the four years since then, we have found that this applies to the AgriTech social innovation startup in Kumasi as much as it does to the leading domestic energy company in Saudi Arabia.
Gumi has been opportune to partner with organizations across every component of this innovation equation and, since we practice what we preach, we asked ourselves what is next?
The journey towards conceiving and building Jebel started with that simple question, which led to another: How can we rapidly multiply the positive outcomes we have helped create for organizations In our primary geography of operations — Africa and The Middle East?
In thinking about this, we made sure we were honest about our constraints: human resources, hours in the day, as well as the risk of the few instances where weeks of work didn’t yield the desired outcomes at the desired magnitude. This drove us to refine our initial ‘what is next’ question to what we consider a better version:
How can we as an innovation factory stimulate innovation with outstanding ripple effect? Particularly since our vision is that, through our work with organizations we hope to move the needle enough to create and deliver value and impact to the 1.8 billion people who live in Africa and the Middle East: value and impact that is independent of the capacity to facilitate/sustain it.
This paradigm shift in our thinking led us to reorganize our value proposition in mid-2022. The first move we made was to strengthen our product development capabilities. We became more focused on building products that have market-creation potential in the essentials industries i.e., education and healthcare.
We also published our first knowledge paper where we argued extensively for how exponential technologies such as AI, IoT, Big Data, and Cloud can drive widescale digital transformation in private, public, and non-profit organizations, so that whatever impact they currently have can reach even more people than it would organically- i.e., without these technologies.
Our Innovation Knowledge and Communications function is also aiming to have 1 million digital interactions in 2023. That way, at 1 million different instances, a leader, an innovation enthusiast, or a manager would have learned about and be able to apply a simple ‘hack’ that will improve the reach of the positive outcomes of their work.
Jebel launches in early 2023. Applications to participate in its first cohort in any of its four skill areas: growth, innovation, management, and strategy (GIMS); in three locations — Dubai, Lagos, and Nairobi- are invited.
Over a period of eight weeks per cohort, participants will learn and develop new skills that are relevant to their career journeys, and their unique organizational and sector contexts. They will also enhance their ability to reach and retain more beneficiaries and consumers.
It feels good building products and doing work with high value-adding potential. It will feel even better knowing many more professionals and partners are being equipped to do so in a way more relevant to their unique contexts.
We hope to see you in a cohort not too far in the future.
To find out how to join a cohort, check out www.jebel.me
Happy New Year, from Gumi & Company!
