This blog is written by Satish Rao who is working with Lend a Hand India as part of the technology leadership program.

I have spent 25+ years in the corporate world and am now working in a tech leadership role in the social sector as a part of the Tech leadership cohort in Tech4Dev. I have attended many offsite workshops during my corporate stint and I had an opportunity to attend my first workshop in Bangalore organized by Tech4Dev. 

I went in assuming this would not be any different. Instead, our facilitator, Romana Shaikh, opened the day with paper, crayons and an instruction that had nothing to do with technology. The first tasks were deceptively small: design a name card, then sketch the last few months of your life and work without writing a single word. It took a few uncomfortable minutes to admit that I had to become creative and I simply did not know how to do that. In the end, I designed a name card as a star with sun, moon and clouds embedded. We were supposed to say our name and why we had designed the name card the way we did. The tag line I chose was impromptu – “Hi, I am Satish. For someone to organize an event at this scale, the sun, moon and the stars have to be aligned and I couldn’t leave the cloud behind”, a bit of pun to show my techie side. I suspect this activity was chosen for a reason: the people we will work alongside in NGOs will rarely meet us through our credentials. They will meet us through how open, or how guarded, we are.

Next, Romana had us stand up.

The rules sounded easy. Walk around the room. Stop when anyone stops. Start when anyone starts. Nobody leads, and nobody speaks. With no leader and no spoken instructions, the group had to walk, pause and change pace together, reading one another’s bodies for the cue. My reflex was to anticipate, to move slightly early, to nudge the group toward what I thought should happen next. Every time I did that, the group fell out of sync. The rhythm only held when I let go of and simply paid attention.

Later, Sushil and Anto, two of Tech4Dev’s fractional CxOs, spoke candidly about their own NGO engagements. This was an inspiring session. What struck me was how little of their story was about the technology they chose. Most of it was about people: who opened doors for them, who quietly questioned their proposals, and how long it took to understand how decisions actually got made inside each organization. Listening to them, I understood that in an NGO, learning the tech stack is the easy part. The real work is learning the organization’s history, its unspoken rules, and whose trust everything else rests on.

The next session was about what happens to us when we disagree. We spent less time on the words people use and more on everything around them: folded arms, clipped replies, a small change in tone. When I’m sure a technical approach is right, I speed up and become very precise. I have always called that clarity. To the person across the table, it probably looks like impatience.

Then we worked with the Ladder of Inference, which traces how we climb from one small observation to a firm conclusion without noticing the rungs in between. The takeaway from this exercise is simple: before I argue for a solution, I try to walk back down the ladder and ask one genuine question about what the other person is seeing. In the social sector, where the people closest to the community often understand the problem better than any architecture diagram, that question is frequently more valuable than my answer.

We closed with a session of uninterrupted writing on what collaborative leadership means in this sector. Writing without editing is not something I do often, and what came out surprised me. What I wrote that afternoon was about trust, and about the idea that in small, mission-driven teams, progress moves at the speed at which people feel safe to say “I don’t understand” or “this won’t work for us.” 

Three takeaways have stayed with me since the offsite:

• Listen before I architect – Spend the first conversations understanding people and context, not proposing systems.
• Slow down to stay together – Accept that a shared pace beats a fast solo sprint, especially when the team is small and stretched.
• Show up for others deliberately – Ask what a colleague actually needs, rather than offering what I’m most comfortable giving.