IngeniousPeoplesKnowledge

An interesting article, well worth reading!

If we understand a company (or any other institution/organisation or even a project for that matter!) not as a machine, but an organic “being” (system) such as a city, what can we learn from that? Read yourself:

Communication Nation: The connected company.

Adrian Gnägi from the Swiss Development Cooperation (SDC) has written an interesting blog article on “What is wrong with Managing for Development Results?”, reflecting an essay of Andrew Natsios, former head of USAID.
The article deals with “«Obsessive Measurement Disorder» (OMD), … an intellectual dysfunction rooted in the notion that counting everything in government programs will produce better policy choices and improved management”. We have gone over the top with the well-intended desire to ensure results and to be accountable. But we have set the fox to keep the geese: all the attempts to monitor and evaluate are in themselves becoming one of the biggest impediments for efficiency and effectiveness… Our current M&E practice has in fact become one of the big problems rather than a solution to anything…

Read it on the SDC Blog, it’s worth it!

Already 11 years ago, Meg Wheatley wrote a very similar article on the obsession of measurement, and it’s more topical than ever:
http://www.margaretwheatley.com/articles/whymeasure.html

There is a second article of her speaking to the same issue, a nice illustration from the educational system in the US:
http://www.margaretwheatley.com/articles/largescalechange.html

I have come across this interesting article in “The New Yorker” on what science – and thus we – can really know, how we perceive and deal with reality:

The Decline Effect and the Scientific Method: newyorker.com.

Some of it may not really be surprising if you look at it from a complexity perspective – I really like the study on the behaviour of the mice: you can try to control all variables of an experimental set-up and keep them totally constant over several replications. Your experiment should then reproduce the same outcomes – but it doesn’t! Dramatically! You can’t predict the behaviour or reaction of a living system, no matter how well you plan!

If we try to consider the consequences of what we find in this article and consider that these findings are mainly from “hard science” (like medicine), than how difficult is it to come to a valid finding in a “soft” field like evaluating a development project? Is there anything at all that we can measure and prove? Or is Monitoring and Evaluation largely shadow-boxing, eyewashing, pretending we are able to control something we can’t? How far from “reality” are we with all our studies, evaluations, …? And what value remains then?

Interesting ideas – and large-group events (such as OpenSpaceTechnology) could and do contribute to create instances of such “liquid networks” that have an impact in the moment but also beyond.

We strongly believe in the power of self-organised events and organisation, but self-organised learning takes it still on another level! However, why should something so complex as teaching and learning suddenly ignore and escape all the things we know about complex systems? Such as the prevailance of emergence? If we believe that it is important to work with life and nature, rather than against it, it should be nothing but consequent to go this path! Very impressive, we find…

In fact I have been following Sugata Mitra already about 8 years ago (at my time at Helvetas), when he did his experiments called “The hole in the wall” – and was already highly fascinated then. “Imagine if you could take this further…” I thought – and Mitra of course did! I’m really excited to see what a long way he has come!

So it is maybe not such a good idea to make things look too serious and scrupulous if we want to effect behavioural change. On the contrary, is it maybe a sign of being unprofessional if we try too hard to look professional?

More information on “It’s Nice That“.

Time and again, we come back to the question of how to create a knowledge sharing culture. One of the constantly recurring points is: we need to stimulte people by building KM into the performance management frameworks, we need to provide all sorts of incentives.

Well, maybe we – once more – have been on the wrong track. Watch this – and think again…

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/dan_pink_on_motivation.html