IngeniousPeoplesKnowledge

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

On 3 and 4 November we had the opportunity to facilitate our first workshop in Maputo, Mozambique, for the ILO’s Women’s Entrepreneurship Development and Gender Equality in Southern Africa (WEDGE-SA) programme. The workshop was designed to enable the roughly 70 participants from the four programme countries (Mozambique, South Africa, Lesotho and Malawi) to elaborate the major building blocks required to move policy formulation in their respective country forwards, i.e. influence and transform their national policy environments to become more favourable for women led and owned enterprises.

Some participants struggled to grasp the abstract nature of working on measures to influence national policy formulation and other frameworks (macro level) – they had an inevitable tendency to fall back into discussing and suggesting issues and measures linked to the three other levels, such as: changing the socio-economic context (meta level); providing training (micro level) and; financial assistance to women entrepreneurs (meso level). For many participants thinking on the policy and framework level might have been a new experience, for others it wasn’t. At the start of the second workshop day we, however, successfully clarified the difference between the four different intervention levels using the following graphic illustration.

It was a bilingual workshop and the fact that about two thirds where Portuguese speaking (of which probably about half were also fluent in English) and the other third of the participants were English speaking posed certain challenges. We were fortunate to enjoy the services of two simultaneous interpreters as well as many of the bilingual participants helping out with interpreting during the small group working sessions. The small groups were formed randomly in a self-organising fashion, which sometimes led to language imbalanced groups in which in some instances the minority language monolingual speakers felt isolated from the rest of the group. We conclude from this that at our next bilingual event, we would like to try giving participants clearly recognisable “language tags” next time around, i.e. English only, Portuguese only or bi-lingual. This way we could ask participants to form more balanced language groups when re-grouping between the different sessions. We would still not recommend sticking to monolingual groups at a bilingual event, as we feel it would be a missed opportunity in terms of captialising on the experience of learning across borders and working across country and language barriers, and thereby creating more cohesion and understanding amongst the different participating countries and organisations within a project/ programme.

I met a consultant friend for coffee the other day. We spoke about the challenge of sustaining the momentum that a group of individuals gathers at an event aimed at coming up with ‘solutions’ in the form of ‘projects’ to achieve ‘transformation’. In other words: designing and realizing a future that is different from the present. How can we ensure that what a collective of individuals creates, designs and commits to, becomes a reality? We have the evidence: dozens of flip chart sheets of project plans filled with tasks, deadlines and names of those that are committed to fulfilling all of the above; participants leaving fully re-energized and enthusiastic; and yet, just a few weeks after the event the momentum that was gained in ‘tackling’ the common task at hand threatens to slow down to a virtual standstill…

My initial answer to the question of how transformative momentum is sustained was the following: momentum cannot be sustained through internal or even less external interventions, but rather sustains itself if the platforms for collective conversations are present and accessible to all within the organisation at all times, i.e. if the organizational culture is one of learning in which knowledge sharing and change management strategies become second nature and all members/employees learn and practice this way of thinking and engaging with each other. So training in such methodologies could be a very useful way of making an organisation ‘fit’ for ongoing transformation in a complex and rapidly changing world.

I attended a Peter Block Community Building event last week that has inspired me greatly and also raised a new question: What if the transformation of large numbers of individuals within a system (i.e. its members being trained in various knowledge sharing and change management methodologies) does not lead to an organisational culture that is conducive to ongoing transformation? How and when does momentum last?

And I might just have found an answer to these questions in the form of further questions.  How do you create a sense of community amongst a group of people? How do you connect them to a common task/bigger purpose? Because only when people feel that they belong to a community will they also care about this community that they belong to and that belongs to them (Peter Block). So people care about what they create (Margaret Wheatley), but they carry on caring about what they create because they belong to a community that at the same time belongs to them (and that they carry on creating). So when and how do such transforming communities emerge…?

Catherine Widrig Jenkins

“We would like to dethrone measurement from its godly position, to reveal the false god it has been. We want instead to offer measurement a new job – that of helpful servant.” (M. Wheatley and M. Kellner-Rogers)

Measuring for accountability examines “what”, the products, the “things” and assumes that knowledge is a package that can be counted. Measuring for learning makes sense of the “how”, the process rather than the product, and the relations between things. Measuring is not a bad thing in and of itself, the problem emerges when measurement is used for the wrong things. Measuring is good at accounting for what we have done against what we planned and thus should be used for gauging input and outputs. However, one cannot attribute impact to input because of the complexity and therefore measuring impact is almost impossible. Measuring for accountability does not appreciate what is of greatest value and in a knowledge management environment this is likely to be a catalytic conversation or a new idea for innovation.

Within the scientific domain, “measurement reduces and standardises. In order to make sense of complex systems and processes, measurement first uses models and frameworks to reduce them to manageable segments” (Taylor, J. and Soal, S. (2003) Measurement in development practice. CRDA: South Africa, p.4). This is contrary to I-P-K’s approach which encourages complexity by inviting it into one room.

Measurement for learning can be used to improve development practice by creating a picture of what we want to achieve and once the activity is complete by taking time to reflect on why it did not go as planned or why it did not turn out as intended. This reflection and learning should be incorporated into future planning to improve practice. If this does not happen, there is no behaviour change and the project continues as it has been. This cannot for work for any development initiative. Measuring for learning can help ensure that the changes you make to your practice will make you a more effective organisation.

(Text by Margaret Jack, I-P-K)