#simplydevelopment

[ecologyalike]

Learning Organisations I

So instead of increasing the external accountability measures and building new institutional structures what should we do? With those organisation we already have? Many grassroots development practitioners and integrated experts are quite familiar with this kind of work. 

When measuring performance is not something that is outsourced (to third party consultants) and there is actually an internal process where development agents will have a dialogue with the real people in real organisations and real problems that they (those real people in the real organisations) perceive prevent their organisations to work.

So with the next blogs I will try to collect some examples what to do?

These simple ‘learning questions’ can help those involved in the implementation of the project discuss and reflect how they are supporting institutional development and improved operational practices:

1.     Who are the partners that the project is working with directly?

2.     What would the project like to see changed in the practice and relationships between these partners?

3.     What activities would the project use to support its direct partners?

[ecologyalike]

Getting the terminology right

I have started the PDIA: Building Capability by Delivering Results online course at Harvard College. The refreshing news from the first module is exploration of new terminology - terminology to say things, that have made completely sense for the past decade, but are not talked about. In the end it is the words that we need to share and explain what we see and these words have not been so far in the normal vocabulary of the ordinary development discourse. 

What we should be talking about?

If an administrative fact is actually a fiction and leads to the fact that all the rest based on this administrative fact becomes a fiction too....

If instead of talking about incentives we could just use plainly the word “motivation” that better describes the internal quest for improved performance.

If accountability measures will prevent innovators to find solutions for locally nominated problems and new policies and regulations (instead of helping to reach accountability), help to enforce the status quo and power of the rent seekers in the organisations (who have learnt that administrative fact in fact is a fiction).

That maybe the Finnish (plainly stupid?) integrity and internal coherence with lutheran work ethics, becomes the only working environment where almost all development interventions (policy reforms, new laws and policies, training, funding) so far implemented would have worked perfectly well.

And then finally to come to the obvious conclusion: the world is not Finland and organisations in the world are not Finnish, so the strategies applied to promote sustainable development might not actually work...

What do you think?

[ecologyalike]

When I speak about eduction, I do not mean only that which goes on in schools. Education ought to permeate society. Eduction is also what is passes between parents and children. A society can be transformed by stories it tells itself. But it has to be the stories we tell ourselves in our everyday acts. When we allow shacks and shantytowns to abound we are perpetuating stories about our inability to deal with poverty; we are adverting our failures to ourselves; we are , in fact, educating our schooled to fail. Every act of government is an education every act of policy is a revelation; every failure to rise to justice, to lift the people from misery, is an eduction in destroying the confidence of the a people.

Ben Okri, Comment&Debate - The Guardian Weekly 11.09.15