Did we do okay today? February 21, 2010

Within the broad arena of humanitarian work, donors are increasingly demanding ‘results’ from the projects they fund, and the organisations who implement the projects are increasingly concerned with accountability and demonstrating their impact.

The article ‘Just wasting our time? Provocative Thoughts for Peacebuilders’ by Simon Fisher and Lada Zimina (March 2008), poses the challenge that peacebuilding and conflict transformation projects are not yet demonstrating the impact we hope and expect. The thoughts in this article mirror my own experience that proving the results from peacebuilding and conflict transformation activities is a very challenging aspect of the work, but one which I believe is made more difficult because of the way projects expect to measure the results by using techniques developed for development and humanitarian work, rather than for Conflict Transformation.

The approach based on the Logical Framework and encapsulated in Project Cycle Management (PCM) has become widely used by bilateral and multilateral donors and large Development NGOs, but little work has been done to adapt the methodology from Development and Humanitarian projects for use in Conflict Transformation.

Conflict Transformation typically takes place in a fluid and complex environment, where trust and relationships are a key element. When thinking about results we know that Peace is not something that can be ‘delivered’, a peace project can be deemed successful even if levels of violence increase, and proving a direct link between activities and any changes in the community or state is difficult. As noted in the United Nations definition[1], the Logical Framework expects a causal relationship to exist between activities and results, but when the project is dependent on so many external factors, and when local people have a central role, looking for indicators of direct impact may not give evidence that the activities have had the desired impact.

So, how about we collaborate to adapt methods and models to work more easily in projects that work to reduce violence and build peace, so that we can show the skeptics that civil society peacebuilding and violence prevention works…starting with the logical framework.

Can you share with us some of your experiences – how do you show the results of your peacebuilding and conflict transformation work?

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[1] See http://www.un.org/Depts/oios/mecd/mecd_glossary/documents/glossary/set_l/logical_framework.htm (accessed May 25th 2009)

A suggested experiment in learning from our work January 28, 2010

Every project and program knows it must appropriately keep track of expenditures and be able to share  on short notice, any number of financial reports.  No organization that avoids this task or that doesn’t give basic resources to these tasks, is trusted with grants nor grows very quickly.

Yet very few organizations allocate any resources toward learning from their work.  Of  course learning is going on all the time.  Everyone of us is learning what works, what doesn’t, in what circumstances, new ideas, and evening learning the limits of what we know and what we wish we knew but don’t.  But few organizations have any system or method at all to articulate this and share it amongst staff. Thus individual learning often walks out the door with staff turnover.

If we think of evaluation as a particular subset of learning, organized to answer the question “Are we having and impact and if so what and how?”, then the lack of attention to learning is even more dramatic.  One of the pressing needs for work in communities, whether oriented toward conflict transformation or community building, is to articulate and demonstrate impact.  And yet the very building block to do so are rarely attended to.

My own personal list for why I don’t pay more attention to what I am learning includes the following:

Intensity – too involved with what is going on to even remember or think about taking a step back.
Lack of distance –  too absorbed with details to see  patterns, or a bigger picture.
Lack of discipline – this would require developing some new habits and the discipline to do so.

Lack of method – I don’t really have a method in this, though I KNOW many methods I could be using.

A belief –  no one, including me, will ever use any material I generate, it makes no difference, why bother.
Confusion – I am not actually clear what I am trying to learn, I need to review key questions before each reflection, questions that hold the focus on what I want to be learning.

Lack of time – always too much to do, competing priorities, other things always seem more important. –
Choice – prefer to use my “free time” to unwind, do other things.

Does this resonate?

Add at the organizational level a lack of valuing learning, lack of resources, no rewards for doing so, and of course it doesn’t get done.

Why care?

Every day people are learning critical lessons, in every organization.  We learn more about the history of where we are working and how that relates to our goals. We learn new and subtle aspects relating  to culture and customs that allow us to do our work more effectively, even when we grew up in the community and think we know it all already.  We learn about new techniques, and new needs, new opportunities and new challenges.  Circumstances are changing all the time, nothing stands still.  We get feedback from others and learn about the impact of our work from the people we work with, leading to insights about what is working, why and how.

The technology exists to capture this learning and share it so easily. Look at what people are doing with Twitter and Facebook.

Here is the experiment.

Try creating a facebook page, blog, Ning, LinkedIn group….some social networking system that you are comfortable with, just for your co-workers. Post a couple of questions that are important to you, and ask what others are learning.  See if you can post your own thoughts, experiences, ah ha moments ( whether about positive or challenging moments) at least once a day.  Remember that Twitter works because people post brief, easy to read, messages.  Try to keep the focus on what you are learning, not just what you are doing.  Add links to interesting, relatively brief news,  articles, web pages, etc that you run across.   See what happens.

And please, post what you learn here, to share with others. Let’s do this experiment together!