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Laura Roper and Jethro Pettit
If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the best of us walk about well-wadded with stupidity.
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Why development and the Learning Organisation?
Why a volume on development and the learning organisation? We are aware that an increasing number of NGOs, particularly some of the large international ones, as well as some bilateral and multilateral actors, are embracing the idea of 'becoming a learning organisation'. Over the past decade, as NGOs have either rushed into the mainstream in their claims of innovative and effective practice, or they have tried to transform themselves to fit new realities, organisational learning has emerged as one way to live up to expectations and needs. Certainly, it is difficult to find organisations that are not touting the importance of knowledge generation and organisational learning in one form or another. We are curious to know how practitioners are approaching the issue of learning in organisations and whether their approaches are yielding positive results. We are especially interested because much of the writing and thinking on learning organisations has come out of the private sector, and we want to explore how applicable and useful those insights are for the development field.
As readers will see, our call for papers generated an interesting mix of responses and cases, ranging from major organisational transformation efforts significantly informed by learning organisation theory, to micro-level case studies of individual and group learning practice in very specific settings. While primarily focused on NGO experiences, the responses were varied as the literature itself. To help orient the reader, it may be useful to draw some distinctions among terms that are often used interchangeably - the learning organisation, organisational learning, and monitoring and evaluation (learning) systems. Most importantly, there is a need to distinguish between the body of thought that focuses on the 'learning organisation', and that dealing with 'organisational learning.'
The Learning Organisation
In a very useful review article, Mark Easterby-Smith (1997) makes a distinction between writers on the learning organisation and those who focus on organisational learning, and then he goes on to discuss several strains of thought within the latter category. He notes that the learning organisation, most closely associated with the writing of Peter Senge (1990), is 'pragmatic, normative and inspirational'. The literature is pragmatic in that it focuses on how organisations successfully acquire, share, and use knowledge to achieve organisational goals. There is a strong emphasis for creating 'knowledge for action', not knowledge for its own sake (Agyris 1993). Further, it recognises that organisations are part of complex social systems over which they cannot exert full control. Rather than trying to isolate or protect an organisation from its environment, an organisation ought to be closely attuned to it, embrace the opportunities that changing circumstances can offer, and, as more recent theorists have urged, 'ride the wave' (Duesterberg 2001, Merron 1997). Another aspect of the pragmatic orientation is that learning organisation theorists, unlike many of their academic counterparts, have also developed an array of techniques and tools for doing diagnostics, examining patterns of behaviour in organisations, and engaging in 'transformative thinking' (Wycoff 1995).
This approach is normative in the sense that there is a strong set of underlying values that inform practice within a learning organisation, which include a commitment to:
There is also a strong element of 'self-improvement' found in the literature, whereby individuals in a learning organisation are not only in an ongoing quest for work-related knowledge, but also for self knowledge. One aspect of this is the need to understand their own 'mental models' - deeply ingrained assumptions about how the world works, what motivates people, cause-and-effect relationships - and to be open to challenges regarding these assumptions.
The writing on learning organisations is also normative in the sense that it encourages organisations to go beyond 'single-loop learning', which often focuses on finding efficiencies and dealing with first order problems (symptoms), to double- and even triple-loop learning. In double-loop learning, organisations consistently test assumptions, identify the roots of problems, and are open to fundamental rethinking of strategy. Organisations practising double-loop learning are open to examining how organisational practice diverges from 'espoused theory' and addressing these inconsistencies (for example, an organisation that espouses gender equality would be willing to examine the extent to which it lives up to its own values and make the necessary changes). In triple-loop learning, the highest form of organisational self-examination, people are open to questioning the very raison d'être of the organisation.
The learning organisation literature is aspirational in the sense that the models are presented as 'ideal types', which no real organisation can realise in full. Individuals as well as the organisation are engaged in an ongoing quest for knowledge, their struggle to 'unlearn' dysfunctional behaviours is continuous, and because change is a constant, they must constantly change.
Organisational Learning
The 'organisational learning' literature is much more extensive and diverse. Entering 'organisational learning' in a web search generated over 92,000 entries. Just to mention a few of the streams in this literature, there is:
It should be noted that works cited in the Easterby-Smith (1997) review, from which these categories are largely drawn, as well as other literature reviews, deal almost exclusively with private-sector experience and organisations (although there is a growing literature on the health and education sectors, in which some of the actors are non-profit). In addition, the orientation towards learning in organisations is a modern Western concept, with a bias towards dynamism and disequilibrium, rapid response and high performance, and the embracing of change in part because it is impossible to exert control.
As we mentioned earlier, we are curious to find out how this literature has informed thinking and practice in the development field. We also wonder if thinking and experience from the latter might make useful contributions to the theoretical literature. The material falls into five thematic areas, providing a convenient structure for this volume. The first set of articles deals with the broader dynamics of organisational learning and change, including issues of power, culture, and gender. The second set looks more specifically at 'learning in partnership' - organisational learning involving more than one institution or sector, such as academic-practitioner collaboration, bilateral programmes, and those involving the private sector. The third is a set of case studies that reveals the diverse 'levels of learning' within organisations and identifies a variety of effective leverage points for innovation and change. A fourth set of articles looks at learning within the humanitarian relief sector, in which a context of conflict, high staff turnover, and operational pressures can yield challenging organisational cultures. The fifth and final set of articles deals more specifically with 'ways and means': tools, methods, and approaches that can either inhibit or enable effective learning.
While each of the papers in this volume can be read on its own, if viewed as a whole a number of powerful ideas and questions emerge. We shall comment on three aspects of these papers that have drawn our attention. The first is the paradox of origins; the second relates to the challenge of complexity, and the third is about the nature of incremental approaches to the transformative process.
The paradox of origins
Where and why have development organisations taken up the idea of becoming learning organisations? The diversity of views on this question are worth untangling. David Kelleher and the Gender at Work Collection see learning organisation theory as a 'borrowed toolbox', while Vijay Padaki suggests that the learning organisation is simply the latest management fad. Grant Power, Matthew Maury and Susan Maury argue that '[a]lthough many businesses are modelling learning practices, neither the for-profit environment nor corporate structures fit well with the environmental and organisational forms needed for grassroots development'. The absence of shareholders and profit as priorities for NGOs, as noted by Didier Bloch and Nora Borges, means that values that are related to principles and mission tend to dominate. Yet the concept of 'being a learning organisation' and the transformative promise of effective organisational learning clearly resonate deeply in a great range of organisations represented. Why should this be so?
First of all, there is a long tradition in the development field of recognising untapped human potential in all human beings as well as the transformative power of learning. Even in the earliest years of international development, significant support was given to literacy and adult education, primary and secondary schools, and, to some extent, higher education. Beyond valuing education simply as a ticket to a better standard of living, there were thinkers who saw education as more than an investment in skills and capacities; non-formal learning in particular was recognised as a process of sparking critical awareness and consciousness, leading to both individual and social change. Paulo Freire's The Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) is among the most brilliant and influential expressions of this tradition, showing that critical analysis of one's reality can be a powerful tool for empowerment and collective action. In the African context, the idea that development should be a 'mutual learning experience' was powerfully expressed by Julius Nyerere as early as 1968 (Oakley et. al. 1991, cited in Cornwall 2001). Both thinkers were inspired by Christian thought as well as socialism, and their work - rather than viewing learning in a strictly instrumental way - shared a redemptive vision, as well as a commitment to liberation from oppression in the here and now as the right of all people.
Indeed, these early concepts of learning as a process of personal and structural transformation have nurtured much of today's continued interest in participatory action research, action-learning, and participatory monitoring and evaluation. Broadly, these traditions place value on diverse sources of knowledge, respecting different learning styles and trusting that the inclusion of multiple players acting together will be more likely to generate creative and meaningful change. A key principle emerging from this tradition is that learning and change are mutually reinforcing processes, affecting both the participants and the agents of change - and by extension the structures and organisations involved. Much of the writing on participatory development focuses on the need to foster creative processes - including more flexible and enabling structures, behaviours, and attitudes - that will enhance participation and integrate different realities (Chambers 1997). The approaches developed by practitioners in these participatory traditions foreshadow language and methods that are used in the corporate sector today.
A second aspect of learning organisation theory with which development practitioners should feel comfortable is the emphasis on embracing change. Most people join the development field because they want to change the status quo - whether in a relatively restricted way such as improving nutrition, housing, or educational opportunities, or in a more profound way, such as addressing the root causes of poverty, and challenging those economic and political structures that perpetuate it (see, for example, Hope and Timmel 1984). For the development practitioner, change is both desirable and necessary. Consequently, how to generate 'knowledge for action' and be constantly monitoring a dynamic environment in order to identify opportunities and anticipate challenges has strong appeal. Development organisations themselves are also seeking to embrace change, to become more flexible and adaptive in a rapidly changing global context, and to become more strategic in addressing deeper structural inequalities and policy issues (Edwards and Hulme 1996). For some, organisational learning approaches hold the promise of helping to introduce urgently needed shifts in culture, vision, and purpose.
Thirdly, many development professionals will identify with relates to the focus on changing internal structures and practices that inhibit learning and, in turn, the fulfilment of an organisation's mission. An enormous area of work in the development field has to do with 'institution building' or organisational capacity building. The learning organisation literature has the merit of going beyond much of the mainstream capacity-building guides put out by organisational development consultants and technical intermediaries, which often have a prescriptive feel and are not characterised by a sensitivity to different economic, social, and cultural contexts. (For notable exceptions see Eade (1997) and Kaplan (1996).) The limitations of the conventional capacity-building guides are a function, in part, of the influence of neo-liberal thinking on (and funding for) management and governance. This is particularly pronounced as NGOs have come under pressure to live up to their idealised role of 'providing models of good practice for others to follow' (Cornwall 2001), and to do so efficiently. Learning organisation approaches - with their emphasis on flatter organisational structure, the nurturing of the leadership potential in all staff, closer connection with and greater accountability to clients, better internal communication, and the efficacy of teamwork - may be seen by some as a potential antidote to more traditional NGO organisational practices, which can often be hierarchical, narrowly construed, and non-participatory.
In short, a lot of the thinking that has been done by development practitioners in fact anticipates significant aspects of learning organisation theory. That said, we would encourage you to read the articles by Kelleher et al., Power et al., and Padaki, who suggest that the theory does not go far enough. As a normative theory, it does not argue explicitly for internal democracy and, because it does not examine 'deep structures' and power inequities within organisations, is unlikely to have the transformative impact it aspires to (Kelleher et al.). Related to this, because learning organisation theory emerges from the private sector and consequently is not concerned about development, much less development that is firmly grounded in a grassroots approach, the scope of its interest in transformation is in fact quite limited (Powers et al.). Regarding the extent to which it is pragmatic, Padaki argues that it actually distracts from attention to management fundamentals, and may generate more heat than light. Bloch and Borges, on the other hand, find potential in those strands of organisational learning theory that focus on critical reflection, transforming values, and personal behaviour (Agyris and Schön 1974).
The challenge of complexity
In reading the papers that comprise this volume, one point emerges particularly strongly: learning is hard to do, not only for individuals, but particularly for organisations and groups of organisations. When we do learn, we often learn the wrong things. Huge gaps often remain between our learning and our behaviour or practice. It is important to keep in mind the characteristics of the development and humanitarian work that may present particular learning challenges. We might summarise these as the complexity of the development process; the complexity of accountability demands and duties; the complexity of measurement; and self-inflicted complexity. We will now briefly comment on each of these.
The complexity of the development process
David Ellerman notes that '[t]he questions that development agencies face about inducing economic and social development are perhaps the most complex and ill-defined questions confroting human kind'. As practitioners know, development is non-linear, unpredictable, and what is needed for sustaining development on a non-trivial scale is poorly understood. In this process, there is only a small range of things over which organisations actually have any control, and a great many more over which they do not. It is not clear which aspects are most important, when and how they interact, and what the downstream effects will be if 'success' or anticipated change is achieved in any one area. This presents a significant challenge to any organisation committed to learning, because it is not always clear what it should be learning about or how it should make sense of what it learns. This is a problem that can be particularly pronounced in humanitarian work, particularly in situations of complex emergencies or high levels of vulnerability (see the articles by John Twigg and Diana Steiner, and Dorothea Hilhorst and Najda Schiemann).
Ellerman argues that this learning challenge is greatly compounded when development organisations, including some with enormous influence and resources, try to identify the 'One Best Way', and become deeply wedded to dogmatic beliefs. This creates significant obstacles to learning, as people focus on explaining away failures (bad single-loop learning) rather than on questioning the wisdom of the dogma or the dominant paradigm (double- and triple-loop learning). Bloch and Borges suggest that NGOs tend to get stuck in single-loop learning because their planning and evaluation tools focus on the operational level, and fail to engage people in critical reflection on underlying issues of behaviour, values, and agency. They agree with Michael Edwards that the complexity and diversity of the development process 'means that to develop capacity for learning and to make the connections is even more important than accumulating information' (Edwards 1997).
The development effort is also made much more complex because it is not a solo enterprise. Nor is business, of course, and there is a considerable literature on joint enterprise. However, the private sector literature focuses on developing characteristics of a learning organisation in order to maintain an edge over competitors. The competitive lens is not the most useful for analysing actors in the development sector, particularly since collaboration has become increasingly important for achieving development and humanitarian goals. Development and humanitarian organisations in different countries, of different sizes, with different missions, mandates, and accountability structures have to collaborate with each other in the hope of having impact. Even within a given organisation, there can often be many hierarchical levels and a variety of sectors or units, as well as remote offices, each with its own cultural context and different worldviews. The challenge in the development field is to instil learning capabilities, including the learning challenge of consistently and effectively working with a wide range of organisations which operate at different and/or multiple levels and in profoundly different contexts.
Several papers in this volume tackle aspects of the challenge that collaboration poses for both individuals and organisations. Laura Roper examines academic-NGO learning collaborations and argues that different organisational cultures can undermine partnerships that would seem to have enormous potential. To be successful, there needs to be a clear negotiated agreement about both the ends of the collaboration and the means of reaching those ends, with both parties being aware of the nature of their differences. This message is reinforced by Gelaye Debebe in her paper on a collaboration between a Navajo service and capacity-building organisation and the 'anglo' technical intermediary. Marla J. Solomon and A. Mushtaque R. Chowdhury also examine the challenges and benefits of a learning collaboration between the School of International Training (SIT), a US-based academic institution, and BRAC, a Bangladeshi NGO.
Looking at a joint rural development effort of the Dutch and Kenyan governments in the Keiyo Marakwet district, Samuel Musyoki asks whether organisational learning principles are relevant or useful in complex bilateral programmes,. He examines how participation was institutionalised at different stages of the programme, as both a learning and a conflict-generating process. In the politicised context of bilateral programmes, Musyoki finds that the ability to carry forward any learning from one phase to the next is hindered by high staff turnover, national politics, diplomatic considerations, and shifts in the international development agenda. Learning organisation theory tends to assume some degree of consensus or shared vision, both of which can be elusive in development programmes that involve multiple actors, competing interests, and conflicting goals.
Pauline Tiffen, writing about producing and marketing fair-trade chocolate, documents a fairly complex multi-institutional collaboration effort and highlights how each participant - from a rural Ghanaian producers' cooperative, to two international technical support organisations, to the UK-based Day Chocolate Company - engaged in strong learning practice. Learning occurred on many dimensions. The cocoa producers learned from past experiences and mistakes in trying to establish a strong, responsive farmers' cooperative. Twin, a specialist NGO based in the UK, used research and its experience of working with Latin American coffee, sesame, and honey producers to support the development of a fair-trade marketing strategy for cocoa. Day Chocolate, among other strategies to promote fair trade chocolates, set out to break down the distance between the faceless producer and the faceless consumer through a number of interesting innovations.
Complexity of accountability
It became common 'wisdom' in the private sector during the 'go-go 90s' that a company's primary responsibility was maximising shareholder value. This implied accountability and responsiveness to customers, and to a more limited extent to employees, as long as doing so served to maximise profits and return on investment. Compared to the NGO sector, private sector accountability is quite straightforward, particularly since there arguably is a congruence of interests among its immediate stakeholders. This apparent congruence can, of course, be disrupted if a company develops a monopoly over the market, if influential shareholders are exclusively focused on short-term profit, or (increasingly rarely) if labour is highly organised in a tight labour market. Today, there is growing awareness in the corporate boardrooms of the need not only to satisfy the shareholders, but also to protect the company's reputation (and deflect public criticism) and minimise practices that are environmentally unsustainable - the so-called 'triple bottom line' (Elkington 1997).
Accountability is not necessarily so straightforward for NGOs, whether local or international. In this volume, Power et al. are most explicit in identifying the conflict of interest between two primary stakeholders of an NGO -its donor institutions and its 'clients' or beneficiaries. Because donors control the purse strings, they often exert undue influence on how the NGO views accountability. Consequently, monitoring and evaluation systems, the development and use of reports, and criteria for success are determined not by the NGO clients, but by the donors. This obviously has consequences for how learning processes are structured and whose interests are served. Esther Mebrahtu illustrates how this plays out across a number of organisations, while the case studies of CARE (Colin Beckwith, Kent Glenzer, and Alan Fowler), ActionAid (Patta Scott-Villiers), Heifer International (Thomas S. Dierolf, Rienzzie Kern, Tim Ogborn, Mark Protti, and Marvin Schwartz), and Médecins sans Frontières (Hilhorst and Schmiemann) deal with the challenges faced by individual international NGOs. These experiences highlight the extent to which the 'development project' remains the currency of most agencies, driven by the transfer of resources from donors to recipients. Reporting systems and procedures are geared toward the control over resource flows, rather than toward learning and innovation.
The accountability challenge is still more complex when NGOs belong to confederations (such as Care International, Oxfam International, or Save the Children Fund Federation); and have diverse and segmented publics (different types of donors, volunteers, activists, etc.), as well as relationships with policy makers, the media, and a range of allies. An NGO often needs engagement from these other stakeholders (free labour from volunteers, the placement of stories by colleagues in the media, favourable decisions or policy positions from policy makers, and so on). These stakeholders are also frequently physically closer and may be more similar to headquarter staff (for instance in terms of class, ethnic background, and education) than are the partners or beneficiaries in the South. As a result, the former set of stakeholders are quite likely to be better organised and be better able to exercise their voice than are the poor communities on whose behalf the work is being done. As international NGOs, in particular, increasingly take on advocacy and campaigning roles, very close relations may develop with the media, sympathetic policy makers, and other like-minded agencies, and opportunities in relation to the domestic public can become more pronounced in influencing the organisation, albeit for good strategic reasons. Finding the right balance and methods for handling accountability relationships thus become a major challenge. Neither the literature on learning organisations nor that on organisational learning deals extensively with questions of accountability to multiple stakeholders, although as the scope of NGO work broadens, this is becoming a more pressing issue. (See Lindenberg and Bryant 2001; Moore et al. 2001; Coates and David in this volume.)
The challenge of finding the right metrics and methods
Development organisations are not producing and selling widgets. They are interested in both process and outcome. Outcomes are multi-dimensional and often not easily measurable. How do you measure organisational capacity? How do you measure empowerment? If a coalition does not achieve its articulated policy change goals, did it accomplish other objectives that lay the groundwork for a more successful effort in the future? How do you evaluate a process and even define what a good process is? The things you can most easily count are often things that don't tell you very much. There are fundamental questions to consider about who does the measuring, who benefits from monitoring and evaluation procedures, and whose learning and knowledge is being valued (Estrella et al. 2000).
The challenge of metrics and methods runs smack against the accountability issue. Several of the papers in this volume note that their monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems are designed to conform to donor demands (Esther Mebrahtu; Sarah Earl and Fred Carden). There is also the organisational imperative, particularly of large, sprawling, multi-million dollar agencies, to try to make coherent sense out of diversity of experience (Scott-Villiers). There is, however, a good deal of creative work being done in both the development and humanitarian arenas. Marshall Wallace describes the inductive process carried out over several years by the Local Capacities for Peace Project (LCPP) to tackle the difficult challenge of humanitarian intervention in the context of complex emergencies. Mebrahtu also highlights innovations by field staff, often outside the formal demands of the system.
In their work with a reproductive health rights NGO in Brazil, Bloch and Borges describe efforts to engage staff in deeper reflection of their own values and behaviour, and to build skills for more effective listening, dialogue, and relationships. They link this effort to the NGO's M&E, so that both qualitative changes in organisational response and performance can be measured over time, and the staff can reflect on their own behaviour in the process of defining indicators, documenting progress, and learning from the evaluation process in order to break with 'defensive routines'.
The rapid growth of advocacy work is challenging many development organisations to develop effective ways to monitor, measure, and learn from programmes. Barry Coates and Rosalind David explore the complex and changing nature of advocacy, drawing on experiences of ActionAid and the World Development Movement. They suggest that conventional M&E and impact assessment methods are likely to be inappropriate or even counter-productive. A focus on measuring short-term advocacy impacts, for example, may undermine longer-term aims such as strengthening the capacity and voice of partner groups to effect deeper change. Similarly, causality can be hard to pin down. Efforts to assess the impact of one organisation may create perverse incentives that undermine joint action. Coates and David argue that an analysis of power and power structures should guide advocacy strategy and inform the ways in which advocacy is evaluated. Their review adds to a growing body of work on the challenges of doing and assessing advocacy and policy change work (Chapman 2002; VeneKlasen and Miller 2002; Cohen et al. 2001; Roche 1999; Brown and Fox 1998). To contribute to organisational learning, those applying conventional M&E approaches to advocacy work are advised to join the search for alternative tools and methods.
Self-inflicted complexity.
Development and humanitarian organisations are notorious for the imbalance that is almost inevitably found between aspirations, capabilities, and resources (human, financial, and temporal). As Twigg and Steiner note, '[o]ne of the most significant, and emphatic, findings of our research is that overwork and pressures of work are not minor factors in NGO operations and performance, but systemic weaknesses [which] in our view&[are] a major obstacle to the uptake of new approaches'. Mebrahtu, Scott-Villiers, and Hilhorst and Schiemann also identify time as a major constraint. Another challenge is staff turnover, especially within organisations, such as Médecins sans Frontières and Peace Corps, that embrace voluntarism. Various authors highlight the importance of simply creating a 'space for learning.' It is interesting to note that, in the case of the LCPP described by Wallace, space had to be created outside the individual humanitarian organisations and that often it was the field staff rather than the headquarters who were driving the learning effort.
Despite emphasis on learning and knowledge creation, many practitioners feel themselves to be in a vicious cycle. How many of us work in organisations where we are rewarded for reflecting on our work, for reading and listening to what others have to say, for systematising and sharing our experiences so others can critique our work, both within our institutions and in the broader development community? We are working with ever more ambitious NGO agendas, increasing numbers of relevant actors and stakeholders, and more complex change processes. As we learn by doing, real learning becomes even more important. Yet increased complexity increases demands on staff and strains existing infrastructure, meaning there is even less time for reflection and learning. When and how can this cycle be transformed into a virtuous cycle of reflective practice?
Transformation through incrementalism? sustaining learning practice
We are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhaps been staring at us in private, while we have been making up our world entirely without it.
George Eliot, Middlemarch
The gulf between the ideal type of a learning organisation and the organisations many of us work in is often huge, although there certainly are exceptions. John Hailey and Rick James identify a number of successful South Asian NGOs characterised by good learning practice, and emphasise the importance of the commitment of the top leadership to learning and critical inquiry for creating a learning culture. Patta Scott-Villiers deals with ActionAid' attempt to undergo a major strategic transformation through its Accountability, Learning and Planning System (ALPS). A driving force behind this transformation is the decision that ActionAid owes the highest level of accountability to its primary stakeholders - the communities it serves. There are interesting examples of how Action Aid is putting its guiding institutional principles into practice, such as sharing detailed financial information with communities. Although less explicit than in the Hailey and James article, the role of top leadership for moving change through the system is clearly significant.
More often than not, one often finds pockets of good learning practice in organisations whose leadership may either simply allow innovation (as Mebrahtu illustrates in some of her case examples) or nurture it with varying degrees of intentionality. Dierolf et al. describe how Heifer International has created an enabling environment for learning experimentation at the country level, as well as established mechanisms at headquarters to foster cross-regional and cross-functional learning and planning. In the case of CARE (Beckwith et al.), the decentralised nature of the system, as well as a mandate coming out of a participatory planning process that, in effect, changes the business model of CARE from being a service-delivery agency to becoming part of a movement for development, has allowed the Latin American Regional Unit to innovate in planning, programming, and learning. The question the paper leaves us with is how an organisation can handle the tensions generated by an innovative middle-range leadership that is considerably ahead of its superiors and the rest of the organisation.
There are also examples where organisations try to take an evaluation process and ensure that it creates a genuine learning moment. The joint evaluation carried out by SIT and BRAC of its Global Partnership's NGO Leadership and Management Programme is such an example (see Solomon and Chowdhury). The International Development Research Centre (IDRC) is focusing considerable energy on developing methods that allow for more effective planning and learning, and we have included in this volume two examples of the tools they are developing (Earl and Carden; Molly den Heyer).
While the focus of this volume is on whether and how organisations learn, clearly a key aspect for successful organisational learning is to structure learning processes in such a way as to enhance individuals' agency and learning capabilities. The paper by Charles Ogoye-Ndegwa, Domnic Abudho, and Jens Aagard-Hansen looks at how learning and participation in a nutrition programme was structured in such a way that students, traditionally the passive recipients of information dispensed by teachers in an authoritarian schooling tradition, became researchers, active learners, teachers of their peers and parents, and contributors to community good through identification and cultivation of nutritious traditional foodstuffs.
Wallace illustrates a process where individuals were brought together outside their organisations to share their individual learning regarding delivery of humanitarian aid in complex emergencies. Through an inductive, iterative process, a framework for assessing interventions in complex emergencies was developed, and it was later adopted and tested, often by interested individuals or small groups with a given relief agency. The challenge that many participants were left with was how to institutionalise that learning within their respective organisations, particularly when headquarters staff had not been much involved. An interesting follow-up will be to see which organisations mainstream the model and how they did it.
Debebe details the challenges inherent within a bicultural collaboration that includes participants with very different worldviews and value systems. The paper demonstrates a point made by several other authors (e.g. Hilhorst and Schmiemann; Mebrahtu), which is that each of us negotiates our place within systems, often simply seeking to cope. It also illustrates that the extent to which individuals can learn is limited by the extent to which they have insights into underlying issues of values, power, and culture. The importance of this cannot be overstated. Very often, organisational evolution or transformation is derailed by the limitations of key individuals to engage in profound and genuine learning.
This is highlighted very forcefully in the papers by Kelleher et al. and Sara Ahmed, both of which deal with gender relations within organisations and efforts to make organisations more gendered in their policies and practices. To many people, examining the 'deep structure' within organisations, including positions of privilege that are reinforced by institutional policy and practice, can be highly threatening. Those holding positions of privilege in a society (or organisation) may be totally oblivious to the effects of that power structure. While they can gain insights and are willing to address the more obvious and glaringly unfair practices, they may be completely unaware of other aspects, and cannot recognise them even when they are pointed out. Very often, leaders will embark upon organisational change processes with real commitment to transform the organisation, until they realise how genuine transformation will challenge their own authority and prerogatives. Even when top leadership remains committed, it is often middle-management or upper-level professionals who feel threatened by the constant challenge to basic premises and by the more egalitarian values embodied in learning organisation theory. As Kelleher et al. observe, '[a]s change agents we may recognise that gender equality requires a very different set of power relations in an organisation, but we are seldom, if ever, asked by organisations to lead a cultural revolution'.
Where leadership structures are highly politicised, as in the case analysed by Musyoki, learning and change may be very threatening to the status quo. Commitment to a shared vision may not exist, even nominally, and it may be necessary to create alternative, community-based structures that can build trust and hold officials accountable. Musyoki argues for more rigorous attention to the political and power dynamics at play within and among organisations, and he observes that this is missing from much of the writing on organisational learning. He also cautions that even alternative structures and processes of participation can then be formalised in ways that fold them back into the existing power structure, where in the end it is 'political dynamics that determine what is to be learned, by whom, how, and for what purpose'. By understanding these political dynamics, we can engage in more critically reflective and open processes in which people can develop their own learning agendas and manage the outcomes.
Conclusions
Obviously, a key challenge, and one with which many development workers are familiar, is how to achieve those transformative breakthroughs that get us closer to our goals. In the context of organisations, learning organisation theory has been effective in articulating a set of values and practices that has galvanised a lot of creative thinking and fundamentally changed the nature of the discourse on organisational development. It seems appropriate, however, for us in the development sector to push both the discourse and practice even further.
As Kelleher et al. note, given the values that underlie our work, we should also be committed to building organisations that are '[s]ufficiently democratic that those ideas with merit can be enunciated with power from all levels of the organisation and evolve into practice', and that 'possess[&] teams capable of functioning democratically and effectively'. We should use whatever tools help us achieve the aspirations of mission-driven organisations, some of which may come from the management literature, while many others have roots in other disciplines and in development practice itself. These traditions, identified earlier in the paper, focus on individual reflection and empowerment for collective action, and on the transformation of oppressive structures and power dynamics.
As Power et al. argue, if we are truly committed to poor communities and the potential of the grassroots to move a development agenda forward, we have to make the necessary investments in time, resources, and experimentation with innovative learning methodologies to ensure bottom-up learning, mutual accountability, and a people-driven, rather than donor-dominated, development practice. They warn that this can have profound implications for organisations in terms of their size, their mission, and their organisational drive. To take their argument a step further, and perhaps return to the thinking of Freire and Nyerere, should we not be finding ways in which the poor and marginalised are able not simply to influence NGO practice, but actually to define the development paradigm, drawing on the richness and diversity of their philosophical, religious and cultural traditions? At the very least, organisations should be searching for ways to create space for innovative development and learning practice, sometimes referred to as learning laboratories or communities of learning, that has the explicit intention of challenging standard practice and/or dominant paradigms This includes negotiating with official donor agencies (bilateral and multilateral) so that they in turn are able, at a minimum, to negotiate with their funders (legislatures and governments, respectively) for more flexible application and reporting requirements on at least some of their funds.
A third area in which development practitioners can potentially contribute a great deal to debates on organisational effectiveness and change concerns the cultural aspects of organisational learning. The business literature is extremely weak in this domain, although Bloch and Borges find promise in the values-based approaches to learning and change that promote reflection on personal behaviour (Senge 1990, Argyris 1974, 1993).In this era of accelerated globalisation, where multi-institutional collaboration, such as that described by Tiffen, is increasingly becoming the norm, understanding the ways individuals and institutions collaborate and learn in their own settings, as well as across great cultural and economic divides, will become essential for achieving the development breakthroughs needed for significant numbers of people to overcome poverty. International NGOs have a special role to play in this effort because they have feet in more than one environment, and are particularly positioned to bring forward non-Western understandings of development, management, and cultural practices from a variety of settings that could serve not only to reduce dependence on the influence of Western, business-sector theorising, but actually create more hybrid forms of knowledge and theory.
Finally, the papers provide practical insights into the elements that need to be in place for the generation of knowledge and offer the beginnings of an empirical base upon which to refine both organisational learning and learning organisation practice in the development field. Time is essential (and one of the most scarce commodities for development practitioners) and neutral space is extremely important, as Wallace's paper attests. The skill and the patience to value contributions from people whose knowledge may have been devalued or ignored for years, as both Tiffen and Ogoye-Ndegwa et al. illustrate, is enormously empowering. There are numerous examples of how development organisations - usually operating in more dynamic, more complex, and more ambiguous contexts than most private sector organisations - identify the need for change and operationalise it (Scott-Villiers, Beckwith et al, Dierolf, et al.).
Many of the examples provided in this volume document early stages of institutional processes. These are worth following over the coming years to gather more empirical evidence about how these processes unfold, how they affect culture and practice within organisations, how both internal and external stakeholders experience these processes, and finally, whether these organisations become more effective actors.
We therefore close by inviting readers to send us more cases, so that the debates, networking, and the sharing of experiences that underpin learning can continue beyond the contribution we trust this volume has made.
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The authors
Laura Roper is Director of Program Planning and Learning and Deputy Director of Global Programs at Oxfam America, where she has worked since 1989. Prior to that, she was a research manager at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at the University of Pennsylvania. Contact details: Oxfam America, 26 West Street, Boston MA 02111, USA.
Jethro Pettit is a member of the Participation Group at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex in the UK. Before joining IDS, he had worked for many years in the US NGO sector, most recently at World Neighbors in Oklahoma City, but also at Oxfam America and United Universalist Service Committee, both in Boston. Contact details: IDS, University of Sussex, Brighton BR1 9RE, UK.
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