sdclan

By Michèle Marin

Are you about to plan a new working aid or revising an existing guiding document? Are you trying to figure out what a “good and modern” tool is all about and how it is best elaborated? Find lessons, recommendations and inspiration for innovative products based on a recent exchange among SDC Focal Points and LerNetz AG. There are always sufficient reasons for reflecting on adequate formats of guiding documents and working aids  in the international cooperation context: The existing formats have been developed in a particular political and institutional context, responding to concrete mandates and contextual challenges at a specific point in organisational or political history.
Are the traditional formats still the right answers to the challenges of today? Are we making best use of our technological infrastructure to design learning and communication? And,  what will be an adequate format by the end of often lengthy production-processes in  fast changing contexts? Several SDC networks are about to review their existing technical guiding-documents and check them for accuracy in contents and format. With a recent revision of competencies the responsibility for working documents is laid into the network’s hands, while the corporate provisions regarding format, volume and design have been loosened. (more…)

by Adrian Gnägi

A few years ago, when I was posted in Amman, we frequently visited my wife’s family in Beirut. That made for long rides on monotonous Middle Eastern desert highways. The deal with the kids was that they could wish for stories to be told. One of their favorites was the illustrated book “Beaver, give us a ride”. The story goes like this: Beaver uses a hollow log as boat on the river. His friends are not impressed: nice, but small. So beaver builds a large raft and invites one after the other of his friends to come on board. When bear joins after all the others, there definitely is no space left. The friends try to prevent an uninvited butterfly from landing on the overloaded raft in the rapids, but …

The story is a beautiful explanation of complexity theory for children. Our kids used to discuss for hours whether and how the wreckage could have been prevented. They asked to review the pages where the different friends joined the party, discussing who could have done what differently at which moment to prevent the accident. The better they knew the story and the pictures, the more weak signals they discovered. In the end they realized there would have been steering potential in every single scene, right from the beginning.

But why was this steering potential not realized, why was the catastrophe not prevented from happening? Standard MfDR (managing for development results) thinking explains impact as the end of the result chain: impact happens in a distant future, when all outputs have been produced, when outputs have interacted with other factors into outcomes, and when other forces have diluted outcome influence in the attribution gap. 

Beaver’s story shows why the MfDR impact model is not useful for development program steering:

• When impact is conceptualized as happening in the distant future, all impact induced steering opportunities are forgone, because they lie in the past. At the moment when the friends are swimming to the shore, they cannot prevent the wreckage any more.
• The attribution gap prevents from knowing what kind of steering should have happened – the cause-effect chain is broken. When the friends discuss who was to be blamed, they agree none of them had caused the result - it was the butterfly’s fault! (more…)

 In our interview series “11 Questions for…” we ask people from in and around SDC and the KM world the same 11 questions. Our goal is to offer insights into different working methods, different ways of looking at individual and institutional learning, and different ideas and opinions on how to make organisations more efficient… And, along the way, to hear interesting stories and experiences our interviewees have in store!

 Our fifth interviewee is Manuel Etter, Swiss Country Director in Kiew and designated Head of the Learning and Networking Division from 1  October 2011. (more…)

By Manuel Flury

SDC operates in fields such as skills development, water and sanitation, rural livelihoods, micro finances, municipal development or community based health care. It is active in poorest, conflict prone and fragile states via direct bilateral aid and through programmes of multilateral organisations. The portfolio includes sector budget support, capacity development, infrastructure work and related policy work. SDC collaborates with a wide range of public, private enterprise and civil society partners.
High quality of its thematic and technical work has always been a trade mark of Swiss Cooperation. This level of competence is at great risk! SDC is about to lose its thematic excellence. Administering larger junks of development funds is becoming characteristic for SDC’s development work. Despite this overall trend, the importance of excellence and competence in what SDC is doing is repeatedly stressed. The question, however, what the fields of (thematic and technical) competence of Swiss Cooperation would be remains unanswered, still, and already for many years. (more…)

by Adrian Gnägi 

20 years ago I worked as a consultant for GTZ. Those were the golden years of ZOPP (Zielorientierte Projektplanung). I got trained on ZOPP, I was forced to use ZOPP. I learned to hate ZOPP as naïve, pseudo-participatory planning tyranny. In November 2010 I attended a training workshop on “Capacity WORKS”, the approach that replaced ZOPP in GTZ. I could hardly believe what I saw and heard: a real tectonic shift, a different paradigm. In this post I will share some of the great things I learned. And yes: not everything is brilliant with “Capacity WORKS”; I will write about the weaknesses, too. (more…)