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The Swiss Cooperation Office (SCO) Mongolia has witnessed a clear transformation from scepticism about the networks’ usefulness towards a supportive environment for knowledge management. This change is so far one of attitude only, however, with little direct impact on operations in the field.

Over the last couple of years the SCO Mongolia has seen a trend from doubt, scepticism and criticism about the “raison d’être” of the networks towards a supportive environment for knowledge management. The following visible changes could be observed:

• All NPOs, SCO management and several project staff are network members – although only 4 out of 11 consider themselves as being “active”;

• Thematic events are now held regularly, often in the form of a “Brown Bag Lunch”, in order to present a topic in-depth and share information;

• Staff responsibilities have been rearranged along thematic lines and in accordance with the domains of our new Cooperation Strategy 2013-16; and

• Staff incentives have been set in a way to encourage participation in knowledge networks, for instance by being able to attend face-to-face (f2f) meetings while having knowledge management firmly included in everyone’s annual performance assessment (MAP).

This year the SCO held two major events to promote the knowledge networks. Interestingly, a recent anonymous survey among SCO and self-implemented project staff revealed that one third still didn’t know about the networks, and that half the respondents were not members in any of them. But 91% of staff thought that networks were useful!

Photo: SDC Mongolia Staff

Given our recent history with “networking”, the SCO Mongolia embraced the opportunity to participate in the blog series “Cooperation Offices and Networks”. We even requested for the questions to be more “provocative”!

Questions and answers

1) Are the networks completely HQ-driven and hardly visible in the SCO or do you feel included and involved in the network activities?

While staff agreed that the answers to these questions varied from network to network, overall they are perceived as being rather HQ driven. At the level of the SCO, some networks are very visible, while others are hardly noticeable. Generally staff feels included whenever an opportunity to interact and engage presents itself. This is often the case, for instance, in the run-up to f2f events, when networks are generally buzzing with activity.

2) Are the networks an additional burden or a useful support for sharing and learning? Are you lazy lurkers or do you proactively contribute to the network activities?

It is both. All staff felt that sometimes networks feel like a burden (e.g. as a MAP goal), while at other times they are more than just “nice to have” but really support us in sharing experiences and learning, for instance when it comes to problem-solving type issues. And yes, we feel that half the time we are rather reactive, passive and “lazy lurkers”, and that we want to be much more proactive in future. However, the usefulness of the network really depends also on the way it manages to play its role of a “knowledge broker”.

3) Are networks a luxury occupation or does sharing and learning through networks strengthen in the end the operation? Do you observe positive change? Where and how?

This was the most debated question. No, networks are clearly not perceived as a luxury. They are seen as a necessity. A learning organisation such as SDC must have a vehicle through which it can share experiences and promote knowledge. However, all staff agreed that networks, so far, are not directly linked to our operations. In order for that to happen, networks would have to become a source of more factual, practical and evidence-based knowledge that is easily accessible to all its members.

As the debate got going, our discussion group decided to draw up some simple recommendations on how to make the networks more useful and engaging for SCOs:

1. Have a dedicated and motivated moderation of the network;

2. Offer qualified and useful services for operations;

3. Design attractive and interactive network websites / online portals; and

4. Provide professional and highly qualified inputs on specific topics (similar to “Ted Talks”).

At the end of our discussion we started to wonder why we all seemed to spend more time on social media than our knowledge networks. Hence, we were asking ourselves, how can knowledge networks become as engaging as Facebook?

This post is the second in a serie on the network experience of the Cooperation Offices.
Read the previous post:
Cooperation Offices and Networks – the Pretoria Story (by Reto Wieser)

In the perspective of the Swiss Cooperation Office Southern Africa the networks did arrive. Reto Wieser, Director of Cooperation summarizes how networks make a difference for his team. And he points out some suggestions how networked learning and collaboration can be further strengthened trough the active implication of the Directors of Cooperation and the members. (more…)

The importance of knowledge brokers for learning in SDC or why “Manejo Integrado de Plagas” (in engl. Integrated Pest Management) was the most downloaded document of SDC websites. (more…)

Social Reporting on and from face-to-face meetings of SDC’s networks became a trendy practice. This blog post looks behind the scenes and reflects on three questions: What is actually Social Reporting? What makes it social? And is it worth the effort? (more…)

Manuel Flury reflects the Seminar of the Coordinators from a learning perspective and comes to the conclusion that the Seminar was not a learning event and had no learning agenda; nevertheless important learning happened as the most important side event. (more…)

What’s the true nature of networks? In this post Nadia von Holzen reflects on the characteristics of networks and how best sharing and learning in networks can be organized and supported. (more…)

As with many things knowledge management starts with ourselves. Today’s interviewee Rana Warrad Sandouka talks about her personal strategies, about knowledge sources and networks supporting her in daily work.  Rana Warrad Sandouka has been working with the Swiss Cooperation Office (SCO) Gaza and West Bank based in Jerusalem since August 2005 in the position of a National Program Officer. Rana’s background is in International Relations and Diplomacy. Her previous working experience was characterised by assignments with the International Labour Organization (ILO), the Palestinian Ministry of Labour (MoL), the Palestinian Ministry of Planning & International Cooperation and Birzeit University in West Bank. Being member of the Employment and Income Portfolio team at the SCO Gaza and West Bank, she is developing, monitoring and supervising a number of development cooperation programs related to economic issues in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. (more…)

Involved in a rethinking process on its institutional learning mechanisms the Swiss Cooperation Office in Chisinau made use of the Knowledge Management workshop for SDC field staff and local partners. This training on demand offered by the SDC Knowledge and Learning Processes Division aims at sharing and raising awareness for SDC’s Knowledge Management practices. In today’s blog post the staff of the SCO Chisinau offers insights gained in this two-day training. (more…)

In our interview series “6 questions to…” we ask people from in and around SDC and the KM world the same 6 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 organizations more efficient… And, along the way, to hear interesting stories and experiences our interviewees have in store! (more…)

A new form of influencing policy-making is emerging thanks to the Internet. The Arab Spring, anti-ACTA protests, the Occupy movement, pirate parties have at least one thing in common: they all share the  Internet as an enabler. On the Internet, protest movements coordinate activities and manage to reach out to the global public. Governments and international organisations cannot ignore this substantive change. Jovan Kurbalija, in his contribution, discusses challenges facing governments and organisations in getting involved in the social media space. (more…)

In 2008 SDC has introduced networks as “caretakers” of knowledge and competence. Networks imply a particular mode of work, less hierarchical and self-managed. In what ways have the networks led to a changed way of learning? Could SDC secure its competence and operational quality? There are no final answers yet. The networks are developing their particular shapes and modes of sharing and learning. The key challenge remains for SDC and its collaborators: To engage in sharing in a trustful environment, both personally and institutionally. (more…)

After Riff Fullan’s comprehensive contribution on e-collaboration and on its prerequisites, in this blog post Andreas Schöne concentrates on more general terms of information management and on the e-collaboration infrastructure to be expected in the near future for FDFA employees and external partners. (more…)

E-collaboration has been around since computer networks were invented, but of course our increasing interconnectedness presents more opportunities for us to do it, and to do so with a greater variety of tools. What is e-collaboration? A brief way to describe it is working together to produce something (a document, a position, a decision) using electronic media. It is easy to get lost among the tools, but successful e-collaboration is much more about the people who are involved and how their interaction is facilitated, than it is about the technologies used. (more…)

In her blog post Nadia von Holzen reflects on the nature of networks, on their constitution, texture and driving force. Networks shouldn’t be taken as rigid entities, they are driven by people and their engagement and are thus propelled by an inner dynamic. Networks grow, evolve and move and it is the network’s members who breathe life into this loose conglomerate transforming it into something similar to a living organism. Therefore networks are pivotal to a learning organization as they comprise essential qualities to manage, transform and generate knowledge. (more…)

Knowledge is Power – In today’s blog post Manuel Etter follows the historical traces of this saying emphasizing an action-oriented quality of knowledge rather than its power maintaining virtue. In a second step he links this historical meaning of knowledge with the future of development cooperation. He questions the conditions and determinants that permit to find adequate answers to the issues of the future. He asks how development cooperation and above all knowledge management and exchange should be organized in order to meet increasingly global challenges. (more…)

Reorganisation in SDC brought fourth a set of new or adapted tools aiming to optimize the impact of SDC’s work. From his personal perspective, a  former SDC colleague casts a critical eye on these tools and the capacity of  field offices to put them into practice and suggests a series of measures to tackle the related challenges. (more…)

By Riff Fullan

At an organisational level, efforts to support greater knowledge management and learning can get ‘stuck’ within a mechanistic approach, designing structures or tools when one of the most important things to think about is people and how we can create the right conditions for them to interact in productive ways. The idea of having a variety of staff playing pivotal roles in enabling greater knowledge transfer – in other words, having Knowledge Champions – is one that is well worth exploring as a complement to other institutional knowledge management efforts. (more…)

In our interview series “6 questions to…” we ask people from in and around SDC and the KM world the same 6 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 organizations more efficient… And, along the way, to hear interesting stories and experiences our interviewees have in store! (more…)

By Dorothee Lötscher, Agridea

“We learn from suffering together” – this statement of a regional focal point of the Global Forum for Rural Advisory Services (GFRAS) expresses some of the key elements of learning in networks: multi-directional exchange between peers, collaboration based on trust and encouragement, and learning from cases. Networking is challenging and time-consuming, but leads to members’ moments of success, motivation, and finally sustainability. Intangible outputs play thereby an important role. Find below how GFRAS regional focal points and the GFRAS executive secretary experience their networking activities, how they deal with tangibles and intangibles, and what this might mean for networks in general. (more…)

HIGHLIGHT

Collegial Coaching is a process that draws on experiences and practices of professional colleagues in order to share new ideas, teach one another or solve a problem. Watch this entertaining clip to get a clear idea of the mechanisms of this useful tool. Or go to the Learning & Networking Website to get more information on Collegial Coaching.

(more…)

By Adrian Gnägi

Manuel Flury recently published a post on changing perspectives as opportunities for learning. When Manuel and I went for overseas postings in the middle of 2011, we decided to continue writing posts for sdclan. We wanted to document how the change of work context affects our way of understanding things. I have written several posts since moving to Laos. They all related to my former work situation: the post on the political economy of result terminologies was inspired by a course on impact monitoring I attended back in July, the post I wrote with dlgn colleagues on the “learning project” methodology reflected on our joint capitalization work on donor support for sustainable municipal finances during the past 2 years, and the post written with Bertha Camacho in August reflected on experiences with e-discussion campaigns we made in February. (more…)

By Manuel Flury

Haven’t we experienced it many times? Discovering new aspects while looking at things from a different angle? Colleagues ask us to review a text, we explain our children what we do in the office, we hold workshops outside of our offices, we meet colleagues in the cafeteria and hold meetings standing around filing cabinets, we discover new issues while jogging or taking a shower, we prepare a negotiation by arguing from the others’ position, we design a learning event in analogy with industrial car production, we think “out of the box”.

As a test: Do you manage to think “out of the box”? 9 points test
And here: the solutions to it! 9 points test – solutions

I am about to experience the change of my work context in three ways: (1) from working on methods and processes of learning and knowledge sharing to working on solutions to problems of food insecurity; (2) from working in a development agency to working in an Embassy; (3) from working (and living) in a European capital city to working (and living) in an African metropolis. Let me share with you two of my first learning experiences. (more…)

By Manuel Flury 

Almost ten years back I met with the „SDC AdFin Circle”, the group of financial administrators. These, mostly women experts in financial management of development projects met regularly in order to exchange on many practical aspects of their work. While the majority of them worked at the SDC Head Office, some were deployed to Cooperation Offices in our partner countries. Facilitating the exchange among all was on the agenda of this meeting and I was invited by the financial advisor to talk about practical possibilities of working with an electronic platform. This person wanted to know about possibilities of using an electronic discussion platform. While explaining the pros and cons of web and email based electronic platforms – that time SDC was turning to Bellanet’s Dgroups for hosting such platforms – one of the participants raised the issue as to who might subscribe to the platform. And she continued by saying to my astonishment: “If my boss discovers what question I ask, he might not be happy since I am supposed to know and not to have questions”!
Later I shared this experience with my Canadian friends from Bellanet and we wondered whether we encountered a cultural difference between Switzerland and Canada where he would exclude such a statement.

(more…)

by Kuno Schläfli, Romana Tedeschi, Katharina Walker, Michael Reimann, Matthias Boss, and Adrian Gnägi

SDC used to be structured as a matrix organization. Operational geographic units managed funds and local context, technical units managed thematic knowledge, and together they were thought to implement effective projects. This setup became perceived to have improvement potential. In 2008, technical units were replaced by learning and exchange networks. One of the justifications for this move was that guidance and policies elaborated by the technical units were sometimes perceived to be too abstract, too general, not enough evidence based. One of the expectations towards the newly created networks therefore was that their guidance should look, feel, and act differently – “experience based good practice” was the orientation received. This post documents one of the first attempts by one of the new networks to distill “experience based good practice”.

SDC’s “decentralization and local governance network” (dlgn) met for its first-ever face-to-face encounter in November 2009 in Delhi. (more…)

by Bertha Camacho and Adrian Gnägi

Solution Exchange pioneered a structured way to conduct e-discussions, called “e-discussion campaigns with consolidated replies”. The structure of those e-discussions looks like this:

• A query is posted on the e-forum of a network and experience carriers are invited to post replies within a pre-determined time frame. Frequently, the moderator supports members with the wording of the query, making sure the query is short, easy to understand and appealing to be answered.
• Moderators lobby experienced network members to post replies in the e-forum. This lobbying is worked mostly over the phone. According to Solution Exchange, it is the major time investment of the e-moderator.
• When the discussion campaign is over, the e-moderator sums up the discussion in a “consolidated reply”. The e-moderator condenses the main messages into an easy-to-understand analytical summary and includes all individual contributions in full into the document.

This post reflects on the first “e-discussion campaign with consolidated replies” conducted by SDC’s “decentralization and local governance” network (dlgn) (more…)