Connecting to peers, being exposed to new thinking and exchanging experiences are most valuable to members of the Democratization, Decentralization and Local Governance network (DLGN). Storytelling on knowledge sharing and learning within the DLGN network suggests that this networking translates into concrete innovations in the field. (more…)
A recent lunch event at SDC in Bern sparked some interesting thinking. It featured guest speaker Kerstin Kude-Osman from the Academy for International Cooperation, a part of the German development agency GIZ. Kerstin told us about the recently developed Joint Learning Journey (JLJ) method, which is a way to bring small groups of people involved and interested in a particular set of issues together, to come up with effective and innovative ways of doing things better. (more…)
Complex situations resist our analytical capacities, they are unpredictable. In these situations, we cannot base our decisions on data. Hence, our decisions often based on intuition, gut feeling, and rules of thumb. Through continuous learning, we can train our intuition and become better equipped to manage our projects in complex environments. (more…)
Make your face-to-face meetings more learner-centered to foster stronger commitment and greater learning. Networks’ face-to-face meetings are a great opportunities for learning. What does it need to make it a learning happening? How do adults learn? What are the key ingredients to be taken into account already at the planning stage? (more…)
The next week’s NeuroLeadership Summet in New-York. A brain friendly f2f meeting. (more…)
This blog post asks about the motivation of reading our sdclan Blog. We are curious to know why you – dear blog reader – are with us, week for week, reading our posts and the posts of our guests. (more…)
Make implicit knowledge explicit und thus accessible to everybody! This is a request I often come across dealing with knowledge management issues. In how far is this possible? Kitchen recipes make it clear: Basic knowledge and skills can be described, but what about mastery skills? There are limits in transforming implicit into explicit knowledge. (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…)
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 Riff Fullan, Helvetas Swiss Intercooperation
“If many people from different hierarchies and countries come together there are always those who think they know less about a subject and participate less in the discussion. They may be afraid to say something wrong. To start with personal stories demonstrates that everyone has a valuable experience to share and we can share it in the language we feel comfortable” (reflection of SDC gender team member on using stories in a workshop context, SDC Story Guide, p. 30).
Conscious engagement with storytelling for knowledge sharing and learning began almost 10 years ago within SDC and was pursued with some energy, especially in the first years. (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…)
As in her first post (cf. 17 July), Corinne Sprecher, Agridea/Team International, went to further look for champions who consciously apply knowledge management-tools in their work. In this article she relates and reflects on experiences regarding learning from one’s own experience.
by Corinne Sprecher
In this second post, SDC staff members share with us some more of their experiences and lessons of applying Knowledge Management Tools in daily life. This time the focus is laid on learning from one’s own and others’ experience. (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:
This post reflects on the first “e-discussion campaign with consolidated replies” conducted by SDC’s “decentralization and local governance” network (dlgn) (more…)
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…)
Learning from our and others’ mistakes is – we know it since our primary school teachers first told us – one of the most effective ways of learning. Admitting failure however is never easy, and it certainly is not in the development cooperation world. Donor agencies are restrained to publicly talk about unsuccessful programmes by fiscal responsibility, political pressure and fear for their international reputation, NGOs do not want to put financial support at risk by admitting something did not work out quite as planned, and even down to the very individuals working in our sector who for career reasons do only reluctantly (and certainly not on record) talk about the less successful parts of their projects, this pattern repeats. Due to this lack of exchange about mistakes, the same mistakes are made over and over again, and innovation does not happen where the foundation for it would have been present for years.
The recently launched website Admitting Failure, conceived and created by the Engineers Without Borders Canada, is an attempt to break with this veil of secrecy. Development workers can submit their “failures” and browse the failures of others in order to benefit from the bad experiences that need not be repeated. (more…)
By Manuel Flury
I A Peer Assist Workshop in Sarajevo – Learning with partners
In a three days workshop in Sarajevo in April 2009, the programme staff of the SDC Country Office met with colleagues of three partner organisations. The Cooperation Strategy 2009-2012 for Bosnia and Herzegovina focuses on capitalizing on acquired expertise and to profit from past investments made and strategic assets accumulated. Capitalising and documenting experiences has been the rational of the workshop. It looked at “disseminating” project achievements in a “new way”: to promote and to facilitate learning and change on larger levels of the society (scaling-up) and/or in comparable contexts (replication). The peer assist allowed the participants to learn from others: how can they facilitate societal change in their fields of primary health care, water resources management and municipal governance and administration.
There was consensus:
Facilitating societal change – learning from project experiences – requires time and patience and a high degree of professionalism in facilitating process and harmonisation among actors. (more…)
By Adrian Gnägi
Social reporting is a new approach in reporting about events. Its purpose is to overcome some of the well-known knowledge management shortcomings of normal reporting:
With social reporting, reports are being
Social reporting can be used whenever there is an interest by a broad audience to get information about the event. (more…)
In our new 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 first interviewee is Roland Anhorn, Senior Advisor at the Africa Division of SDC’s Humanitarian Aid and SHA Directorate. This interview is not only the series’ premiere, it is also the first ever article on our blog in french, paying tribute to the multilingual nature of our organisation and the global environment we work in. To our english-only-speaking readers: don’t worry, we will continue to post the vast majority of our articles in english, but for interviews we like to leave the choice of language to the interviewees. To our french-speaking readers: enjoy! (more…)
By Tobias Sommer
Good governance is one of the keys to contemporary development cooperation: It is considered the magic solution that allows developing countries to make the big step ahead. It sounds simple—yet it is obviously complicated to achieve. It needs the political will to promote good governance through possibly far-reaching reform, the knowledge about how to do it, and especially that governments learn from their own or others’ experiences. Just providing information and instructions to governments does not suffice for this: They also have to transform the acquired knowledge into action. Unfortunately, this crucial transformation process is far from understood. After all, a government, with its complex composition of actors and political environment, cannot be expected to learn and behave like an individual or an ordinary organization.
In the recent World Bank publication The Black Box of Governmental Learning (Executive Summary PDF), Raoul Blindenbacher1 (in collaboration with Bidjan Nashat) sheds some light on this question. I had the opportunity to talk to Raoul Blindenbacher (RB) and get some answers to questions that had emerged while I was reading his book. (more…)
Private and public enterprises lose precious knowledge when experienced workers leave. What practical and well-tested methods exist that allow to capture these treasures of knowledge and experience, and thus to stay competent in times of organisational change?
This is the question addressed at the 3rd Symposium of the network savoir, organised in cooperation with the Swiss Knowledge Management Forum (SKMF) and tcbe.ch – ICT Cluster Bern under the heading
Knowledge Management in Action (more…)
In today’s guest post, Roland Pfister from the =mcm Media & Communication Institute of the University of St. Gallen writes about the downsides of using PowerPoint and pre-printed handouts as collaboration tools in meetings. He explains how new sketching concepts can stimulate systematic, collaborative and creative thinking in meetings, and illustrates this with the example of the Root Cause Iceberg sketch, one of 35 sketching templates presented in the guide “Sketching at Work” by Martin Eppler and Roland Pfister. (more…)
By Manuel Flury
Through the Train4Dev network so called Joint Learning Events are organised. They grew out from training development agencies’s staff on issues such as Poverty Reduction Strategies, Pro Poor Growth and Sector Wide Approaches. There is a deliberate shift from one-moment trainings of individual staff members to placing these events into a process of capacity development of partner organisations such as Civil Society Organisations and Governments. Learning events link up with particular policy reform processes. The demand for a learning event would not anymore stem exclusively from the donor agencies, it would as well reflect partners’ interests. Train4Dev finds itself in a dilemma of promoting joint learning with country partners and in the same time providing the format, the orientation and the resources of the events. The format of the Joint Learning Initiatives need to be negotiated and jointly agreed among al the partners, this is the challenge for Train4Dev and the Joint Learning Events. (more…)
