Agknowledge Share Fair - Recordings of virtual and blended sessions

As I wrote in my last post, we recently supported 4 sessions from the Agknowledge Share Fair in Addis with options for remote participation.

If you hadn't have the chance to attend the event in Addis or online, here's where you can watch the recordings of the sessions we supported.

• (Introduction to) Liberating Structures (Fisher Qua) 
• Social Reporting (Pier Andrea Pirani and Pete Cranston) 
• Working with Virtual Teams (Nancy White and Ewen Le Borgne)
• Liberating Structures: Part 1 - Part 2 (Ewen Le Borgne and Pete Cranston)

Note, the videos are mostly unedited so use the navigation on the left end side of the Adobe Connect recording playback to skip through the different parts of the video.

As you'll see, it's not an easy job to combine onsite and online facilitation and ensure participation and engagement. But with practice, experience and the desire to experiment, a lot can be achieved to create participatory, blended meetings. 

Blending online and offline meetings - 5 short lessons from Addis Share Fair

Earlier this week, we supported 4 sessions from the Agknowledge Share Fair in Addis with options for remote participation. As well as giving people that could not travel to Addis the opportunity to participate in part of the event, for us this was also an occasion to experiment more with Adobe Connect and how to use it to support online and offline events - and blend them together.

In designing the remote participation, we had decided to try with different formats and modalities of e/participation.

• A webcast of a session from Addis via Adobe Connect, with online interaction carried out via chat and breakout rooms
• Two sessions where the conveners joined in remotely, and online and offline participants interacted in various ways from group chats to bilateral chats to small groups in breakout rooms
• A blended session with activities in parallel on site and with a fully blended group, with two people from Addis joining three online participants into Adobe.

We’ll be having a debrief with the rest of the team that supported this experimenting. And we’re collecting feedback from participants, to understand how they have experienced these sessions, and how they can be improved. But to get the conversation started, here are 5 quick takeaways from this recent experiments:

1. Online and offline have different pace and dynamics
   We probably all knew this before but experimenting to bring remote participation into a face to face meeting confirmed how interactions and exchanges have a very different pace, online and offline. In the former, the feedback loops are much slower.
2. Split the processes - and bridge in debrief
   Because interactions work differently online and offline, running the two in parallel is easier to manage. You can have the same activities F2F and online, but these may have to be facilitated in different ways. For example, you may go through a set of 1 to 1 chats between physical participants, while having a group chat with all virtual participants. The exchange and cross over between online and offline can be done in the debriefing sessions.
3. Blended ain’t easy
   It’s very different is when you try to have physical participants interacting in small groups with online participants. This requires a lot of preparation, and an optimum use of the technology, not only to avoid sound issues but also to make sure participants can interact using text, video and voice.
4. You need a team

Depending on the type of e-participation that you want to enable from a face to face meeting, you may need different people being part of your facilitation team: two facilitators (one onsite and one online), one technical host and, if the onsite facilitator isn’t experienced with blended meetings, one ‘blender’ who connects online and offline from the physical meeting room.

5. Always have (some) Plan B(s)
   Always be prepared for what can go wrong. For example, in one occasion we lost the video and audio feed from the room - it’s important to have ways to notify participants immediately, and be ready to fill in this gap with other activities.

We’ll keep on reflecting on this experience and experimenting with tools, approaches and facilitation techniques, and we’ll make sure we share our findings here. Let us know what your experience is with blended online offline meetings and what we can learn from other experiences.

Pier Andrea Pirani

Learn with us online at the ‘AgKnowledge Innovation' Process Share Fair

On 25 and 26 May, we'll be joining the ILRI communications and KM group in Addis Ababa and several partners in the AgKnowledge Innovation' Process Share Fair.

The focus of the event is on the "design and delivery of truly effective ‘process’ improvements that lead to applied innovation, social learning and value for money (in agriculture)."

While Pete will be onsite in Addis, I'll be connecting online; together we'll facilitate and host one session on social reporting. We'll also provide technical support and participate in the other 3 sessions that are open for online participants.

To help us organise we’ve set up Eventbrite pages for the four sessions currently open, so please register here (all times East Africa Addis Ababa/Nairobi):

• Mon 25 May, 10.30: (Introduction to) Liberating Structures (Fisher Qua) http://bit.ly/1S0DG4q
• Mon 25 May, 13:50: Social Reporting (Pier Andrea Pirani) http://bit.ly/1QWIJRM 
• May, 15.50: Working with Virtual Teams (Nancy White and Ewen Le Borgne) http://bit.ly/1HmYr4b 
• Tue 26 May, 11.00: Liberating Structures (Ewen Le Borgne and Pete Cranston) http://bit.ly/1Ftf0hi

We’re experimenting with different types of online engagement, from a simple webcast of a Liberating Structures workshop session to more interactive formats, with presenters both online and in the room, and participants able to interact equally with those physically and remotely in the room.

If you're interested in learning and experimenting with us, please do register for the sessions and join us online next week!

Five things I learned about running online webinars

Online webinars have become a popular form of online product, especially for trainings and learning events. However, have you ever participated in one of these online sessions, where you just sit in front of your screen, a presenter goes through the slides, but you have no idea about who else is attending the session and what questions have been typed in the chat? I personally feel very lonely being in these types of webinars!

Knowing how I did not want to organize a webinar, last week I co-facilitated an online webinar about “Using Dgroups in all its features” (see presentation below). This was the first of a pilot series of three webinars co-organized with Dgroups and ECDPM to support Dgroups users in learning the ins and out of the Dgroups platform, the basics of online community building and tips and tricks that are at the heart of online facilitation.

I have to admit I’m very lucky to be working with with good friends and colleagues Lucie Lamoureux and Ivan Kulis in the design and delivery of the overall Dgroups webinar series. I guess that knowing each other from the KM4Dev community - and sharing similar ideas in terms of effective knowledge sharing and facilitation - definitely helps to plan and run these online sessions.

But as this was not the first webinar I’ve designed and facilitated in the recent months, I thought to share a list of five things I’ve learned about how best to conduct effective and engaging online webinars.

1. Plan in detail 

Even more than in the facilitation of face-to-face events, to run online webinars I think preparation is key. You don’t want to lose time fiddling with technology, or not knowing what should happen when. For me, this means:

1. Developing a session design and storyboard document
   Before the session, we used Google Docs for the session design and storyboard, so we had all our links and references at hand and had a clear plan of what should happen, when. It’s so easy to run longer in a presentation, or to allow too long for Q&A and finding yourself having to catch up. The storyboard was our reference document to check where to speed up and where to pause, where to allow for more interaction and questions and where to refer users to post-webinar interactions.
2. Timing your presentations - and adding presenters notes
   I had to practice a couple of times and time myself to make sure I could fit my slides in the slot allocated for each part of the presentation. I also used the presenter’s notes to write down my script, to avoid losing my train of thought while presenting but also as a contingency measure: had my connection failed, one of the other co-facilitators could have continued delivering the presentation, by reading through the script on each slide.
3. Preparing your room layouts and materials
   We used Adobe Connect as our webinar platform. One of the (many) great features in Adobe Connect is that you can create different layouts for the different part of your sessions. So we had separate layouts for the presentation and discussion parts, for example with a larger chat window in the latter. All materials were already loaded in the room before the sessions, and ready to be displayed for each presentation session.

2. Build interaction into the session design 

The session was designed to last for 90 minutes - and it was content heavy, I was aware of it. So we designed the webinar to alternate presentations (for max 15 minutes) and discussions (for 10 to 12 minutes) sessions. But we also asked participants to use the chat and write down their questions as they emerged during the presentation. By using an open chat window, participants become presenters themselves as they integrated the contents of the slides also with comments and additional tips or suggestions. Besides leveraging the possibility of peer learning, this is also a great way to keep participants attention and engagement.

3. You need a facilitation team 

You cannot run an interactive webinar on your own. In our case, I was the main host and presenter, while Lucie was managing the chat and the Q&A sessions and Ivan was the technical host helping participants that had experienced problems with audio for example (very few in reality). I believe this is the minimum you can think of in terms of roles and task division. Sure, for the next webinars we need to improve our teamwork, for example in terms of making smoother transitions between one member and the others, or from one part of the webinar to the next, but that comes with practice and better use of the back channels.

4. Not all back channels are equal… 

They are definitely not! In Adobe Connect, you have a presenter area on the screen which is visible only to meeting hosts and presenters. So as back channel we used a note pod (as the various content areas are called in Adobe) placed in the presenter area. However, this was a bit fiddly - we ended up writing over each other or having to wait for one to stop writing before the other could. Even more problematic was the moment that Lucie lost the connection to the meeting room. We had not planned to have also a Skype chat open as back-back channel in case something went wrong with Adobe. So thinking about all possible options will help us identify better solutions next time.

5. Some participants will not come… 

We had a limit of 25 seats in the Adobe Connect room so we kept participants’ registrations to that limit and had a few interested Dgroups users in the waiting list. But as always happens with a free online webinar, some people just didn’t show up, and it was difficult to bring in people on the waiting list after the session had started. So what we’ll do next time is probably not to set any seats limit for the registration, so anyone can register, while only the first 25 registered participants that will actually join the room will have the possibility to attend. This will prevent ending up with ‘empty’ seats in the room - and hopefully will also be an incentive for participants to connect few minutes before the start of the webinar, so it can actually start on time!

What are your top tips to organize effective and participatory online webinars? Let me know in the comments! 

Facilitating emergent conversations – variants on Samoan Circles and Fishbowls

Trying to ensure that the brains and experience of all participants are brought into the room is one of the more enjoyable challenges of facilitation. It’s mainly a question of finding the right balance of different approaches since there are so many formats that provide opportunities for different combinations of people to share knowledge and questions. Our knowledge of those formats comes from ideas and stories freely shared by other facilitators, in person or via resource bases like the KS Toolkit. We do a lot of event facilitation using those ideas so to give back to the Commons we’re sharing here some recent workshop experience.

Samoan circle discussion during 2015 BDS convening 

One element of a good balance is to do with mixing up deliberately ‘leaderless moments’, where natural leaders or burning discussion topics can fill the space, with more structured processes such as those that promote particular people as conversation guides, or even gurus, around whose ideas and presentation discussion flows. Samoan circles and Fishbowl formats can lend themselves to most points along that spectrum of options, and we happily experimented with two variants at the recent annual workshop of a large Sanitation programme.

At its core it’s a simple method: a small group of people have a conversation amongst a wider group of participants. The difference with panels, for example, is that the small group sit in a circle surrounded by the participants. Samoan circles are possibly the purest form of the approach[1]. In this format the central group begin discussing the topic. People in the outer circle cannot speak unless they replace one of the speakers in the centre. If somebody wants to participate, she taps one of the current speakers on the shoulder as a sign of intent that she wishes to replace one of the current speakers in the circle. The conversation continues until the time is up or the conversation dies.

The democratising nature of the format generates a particular energy that drives people into the inner circle, in an active and engaged way. And crucially, people are able to intervene at precisely the point in the conversation which engages them, rather than having to wait and ask questions later, that then take people backwards to an earlier point. As a consequence conversation tends to flow organically– assuming of course that the chosen topic is interesting to the participants and that they are comfortable with and trusting of each other. It’s not a tool to use very early in a workshop.

The Feldman variation

The Feldman Variation

The excellent Liberating Structures group propose a variant, in which the outer circle ask questions, but not randomly. At a given point the conversation in the middle stops and the outer circle talk among themselves, agreeing questions, which they then put to the speakers. Peter Feldman, one of the main organisers of our recent sanitation workshop, proposed a variant in which there were two spare chairs in the central circle. The central speakers stayed in the ring and other participants could join the conversation by sitting in one of the empty chairs, or join by following the tapping convention to replace one of the speakers, but only those in the extra chairs.

We used the Samoan circle and the Feldman variation in the workshop, in two sessions, one focusing on Sanitation financing and the other on Behaviour change. The choice of topics meant that there were many people with ideas and opinions to contribute but it was interesting to see how the two formats operated. We used the Feldman variation for the Financing discussion, partly because we believed there was a great divergence of experience amongst participants, so having a group more familiar with different approaches operating as an expert panel seemed appropriate. The format engaged more participants in the conversation than would be normal in a traditional panel discussion, partly because the conversation didn’t always return to the experts but followed on from ideas introduced by the ‘outer circle’. However, having one group of people always present meant that the conversation was anchored by their experience and confidence in speaking about the topic.

For the Behaviour Change conversation we used the Samoan circle format. The topic and the format generated a lot of debate, lasting a full 90 minutes - at the end of a long day, and the fourth day of the workshop at that. However, the conversation ranged around the interests and opinions of participants and wasn't anchored in the same way. Our conclusion was that in this format someone, either the facilitators or a participant, needs to step forward pro-actively, intervening to summarise, reflect back opinions so far and point out questions that hadn’t been properly answered or addressed.

The workshop was organised around wide range of activities, including two straight-forward presentation and discussion sessions, world cafes, 1-2-4-All, field visit and feedback sessions, spectrogram exercises, group discussions - and the emergent conversations above. That variety scratches all the itches - allowing participants time to listen, reflect and engage participatively both individually and collectively. It's probably one of the reasons why participants were so positive about the Fishbowl exercises, which they were. Organising opportunities for participants to stretch both their legs and brains in stimulating conversations about issues that matter to them is a great way to earn a living!











[1] And apologies to co-facilitators and participants at the 2015 BDS convening, I was calling this a fishbowl!

How do we know we’re learning?

“We will live or die by our critical reflection and ability to internalize learning”, said Darren Saywell, Wash Director, Plan International, in a recent online Q&A on sanitation. That “there is an over-emphasis on Knowledge products and outputs and not enough emphasis on the reflection and learning processes that produce sustainable change within projects and organisations” is something we’ve long argued.  

And in the KM work we’re doing with a large sanitation program, we explicitly built in activities that foster a self-consciousness about learning, believing that in this way the process of learning is enriched and has a better chance of becoming embedded in how people work and interact (and thereby increasing the likelihood of sustainable change). But it’s precisely this kind of critical reflection that is so often squeezed out of operationally demanding jobs. One programme grantee illustrated the point by recounting how he’d hardly noticed an important innovation when it passed by in an email. It took a visit to the site in question to engage his attention and jog his memory about the email.

We’ve engaged the inimitable Nancy White to work with us on this Learning about Learning process. While talking about preparations for the recent annual convening of programme grantees Nancy suggested we, the organisers, be, “on the watch for those moments when reflection and learning is visible and to note when it’s happening, in what context, why and as part of what process” suggesting that, “understanding these things may help us better architect time/space/structure for learning”.

Learning Leaders

The portfolio manager, Jan Willem Rosenboom, rose to the challenge wonderfully, agreeing to lead group conversations and reflections about learning. Senior staff agreeing to lead and model the process is all too rare, and his stepping forward set the tone for the event. Jan Willem introduced an intriguing approach to the process, known as art-form conversations[1], developed by Brian Stanfield of the Institute of Cultural Affairs (ICA), with whom he’d worked in Kenya and Europe.

At the end of Day One Jan Willem held up one of the flowers sitting in the middle of the tables in the room and asked people to contemplate it, describe what they saw – list its’ attributes. You can imagine the looks in the room, but people began contributing. We were then asked to think of how it related to other flowers that we’d seen, compare it. The group (nearly 50 people) was getting restive, a bit ribald, but answers kept coming. Next, what name would we give it: guffaws and some gently mocking answers, including the ‘Rosenbloom’. And finally a question about what difference this might make to our how we use flowers in the future, at events or at home. There was less reaction, people were acknowledging the process underway, which was reinforced in the next question, “so what did you learn from that process?”

The group had been taken through an aid to reflection, developed by Stanfield, summarised below

OBJECTIVE	Facts	e.g. What can you see?
REFLECTIVE	Reaction	e.g. Where have you seen something like this before?
INTERPRETIVE	Implications	e.g. What does this mean to you?
DECISIONAL	Actions	e.g. How might this principle be used?

The process was instructive in itself but, more importantly, triggered a reflective conversation about learning, with participants noting things like the fact that knowledge is contextual, that our previous experience defines what we see, that we all have different reactions to the same thing, and so on. Jan Willem closed with a request for participants to reflect on their learning on that first day, first alone, maybe noting some things down, and then chat to another. The whole process worked well with the group, people were quiet and reflective by the end of the session.

And once the tone was set the process continued throughout the workshop. The second day was taken up with field visits, which were discussed in a feedback session at the beginning of Day Three. At the end of that session, just before coffee, Jan Willem asked people:

• Give me a word, or phrase that you remember from presentations?
• What surprised you?
• What would you like to learn more about?
• What are we learning?
• Where do you see that can influence your work back home?

Again, the simple process encouraged people to reflect on both the activity and on their own learning processes, which triggered the reflection from one participant that it is very “difficult to be influenced outside our expectations and learning frameworks”.

Small reminders continued: one lunchtime there was encouragement to think about a question that was triggered in the sessions and to share them with one or more people. Another lunchtime participants were encouraged to think about whom in particular would be a good person to have a conversation about the issues of the day.

And what difference did it make?

The workshop was designed to maximise opportunities for exchange, conversation, discussion, story-telling. Overall feedback has been very positive, people appreciating the opportunities to dig deeper into issues, share experience, exchange ideas and build relationships. And while we don’t have objective evidence – it’s not something that would come out from an evaluation survey - my own experience of facilitating and participating was that there was a richness of texture to the exchanges, a greater criss-crossing of exchange than in many workshops. And the high profile leadership meant that learning about learning was explicitly on the agenda, an issue that we’ll follow up in other blogs. 

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[1] There is a nice description of its genesis in the book “The art of focused conversation: 100 ways to access group wisdom in the workplace” by Brian Stanfield .

Googlebooks has the relevant excerpt: https://books.google.com/books?id=_9KJKQwwuyYC&pg=PT15&lpg=PT15&dq=art+form+conversation&source=bl&ots=Sg0eKApgzs&sig=nqYdBzH55VlbRv3ULIHwnMs10cw&hl=en&sa=X&ei=u-LGVJXMGISoogTUx4CYDw&ved=0CCwQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=false

You can also buy it on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Focused-Conversation-Workplace/dp/0865714169

Learning about Learning - telling stories and reflecting on change

Telling stories, as a way of sharing and ‘storing’ knowledge has been part of the culture of our species since we first started talking to each other.

WALANGARI KARNTAWARRA "SONGLINES"

And storytelling has been recognized as a central tool in the area of work we now know as Knowledge Management in Development (KM4Dev) since Steve Denning, then leading the World Bank’s drive in the mid 1990's to become a ‘Knowledge Bank’ made it a central part of his methodology. So we were following a well-trodden path in asking participants to tell a story of change at the East Meets West (EMW) workshop during the WEDC 2014 conference in Hanoi in September.

In a previous blog we explained the context and genesis of the workshop. In the session we put our overarching question to participants after we had introduced the concepts and process: ‘How does sustainable change happen, and how can learning about change be applied at scale and in different contexts?

We then asked participants ‘think about a situation where something has changed over the past two or four years, at team, project or organisational level' and then 'tell the story of how that change happened'

1. Where, when and in what context did this happen? Paint the picture in words or on a flip chart
2. Who was involved?
3. What happened - list the key steps in the process?
4. What happened next, was the change institutionalised (embedded in the organisation or project), or is it still being worked through, or did the learning and drive to change disappear e.g. management structures for institutionalising reflection, such as set time within meetings 
5. What can other people learn from your example that they could use in other situations?

The process was outlined as follows:

1. In small groups, brainstorm some examples
2. Choose one story and develop it in more detail, capturing key points on a flipchart or post-its: diagrams are good
3. Share the story with another group and identify any common themes and critical factors - what had to be present for the change to happen. Was the change maintained beyond the original context - and if so what made that happen?
4. Sharing back - in plenary if there's time, or as posters on the wall - summary of the story and key learning points that could be shared beyond the project or organisation

Half of the  participants were either EMW staff or partners of their CHOBA program. The other twenty or so people came mainly from INGOs present at WEDC. We’d done some preparation with EMW staff. Theirs is a fascinating story to tell, since they have been developing an Output Based Aid program now fully funded on a payment-by-results basis. This video is a recording on an EMW Project Officer, Nguyen Van Ngoc Tien, telling their story, translated on the go by Nguyen Hong Hanh, Senior Monitoring, Evaluation & Research Officer at EMW



There were other stories in the room, for example:

• Jonny Crocker, from the University of North Carolina, working a related WASH project with PLAN International,  on his learning about how to cut through the formalities of large organisations to be able to engage directly as a researcher with project staff
• A great story from UNICEF about the positive impact of handing control of developing M&E systems  over to national staff (you’d have thought not a lesson that still needs learning!)

Reflections on the reflections

One of the challenges of working in this way relates to the age-old tension in KM4Dev between product and process. Learning is a process, as is reflection. “Being 'busy' creates a mindset that is not conducive to innovation and creativity.  Time to discuss, reflect and generate new ideas is the ransom that quality demands.”1. But without concrete outcomes, like reports, action points or stories – like this one – people are often uneasy about the value of these kinds of sessions. And part of the challenge is that the learning is as likely as not to become evident or relevant well after a particular workshop. We deliberately ensured that Kathryn Harries’ excellent materials were available to participants as a handout, to ensure that there was something immediately concrete to take away. And we hope to track the outcomes of the workshop with East Meets West staff in the months to come, following up on the event and asking about people’s own perception of what happened and whether useful learning took place and, most importantly, whether what happened as a result. And when we have completed this set of blogs we will follow up with other participants as well.

In terms of learning from the workshop, all the organisers were pleased that the majority of the responses in the post-workshop evaluation form were positive. We ourselves recognised that we came to the event with our own objectives, some of which overlapped and some didn’t. So the format and activities were necessarily a compromise, which meant that we too came away feeling positive but not entirely satisfied. Simply from the point of view of workshop facilitation I (re-) learnt some lessons about using story telling

• Not everyone is a good story teller: it’s not always easy to condense important events over a period of time into a short, compelling narrative and some people are better than others at identifying the elements that will engage an audience, from amongst the detail, and even fewer people are natural raconteurs in front of an audience.
• Everyone is ready to have a go, which is the fun of the event
• Using graphics is essential. Again, some people are better at visuals but most people can display a story at least as well as they can tell, it, and most people do best in a combination of the two, as illustrated in the video
• Those who regularly reflect both on their own and with others in a social, critical reflection process, find it easier to find examples and construct stories. But it’s a challenging exercise for those who haven’t that experience to do so in the constrained time of a workshop
• The group sharing was too short in our own workshop: we should have left people for longer, simply telling stories to each other, rather than pushing them as early as we did to construct one illustration. The ‘group’ story would have emerged more naturally and easily after a longer small-group period and people would have had time to listen and learn, to engage and question

The next in this series of blogs will be about the CHOBA experience in Vietnam, based on interviews with EMW staff and their key partners in the Vietnamese Women's Union.

(Note 1: adapted from a quote by Thierry Barreto-Fernandez West Africa Rural Foundation, Senegal)

Learning about learning - stories of change

We set ourselves quite a target for the three and a half hour workshop on a Friday afternoon, on the last day of the five-day WEDC 2014 conference, that we described in a previous blog. We proposed to explore the relationship between Knowledge, Action and Change. We chose to do that by focusing on stories of change provided by the participants. 

The underlying concept was that constructing such a narrative requires people to focus on change within and between programmes, teams or organisations. And working backwards to track when and how that change was triggered requires the kind of reflection – both individual and collective - that is a central part of learning processes. I was building in part from an earlier workshop, organised by Michelle Laurie in Manila at the Asian Sanitation Dialogue for the South Asia Urban Knowledge Hub project (introduced in Michelle's blog). The overall aim for the four national projects is to influence change through research and knowledge networking. Working with Michelle we applied some ideas and techniques I first learnt in Oxfam GB a long time ago, and later reinforced in work around advocacy and campaigning, where the first step is to identify change goals – defining a future state that illustrates an improved state of affairs, and then stepping back from that point to now, identifying activities that could lead to the desired future state. 

In Hanoi we were working from another angle, aiming to draw on story telling skills as a way to understand how a particular project or team might improve their work and to identify lessons that might be relevant in other contexts. As I said, a tall order for three and a half hours on a Friday afternoon at the end of a very busy week.

Change, time and learning loops

We framed the activities with two sets of ideas. I began with a story based on my experience in Oxfam, as an IT manager for the International Division, from 1994 - 2002. I was part of an Oxfam-wide group running big, complicated IT projects linked to the regionalisation process that was convulsing the organisation. Individually and collectively the organisation was learning how to run such large, integrated programmes. I wasn't the only one who was making major mistakes: the programme as a whole was over-budget and behind target in most areas. As a result OGB went through a learning process, painful for me since I had to accept my own failure, but the failure was at all levels of the organisation, up to the top.

There was a lot of formal output from that learning in terms of documentation and new ways of working, including a much more rigorous Business Case process required for any new IT-related investment. The new systems and approach worked well and one of the main reasons was that learning had happened across OGB, not just among IT specialists. As illustrated in the diagram it wasn’t just about being better program managers, supported by improvements in process and documentation, but also that all those concerned reflected more deeply, in a classic second loop of learning, about priorities and aims. As a consequence the organisation became better at the larger process of integrating constantly changing IT and IS systems into its core business, better at re-using what was still usable and less ambitious in defining requirements for new systems. And while those lessons were also captured in documentation, it was the shared learning – hard earned in many cases, including mine  – between people across Oxfam GB that anchored the new ways of working. 

The importance of this ‘human glue’ became evident when I returned to Oxfam GB five years later, this time working in the Communication Division on Interactive Media, and later, as part of a group defining a Digital Vision for the organisation. Many of the IT staff were still in place, as were the formal processes and documentation. But many of the 'business' managers in the rest of the organisation were different, with few remaining of those who’d learned through the challenge of rescuing a failing program. Consequently, many saw the processes as an imposition, an exertion of central control from the IT Department, and a few were attempting to subvert the process. Institutional memory had dissipated.

To some extent this is a depressingly universal story, in public, private and not-for profit organisations. Our aim was to illustrate that documentation and procedures are meaningless without a shared understanding of and commitment to the ways of working they seek to embed. And that sustaining that change over time is more challenging than achieving more efficient programmes. Further, by starting with a story of ‘failure’, my own, we hoped to encourage people to share openly. Finally, we also wanted to emphasise the importance of engaging with at least a second loop of learning, focusing more on the question, ‘are we doing the right thing?’ rather than ‘how do we do it right’.

A wedge that sustains progress

Kathryn Harries, the Knowledge and Learning (K&L) Manager of the AusAID Civil Society (CS) WASH fund, has developed a model of K&L processes that she presented to contextualize and ground our activity in real examples of K&L processes. A central process in the model is the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle, as shown in this excellent illustration from Kathryn’s work, enabling projects and organisations to, “move up the continuous improvement slope towards best practice, and thereby improving WASH outcomes” as is explained in the guide for members of the CS WASH fund.

And Kathryn has captured creatively the importance of capturing and sharing good practice to maintain improvements within and between projects or when staff members change, which she expresses as a “wedge” to capture good practice so it is not lost between projects, or when staff members change. We explained that in their stories of change participants should focus on the wedge, identifying how lessons were learnt and captured in ways that ensured they didn’t disappear. And the connections to my story from Oxfam are obvious.

Kathryn illustrated the full model below with examples of good practice from SNV and East Meets West itself. I think it's an impressive and rich framing of good, sustainable K&L processes in all sectors, not just WASH and will explore it in more detail in the near future. 

However, in the next blog in this series we will describe what emerged in the workshop.

Learning about Learning with East meets West

"In the WASH sector there is a plethora of information, but not always the ability or willingness to learn, both as organisations and individuals. Effective knowledge systems requires organisations to embed knowledge and learning in day to day work in a way that achieves goals and empowers staff. Additionally they require reflective professionals motivated to learn and equipped to build knowledge and learning into their programmes"

It's always reassuring to find someone else apparently whose thinking overlaps closely with your own. This quote from a training session at the 2014 WASH conference in Brisbane captures well the balance between knowledge and learning that informs the KM project we're doing with a group of organisations. We've based our plans partly on the argument that, in common with other development sectors, there is an over-emphasis on Knowledge products and outputs and not enough emphasis on the reflection and learning processes that produce sustainable change within projects and organisations. Given that we're arguing that we need to make time for learning and reflection I want to 'work out loud' as we go along, sharing process and progress using social media - blogging and tweeting, mainly. Hence this blog, the first of a series based on a visit to East Meets West in Hanoi, recently re-branded Thrive Networks.

Knowledge to Action to Change

How to strengthen the link between Knowledge and Action is one of the design principles that emerged from the consultation with the organisations about how to improve KM within the programme. It's also the theme of a workshop we're doing at the annual WEDC conference. East Meets West (EMW) is lead organiser and we've planned the session with Kathy Harries, who is the Knowledge and Learning manager of the DFAT funded Civil Society WASH programme. (Kathy was one of the authors of the quote above). To help keep the workshop practical EMW suggested we focus on action that leads to change.

Looped learning

We introduced the triple loop learning model as a useful model for understanding knowledge and learning processes to the group of organisations at their annual workshop early this year.



The kind of learning we're interested in links knowledge to action - the reflective and analytical process that involve processing Knowledge, whether research results or personal experience, and identifying what practical steps will improve performance and outcomes.  And in terms of sharing and institutionalising learning and change we're particularly interested in social learning based on critical reflection processes.

We're story telling in the workshop later today, asking people to give examples of changes they have experienced and tell us the story of how that happened. We'll be capturing and sharing those stories, and reflecting on what we're learning about learning in later posts

Using ICT with older people - a workshop with HelpAge International

Help Age International (HelpAge) has been working with older people across the world for over 30 years. It’s far from being the sexiest end of development, so there’s little money and less attention from many major donors and Foundations. That perception doesn’t come from insider knowledge but is a supposition based on the way they’ve built their programme, focused on local level activities supporting, advocating, campaigning, mostly voluntary. The small offices are as full of creative, committed, wise people as you’d expect of long-lived NGOs. So it was a privilege to help facilitate a fascinating exchange with HelpAge staff in a session on the use of ICT to support their programmes. As well as the people in London, we had on Skype people from international offices, including Tanzania, Pakistan, South Africa, the Occupied Palestinian Territories and a South Asian regional programme manager.

First, a facilitator’s note, especially for those working in ICT4D: don’t forget the obvious, which is that many people come to conversations about using ICT in programmes suspicious, often on the basis of experience, about whether or not good development practice will be trumped by talk of tech-led programmes or a belief that programmes and people’s lives can be transformed by new-tech. So it’s important to have assumptions and challenges out on the table at the beginning, to get as quickly as possible to a creative conversation about how to engage in the new context constantly being created by the march of ICTs. Some that could usefully have been stated at the beginning:

• ICT4D isn’t (shouldn’t be) technology led: technology is a core enabler
• New developments must be programme led, which means country and/or regional offices, in decentralised organisations
• Don’t make assumptions without some data – do we know about uses of ICT by segments such as older people? 
• Don’t simply focus on the obvious constraints (connectivity, cost etc.) that don’t take into account the existing spread of ICT like mobiles, even in the context of shared ownership. People came up with plenty of examples of engaged use by older people
• Don’t use digital as the topic header, use ICT, otherwise the conversation is all about mobiles – important enough in itself – but ignores older ICTs like radio
• Context is all important in determining what might be useful, based on what is already happening as well as the goals and capacity of the people involved

I gave a brief presentation about trends, drawn from four sources:

• our recent experience at the ICT4Ag conference
• conversations on the ever excellent eCampaigning Forum
• the ICT4D strand from a recent INTRAC M&E workshop, Track A and Track B
• threads from the #ICT4D tag on Twitter. 

The presentation was intended partly as a collection of useful links but for an audience relatively new to the field, and with very specific sectional interests, more abstraction would have helped. I separated out two areas that I think need in depth investigation – the use of mobiles and trends grouped around Open….. and Crowd…..

The digital dimension

Part of the interest for me was comparing our conversation with those I've had in Oxfam GB over the years. In 2002 nobody was much interested in ICT4D, even as we showed how many international partners were starting to use computers. Our work in Oxfam in 07/08 was part of the the development of a Digital Vision. Having seen how much ICT4D and digital activity was already happening, and recognising the strategic implications of what were then the new Web 2.0 trends, OGB set up a series of work streams. The Regional Director for South East Asia, where a lot of ICT4D innovation was happening, took on leadership for OGB. The wheel came full circle in 2012, when an ICT4D coordinator was appointed.  

Before and during the HelpAge workshop a list was developed of current projects using ICT. Without a lot of effort, ten were identified, some historical but many live, many using mobile phones but others integrating radio and video. I think I am right that nobody had seen that list collated before, which is as it was in Oxfam GB when we did surveys in 2002 and again in 2008: there is a lot of innovation within the on-the-ground programmes, most of which is only known about only by a few, directly involved people. It was the same in the University of the Arts, London, when we explored what was going on across the University as part of work to develop a Digital Vision. Lots of innovation, little visibility and less money. One of the College Directors coined the term, digital dimension, arguing that the digital impacted, and could benefit, all of the creative and admin processes within the University. It's a useful concept for organisations like HelpAge  it's not so much a question of where ICT could be useful, but rather starting from the perspective that there is a potential digital or ICT tool or service that could be used in support of all programme - or organisational - aims.

Participants drew a useful distinction between aiming to build from and develop usage of ICTs by older people and ICT use by the organisations. We agreed that, while it’s important for organisations to get good at integrating ICT, which can be a basis for sharing that knowledge and capacity with others, that can also represent barriers to those less well connected or experienced. One of the major issues for older people in many OECD countries, for example, is precisely that ICT based-services and communication is becoming the default, meaning people need to gain control of the tools and channels in order to access services like pensions. That has, in turn, given extra impetus to digital inclusion programmes in countries like the UK. Digital access as a right has traction in such countries but is unlikely to be a priority with older people in most of the places where HelpAge works, was the general consensus.

The bottom line for HelpAge  and other similar organisations, is that this is - will be - an evolutionary process, exploring and adapting ICT tools as and when they fit, and generally staying well back from the bleeding edge of innovation. It will be enough to focus on simply being more efficient - focusing on the Information and Technology nexus, as in the GOAL Ireland project presented at the INTRAC workshop - and recognising that any kind of communication process or project is likely to be able to be access ICT that supports  collaboration, enables more effective communication, builds and strengthens networks and links into existing organisational communication.