Flying under the results radar

Blog post by ANDREA RODERICKS and is shared generously by The Ideal Practitioner.

flying_under_radarWhat challenges does an “ideal” social change/development practitioner face in trying to live up to that ideal in the real world?

I think the “individual agency” constraints are different for local practitioners and for those who work in a more international contexts.

  • The results agenda and nature of competitive processes have put pressure on people to appear more confident than they may be about particular solutions or strategies… this is dangerous, especially for a practitioner who faces this early in their career.
  • In many cases efficiency is valued above all else, especially for large-scale service delivery projects with short timeframes, or those that have “pay by result” mechanisms. The culture of such projects and of the organisations pursuing them marginalizes social change practitioners – they are made to feel incompetent if they don’t pretend to have all the answers.
    • I once complimented the manager of an action research project on taking advantage of the flexibility of her project funding to adjust her work plan and budget in response to community feedback, moving funds out of an area where they were not needed. While she appreciated the recognition, she said that she almost did not go through with it, because she thought she may appear inefficient in the eyes of her peers, not being able to forecast accurately for such a small grant, when these colleagues managed operations ten times in scale, and spent millions as forecast. The organizational culture had evolved around metrics for large-scale blueprint operations.
  • Overloaded jobs, with a high amount of administrative tasks, leaving little time for reading, reflecting, talking to others.
    • The leader of a sex worker self-help group once explained this eloquently. She said that the one of the biggest challenges they faced since their group had received donor grants for HIV prevention was that they had started spending their time like “NGO people.” Instead of using their drop-in centre to solve problems, strategize, meet and listen to each others’ stories, they spent most of their time writing reports and new proposals, going to NGO meetings and entertaining visitors. She ended her comment by saying, “I have started to take refuge in, and trust documents more than my interactions.”
  • Navigating organisational power imbalances and taking risks – I have often found the most meaningful social change practice among junior practitioners who tend to have more regular interactions with impact populations. But they sometimes find it hard to communicate what they are learning to more powerful people in the aid industry.
    • A couple of years ago, during a meeting that one of our project based teams had with the senior management team of the organisation, I realized that they failed to mention some of their most valuable insights from their work. When I asked them later why they had not shared some of their most important lessons, these were some of their comments:

“At certain levels, people only hear what’s familiar to them. What we learned was not connected to our deliverables, so it didn’t seem important.”

“Even though everyone says it is good to share and learn from mistakes, it is sometimes very risky for people at our level.”

“It would have taken too long to explain the context.”

  • A new one I discovered in conversation with a group of masters development students is that many of them were entering the profession carrying significant debt from their student loans… this coloured their choices of internships and first jobs significantly. It also made them much more conscious of having their names on outputs that they worked on, which did not always go down well with others on their teams.

How have you personally navigated these issues?

    • I sometimes tried to stay under the radar, doing the most interesting work almost surreptitiously until it gained some momentum, to avoid having to show results too quickly
    • I focused on closely managing the administrative work in order toprotect my team’s space for social analysis
    • In a risk averse organisational culture, social change processes (because of their political nature) are sometimes perceived as risky to the organisation. However, often these risks are not openly named, and their likelihood not assessed. In a project where we worked on access of marginalized fishing communities to water bodies we realized that it was helpful to take the lead in facilitating organizational risk analysisourselves to contribute to more informed decision making.
    • Tried to set up regular reflection platforms with participation of diverse levels and groups of development practitioners (with an emphasis on regular… because it was only when they became a regular practice that they became a safe space for reflection)
    • Have social change practitioner friends/ allies/ peers outside of my own organisation/ team.
    • Create “alone time” in the day to process thoughts/ experiences
    • Read about what others are doing
    • Consciously resist the pressure to know everything by focusing on what I am learning, and taking pride in speaking truth to power.

What questions should we be asking that we are not? 

Many practitioners themselves have a role to play in protecting/ widening institutional space for good social change practice to flourish – there is a lot of work on organizational practices and culture, but not enough on managers’ individual agency in development organisations to enable social change. A good question to ask may be,

“What management practices can help widen the space for social change work to thrive?”

or

“What kind of leadership competencies are most enabling of social change practice?”

Another question may be:

“Where do social change practitioners draw support from? Who are their mentors or accompaniers, and, what kind of interaction between them has been most supportive?”

ANDREA RODERICKS IS A FREELANCE CONSULTANT WHO FOCUSES ON PROGRAMME AND ORGANISATIONAL DESIGN AND EFFECTIVENESS, AND CURATING PARTNERSHIPS TO COLLECTIVELY ADDRESS COMPLEX DEVELOPMENT CHALLENGES. SHE HAS WORKED ON DEVELOPMENT AND HUMANITARIAN ISSUES FOR THE PAST 24 YEARS, MOST OF THESE WITH THE NGO CARE INTERNATIONAL, IN MANAGEMENT AS WELL AS TECHNICAL ADVISORY ROLES, LARGELY IN SOUTH ASIA AND SOUTHERN AFRICA. ANDREA IS A MEMBER OF THE SYNERGOS SENIOR FELLOWS’ GLOBAL NETWORK THAT CONNECTS CIVIL SOCIETY LEADERS COMMITTED TO COLLABORATIVELY ADDRESS UNDERLYING CAUSES OF POVERTY AND INEQUITY. SHE SPENDS MOST OF HER TIME IN HER HOME COUNTRY, INDIA.