Organizational Vignettes: Programmatic Versus Organizational Approach to Building a More Effective Learning Organization
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CARE
CARE‘s Economic Development Unit (EDU) took a programmatic approach to the BELO project and focused on identifying and sharing best practices for program design within its Village Savings and Loan (VS&L) program. The overall goal of the project was to improve KS&L within this program among six southern African countries (Angola, Malawi, Mozambique, South Africa/ Lesotho, Zambia and Zimbabwe). CARE had already started an organization-wide initiative to improve its global knowledge sharing, and the BELO project offered a good opportunity to pilot new knowledge sharing activities within a given program.
At the start of the one-year pilot project, EDU worked with consultants of Accenture Development Partners to assess the current state of knowledge sharing practices with respect to the VS&L program in six selected countries and to identify barriers to effective learning. This assessment identified the key needs to enable effective learning – in terms of human capacity, policy & staff incentives, and technology. CARE staff and VS&L practitioners attended a regional workshop in Johannesburg to synthesize existing knowledge sharing practices, identify VS&L themes for collaboration, and decide on a KS&L plan for the remainder of the year.
The main activities included the creation of a VS&L Community of Practice, to enable VS&L practitioners to communicate and share knowledge with each other on a regular basis; the appointment of a Knowledge Manager to support and encourage knowledge sharing activities; and the creation of an online knowledge management application, to enable the collection and sharing of relevant knowledge; and integration of knowledge sharing objectives into participating VS&L practitioners’ Individual Operating Plans.
The project has generated a lot of enthusiasm by people at all levels of CARE and the partner organizations to share knowledge and work collaboratively, and an evaluation was conducted to get formal staff feedback on the utility of the knowledge management and learning mechanisms tested, and to find out whether the changes in CARE systems and policies to enable effective knowledge sharing are lasting.
The detailed findings of the evaluation showed that when given specific themes, practices and a leader, practitioners were able to plug into forums that promote knowledge sharing and programmatic learning. Virtual discussions proved to be the most viable way of obtaining or pulling and pushing knowledge simultaneously, both tacit and explicit, from practitioners. In addition, the virtual discussions proved to be an impressive way of capturing and disseminating the knowledge in multiple languages to varying levels of expertise and program involvement within an organization.
EDU recorded variable initial results from its efforts to build an effective learning organization. Increased knowledge, in both tacit and explicit form, has been gathered and shared with practitioners around the globe. Practitioners are better informed about what is going on in CARE’s VS&L programming and are able to better speak about the impacts of the programming in their neighboring countries. For one, better programming design and implementation has been seen from the sharing of both tacit and explicit knowledge. The knowledge that has been shared has directly fed into proposals, prospective projects, and existing programs. Best practices are disseminated quickly and practitioners know where to seek the resources to understand certain programming. With the creation of a knowledge resource site, a central repository where information is stored and accessed, practitioners are able to retrieve more explicit pieces of knowledge on demand. Given this level of availability, practitioners see value and the incentive to continue sharing. Yet access to this knowledge remains a challenge due to connectivity differences in each country office and sub offices.
Through some of the practices, the practitioners have been able to focus on certain pertinent cross-sectoral programming (linkages, VS&L training center, HIV/AIDS, practitioner profiles lifted inside and outside the Country Office). With this explicit focus, the acquisition of specific knowledge has enabled nascent and fledgling programs to gain the lessons needed to enhance their respective programs. The project did not focus on integrating practitioners from other sectors in the knowledge sharing practices and processes, and this has been signaled as one of the challenges to address in the near future. The project did, however, find meaningful and beneficial methods to share the knowledge of cross-sectoral programs with other country offices wishing to implement similar programs.
National practitioners’ profiles and levels of expertise have been brought to the attention of senior staff both at HQ and in their Country Offices. With this new level of recognition, practitioners around the globe realize the potential of their internal capacities and will turn to each other first before seeking the resources of external entities.
Freedom from Hunger
Freedom from Hunger determined that despite the demonstrable role that learning was already playing in its daily work, the organizations still lacked a comprehensive and systematic strategy for sharing and managing knowledge. Moreover, in order to realize FFH’s new business model to dramatically increase its technical assistance to provide three million poor women with access to high-quality, integrated financial and nonfinancial services, an efficient system was urgently needed for capturing, sharing, collecting, exchanging, vetting, evaluating and documenting the knowledge and experience of FFH and its partners, end-clients and industry counterparts. Top management had already decided that these changes were crucial for the organization, and the BELO grant helped accelerate this vision to become reality through setting and implementing an organization-wide knowledge management strategy.
The keystone of FFH’s knowledge management strategy has been to develop and launch an interactive, on-line knowledge portal serving three main audiences—FFH staff, partners and industry counterparts—and focusing on microfinance and training-related tools and strategies that target poor women. Realizing that information technology alone does not lead to effective knowledge management and learning, FFH also started to analyze and improve upon its knowledge processes. A knowledge management workshop let to conducting a knowledge mapping exercise and ultimately to setting an organizational knowledge management plan. FFH’s leadership team also attended a retreat where they worked to re-clarify direction and cultural values of the organization, which helped to close the loop of project planning by giving clear guidance as to how to evaluate the effectiveness of programs and their alignment with the organizational mission. Another significant change has been the way FFH uses meetings (which remain one of the greatest opportunities to get people together to share ideas and learn): a new meeting structure, consisting of weekly tactical meetings, monthly strategic and quarterly off-site retreats, has helped to ensure that information flows “between silos” and yet remains timely and efficient.
Practical Action
Practical Action used the BELO grant to improve the KM system of its Markets and Livelihoods Program (MLP) around the processes and factors that make market systems work better for poor producers. Its goals were to establish iterative learning processes within the MLP team by strengthening the culture, skills, routines and tools used to learn from, and with, poor producers; to strengthen learning processes among key market system actors; to incorporate mechanisms for incorporating poor producers’ knowledge into organizational strategy; and to enhance knowledge sharing and external learning interactions within the broader pro-poor market development and microenterprise development fields.
MLP team KS&L was achieved through adopting a common set of tools to improve decision-making processes during project cycles, training team leaders in their use, and twinning projects in different MLP countries to encourage horizontal learning between team leaders and field staff. To strengthen learning capabilities of market actors, the MLP team leaders started testing the use of ‘video testimonies’ (to initiate strategic dialogue between disparate, sometimes competing, market chain actors), and subsector ‘interest groups’ (to engage service providers and decision-makers in sharing their knowledge to improve value chain performance). To bring, poor farmers, microentrepreneurs and other market actors into the learning process, participatory video techniques were applied to Stories of Change and Most Significant Change methodology to better capture information about significant impacts, influences and results of field projects. In addition to these various initiatives, sharing of knowledge was facilitated through use of technology, such as SharePoint (an information portal that allows people and expertise to connect and collaborate) as well as learning blogs, Google Groups, podcasts, photopods and wikis.
Practical Action’s approach changed significantly throughout the project: whereas the initial strategy had been to come up with a detailed activity plan with clear schedules and responsibilities, this proved to be untenable because many of the BELO activities were dependent on other projects in the field. The approach became more demand-led and decentralized (i.e. identifying staff members who are responsive to learning processes and supporting them to become learning champions within the organization). Finally, recent work has focused on the formalization of M&E for learning processes and on ‘informal bilateral agreements’ (internal MoUs) between the UK team and the country/regional teams, to identify the key learning moments throughout a given project cycle and maximize their impact on key decision-making processes.
WOCCU
WOCCU proposed a very specific project to develop a series of program modules – components that compile instructions, articles, comments and software tools for program components, such as savings mobilization or governance training, in a single location on WOCCU’s intranet. A knowledge management coordinator was hired specifically to manage this project (evaluating the last four years of WOCCU program materials and relevant external literature to develop the modules, and designing and implementing strategies for linking the modules to every stage of the program management lifecycle). From this review, a set of module topics were discussed with final selection of three for expansion into a full module or “methods” paper. The set of three internal methods papers were elected by senior management as being critical areas for WOCCU’s focus. The KM coordinator focused on one of the three topics: model credit union building in fragile and conflict environments.
The knowledge management coordinator also conducted a KM audit, which served to ascertain staff understanding of what a learning organization is and what knowledge management brings to WOCCU, and to determine what capacity of knowledge sharing and learning currently exists at WOCCU, and how it could be further improved. The findings of this audit stimulated a senior level discussion around KS&L and a recommended set of next actions. These actions include: set of three internal “methods” papers, review of internal web sharing portal of tools and training materials, required reading list and additional KS&L focus groups.
WOCCU has started a series of monthly meetings for all middle and senior management headquarters staff to attend. With a staff that regularly is traveling, the policy is that the last week of the month all staff needs to be in headquarters for these meetings. Further, the internal web sharing portal has been redesigned – using findings from the KM Coordinators review of actual use versus intended purpose. Finally, select staff members from the field and headquarters are all working on a project to revise/review the full set of WOCCU tools to be standardized by an internally selected review board.
