Services
Strategy & Organizational Development
Organizations are the way people interact with each other when they collaborate on something over time. That holds for a sports club as much as for a government cabinet office. Any organizational transformation needs to start with an understanding of what the organization means to the people making it up and those benefiting from its outputs. And it needs to allow these people to have a say in the process of managing change. This may sound self-evident but often it is not what's happening in practice: Not rarely, strategic planning, an approach that is ubiquitous in the world institution-building, is a template-driven exercise where large, coherent plans are hashed out over a few days with limited buy-in or understanding among the beneficiaries. Good change management, by contrast is usually gradual and iterative, build on the perceptions and ideas of the stakeholders. The big picture is important but I have found it often more useful to break things up, pause, and look at how new things can be done in practice before moving on to the next thing. This has allowed me to support more meaningful change as in the case of my reference change maanagement project.
Training & Mentoring
Not another workshop! I have sat through - and delivered - my share of one-off workshops and my verdict is - on their own they are a waste of your money and your beneficiaries' time. Because this is simply not how we learn and evolve our behavior. There are at least three elements to our learning - the absorption of knowledge, the acquisition of skills required to apply our knowledge and the support and incentives required we need to put it into action in our daily work. When I design a capacity-building intervention, I do my best to incorporate all three elements of learning in order to help beneficiaries to do new things or do familiar things in a different way. This can be time and work-intensive but I found it is better to broaden your scope, and maybe revisit it based on experience made implementing than doing too little or doing too much superficially - spreading yourself thin in the course.
Reference project on the way...
Research & Analysis
As political analysts and governance specialists we do a lot of research for assessments and in developing of so-called knowledge products. Often we look at an organization, a sector, a region in question and map it out - looking at the legal setup, economic conditions, institutional landscape and so on. For a single institution, we may for instance do an analysis of the organizational structure, regulatory framework, and membership or staffing. Such a static view is very often inadequate. We can make our analysis better. At a minimum we need to apply political economy analysis, to understand the incentive structures of our decision-makers. I have found it useful to go a step further and focus specifically at how the object of our research interacts with their environment. And perhaps, how that will change in the future as incentives change - as in the case of my reference research project.
Results-based management
I have 12 years experience designing, implementing, and evaluating development projects. Any project is defined by its results: A project is a time-bound activity producing some product at a set cost. The focus on the results can, however, lead to a certain rigidity in project design and management, where we define results and the means for verifying their achievement years in advance of actual delivery. Having planned our results framework out (and raised money against it) we tend to stubbornly and inflexibly stick to exactly what we proposed and see it through. We often fail to see when things are not working. I believe that iterative, learning approach to project work that is invested in critical review and evaluation of interventions is more useful and adequate to designing and implementing the social interventions that are development projects. In my work designing and implementing projects I have sought to apply it.