Crumbs of change on the learning trail...

Published on: 06/06/2011

A couple of interesting things to mention on this blog, particularly in the field of learning for change: First off a colleague of ours, Patrick Moriarty, has started blogging on his own blog and among others he wrote an inspired post (link below) about the political economy of development. This post looks particularly at the much hyped randomised control trials (RCTs) as ‘gold standards’ (or as ‘silver bullets’ if you like your metallic metaphors) for evaluation, when there is perhaps only a certain type of settings in which RCTs are useful. At any rate have a read at his post and you will also find Patrick’s blog on the blog roll from now on.

Another interesting bit of information is the study that IRC is currently conducting in Burkina Faso about ongoing practices of WASH sector actors in terms of knowledge management – with KM introduced here as the combination of knowledge sharing and information management. I have blogged about it – among other things – on my own blog. This study is the first phase of a larger investigation about WASH sector learning in Burkina Faso. The interviews and group discussion that have taken place already reveal very interesting insights about the seeds of change at play in Burkina and particularly the disconnect between, on the one hand, the overall ambitions of sector agencies to harmonise their work and policies and on the other hand the limited efforts to embed a learning and sharing culture within organisations and even among individuals. This echoes another investigation in Ethiopia for the RiPPLE project, where the reasons behind social change are explored in depth, in an upcoming chapter of the end of project book.

And finally, there is this three-pager about ‘the value of learning about learning’ (available below) by Jay Cross and Clark Quinn. It’s a very nifty text which picks up a number of interesting comments about learning:

• Learning has to be practiced – “if Olympic athletes approached running the marathon the way business people approach learning, they would show up for the raced without having trained”.
• Meta-learning is the key to maintaining competitive advantage in the knowledge age. And it is basically focused on “helping individuals learn how to learn and groups how to create optimal learning environments”. This is very close to double and triple-loop learning, the confusing distinction which I tried to explain here and there (see km4meu links below).
• The measure of success of learning (and of meta-learning) is not effort but business results. And it’s possible to assess those results by e.g. timing and costing activities to train staff’s capacity to read more quickly – that example is given in details in the document.
• The overall point of learning is to “optimize an individual’s ability to learn. In a meta-learning environment, the manger becomes a learning mentor, facilitating individual and group improvement while addressing business goals”.
• “Once people’s consciousness for learning is raised, many of them will become aware of their own learning and take responsibility for improving it”.
• And perhaps the most important message here: “many organizations aim to be better than the competition, but most of them aren’t focusing on their greatest resource: people. Organizations must make people – not just business processes – the focus on continual improvement”.

What this says essentially is that we have to focus on very personal learning processes, structuring them, mentoring them, while caring all the while for the employees and having an eye for their own improvement and empowerment efforts. Not a bad message about learning for change. A colleague also passed on another document that I wanted to review, about the World Bank Institute’s ‘Capacity Development Results Framework’. That framework dates from 2009 but it seems worth teasing out some of its insights. I just haven’t taken the time to read it yet but I hope to comment on it quite soon. You can find that document on the WBI website (link below). That’s it for now. But the quest for interesting reflections and documents continues. Feel free to signal them here!