By: Heather Marquette

Heather Marquette — Wed, 17 Jun 2015 14:07:50 +0000

Thanks, Duncan. Great blog for a great paper. One plea – I’d love to see ‘adaptive’ and ‘experimental’ separated out, because they’re not the same thing, nor are they on the same spectrum. It seems a given that development programming should be more adaptive. It isn’t a given that it should be experimental. If our government wants to experiment on us, its citizens, it needs (or at least is expected to!) to conduct pilots, go through some sort of ethical review process, get consent from subjects, etc. But how does experimentation work when its foreign governments or organisations experimenting on citizens elsewhere? Who authorises the experiment? Who ensures consent? Who is ultimately responsible for failure? Who pays the price? ‘Adaptive’ should be a no-brainer. Though there’s nothing at all inherently wrong with it, ‘experimental’ needs a lot more discussion, in terms of both the politics of it, the practice and the ethics.
In the UK, it’ll be interesting to see what happens with the new IDC in Parliament. Lots of tough posturing so far on how each of the potential heads will hold DFID to account even more than before. How that fits with a more adaptive, flexible etc approach, with longer time horizons and where failure *is* an option…I don’t really know yet.

By: Allan Moolman

Allan Moolman — Wed, 17 Jun 2015 11:08:17 +0000

My favourite topic…
The failure to embrace more adaptive management approaches across the entire ambit of development programming is proving costly. The inertia is probably due to over-adherence to the well worn development maxims that we should not be ‘overly responsive’ or that we have to demonstrate out ‘value add/uniqueness’ in order to remain relevant. While large agency supertankers wallow about, the world around them is shifting and changing at a rate that was impossible to comprehend even ten years ago.
It seems some days that the large development actors are viewing the the world at sub optimal frequencies and are responding to the stop motion images that are getting with no sense of the things that are happening between the shutter blinks. The sector is just not agile enough and has not evolved the nervous system to see beyond its frequency limits. if it is to evolve, it is going to have to start developing new muscle memory.
The sector is going to have to get more used to taking risks, has to get used to moving faster and failing and learning more often and has to become very comfortable with a more mutable form or organisation. This is not an impossible thing. Adaptive management, iterative learning, adjustment and refinement on the fly are all very comfortable process for human beings and can be applied in a long term development context provided you have the right people and processes to do this. I have seen the approach applied in practice with significant results and its going to be interesting to see the learning from these experiences in the Oxfam Australia program in South Africa documented and shared in the coming months

Comments on: How can big aid organizations become Fit for the Future? Summary of my new paper

By: Heather Marquette

By: Allan Moolman