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Change Management

Is all this talk about a ‘power shift’ in our sector really amounting to substantive changes?

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Is all this talk about a 'power shift' in our sector really amounting to substantive changes?

How 17 INGOs are going about it

Is all this talk about a ‘power shift’ in our sector really amounting to substantive changes?

And if it is – what has actually changed in the past 3-5 years?

This was the topic of a small ‘benchmarking study’ of 17 international civil society organizations (ICSOs) that are co-owners of the International Civil Society Centre. My fellow consultant Esther Kwaku and I looked into what actually shifted, in terms of decision rights, processes, and structures. And we looked at sources of informal power, as much as formal ones. The results?

The Centre shared the full findings with the agencies who had chosen to be the focus of the study. It also aggregated the findings in a shorter report for the public — credit to Esther for writing this summary!

See Report Here
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The many ways in which informal power shows up in civil society organizations

Leave a Comment / Change Management, Collaboration and conflict, Equity, diversity and inclusion, Organizational culture, Uncategorized

The many ways in which informal power shows up in civil society organizations

Black and white picture of woman planting flag on tiny island in ocean

Our question

How can we as civil society entities be more self-aware of how *informal* power shows up in our organizations?

How can we as leaders and managers be more self-aware of how forms of power that are not related to positional power play out?

This has been on the mind of many of us in the past few years.

My colleague-consultant Esther Kwaku who also runs the neat social enterprise the Nerve Network and I did some work earlier this year which, amongst many things, surfaced insights around the fascinating ways in which informal power plays out in our organizations. Some of these ways you will be aware of; others may certainly cause you to reflect on what’s really happening in our organizations — even during our attempts to shift and share power. The result is a thought-provoking list, we think.

Adding a visualization

And then Dorothy Nyambi, CEO at the development agency MEDA and her colleagues took it upon themselves to commission a sharp graphic designer to visualize the list – so that they too could use the content. Thank you, MEDA!

The result

Result? Voila!  Download your copy of the visualization of the many ways in which informal power shows up here:

PDF version of the Informal Power viz

PPT version of the Informal Power viz

How does informal power show up in your civil society organization? Feel free to use the content as well in your work (please credit us as creators, of course). Enjoy having good conversations about this!

blue skies

Nothing Lasts Forever: Exit Planning is Essential for INGOs

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Nothing Lasts Forever: Exit Planning is Essential for INGOs

Guest blog post by Charlie Danzoll, independent consultant. The views expressed in this post are Charlie’s. You can reach him via LinkedIn.

For all the energy, time, and resources INGOs invest in starting new initiatives, their plans for moving on are often sorely lacking.

 

Whether it is transitioning from INGO status to a nationally governed entity or withdrawing from the country, an INGO planning for closure of its country presence is faced with a dilemma: How can the organization responsibly manage such a contraction when doing so pitts its commitment to core values against the cold hard reality of resources that have run out?  What does responsible transition or exit look like? How can organizations better prepare to uphold their vision, values, and commitments during and after they leave?

While many organizations plan for transition and exit at the project level, and these plans are sometimes included in country-level strategic plans, INGOs don’t often define milestones or benchmarks for country-level transition or exit. Poor planning and execution of country transitions and exits contribute to the very critique of neocolonial aspects of aid. They manifest as, for instance:

  • Disgruntled staff, partners, and stakeholders;
  • Organizational inertia and dissonance;
  • Gradual bleeding of already scarce resources;
  • Insufficient resources to support transition and exit;
  • Focusing on financial risk at the expense of staff and organizational legacy; and
  • Underinvestment in staff income security and opportunities for professional growth.
  • All of this increases the perception that INGOS are not accountable to the people and communities they serve.

Consequently, I argue that preparing for transition and exit is a matter of strategic importance and should be addressed at the very beginning of the work in that country. By naming a transition/exit strategy as a priority, investing early in its design, and maintaining this commitment throughout the program/project life cycle, INGOs can uphold their missions and values through the end of their initiatives and beyond.

Admittedly, the prevailing challenge is operationalizing this advice. “Walking the talk” is often quite difficult.

I therefore recommend the following:

  • Review and adopt the lessons from the excellent  Stopping as Success Project;
  • Set organizational intentions, including principles, benchmarks, and policies for exit and transition;
  • Build transition and exit into the organizational ways of working and strategic planning processes—i.e., viewing them not as a failure but as normal parts of the business cycle;
  • Earmark unrestricted organizational resources for transition and exit;
  • Define transition and exit activities as core costs and advocate that donors accept them as an accrual (similar to how staff severance is accepted as a core cost);
  • Dedicate time and resources to staff wellness as it relates to transition and exit; and
  • Balance the need for financial risk management with enhancing impact and legacy.

Commitment to aligning an INGO’s mission with on-the-ground realities starts with recognizing transition and exit as organizational imperatives that need to be planned for well in advance. Planning should begin years (as opposed to months) before such a strategy is needed and be included as part of country-level strategic planning and program/project design.

The true test of an organization’s legacy and, ultimately, its impact will be how well the transition is planned, managed, and carried out. Therefore, it is time to prioritize responsible transition, exit, and closure.

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The Future of Transnational NGOs: From Anxiety to Strategy

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The Future of Transnational NGOs: From Anxiety to Strategy

In this blog post, George Mitchell and Hans Peter Schmitz, co-authors, provide a synopsis of one of the main arguments in our brand new book ‘Between Power and Irrelevance: the Future of Transnational NGOs’. You can read more about our book here, including where you can buy it — for a limited time period with a 30% discount.

Geopolitical shifts, increasing demands for accountability, and growing competition have been creating a more challenging environment for Northern-based transnational nongovernmental organizations (TNGOs). In addition to changes in TNGOs’ external environment, TNGOs’ own ambitions have increased. Many TNGOs today have adopted a greater focus on addressing the root causes of societal problems, often complementing direct service provision with longer-term strategies for sustainably improving environmental, social, and political conditions. Prominent TNGOs have expanded their strategic repertoires to include new forms of activism, including rights-based approaches to development and supporter-led digital campaigning. Over time, TNGO interventions generally have become more complex, requiring more resources and greater collaboration within and across sectors.

Why all the existential angst?

But TNGOs find themselves today at a point where their rhetoric of creating sustainable impact and social transformation has far outpaced the reality of their more limited abilities to deliver on these promises. Many individual TNGOs have moved to address this gap through organizational reforms, but these efforts have not yet addressed the larger challenges that exist at the systemic level. Meanwhile, there is continuing and sometimes growing criticism of TNGOs along several fronts, including charges of ineffectiveness, limited efforts to hand over control to local partners, and failures to live internally the values that TNGOs promote externally.

What is at the heart of the challenges confronting TNGOs? Many observers have argued that TNGOs have become too large and too focused on their own survival instead of their missions. Others have blamed the overall aid system and its inability to fundamentally change the economic conditions of millions of people living in poverty. And some have blamed increased competition and professionalization, perceived to be inimical to the sector’s ethos. These criticisms identify important issues, but they all miss a fundamental problem faced by virtually all TNGOs: TNGOs are constituted as nonprofits and therefore operate within a specific institutional and normative architecture that constrains their ability to embrace new strategies and roles essential for their future effectiveness, legitimacy, and survival.

How the sector’s architecture is failing TNGOs

In our new book, Between Power and Irrelevance: The Future of Transnational NGOs, we consider how the underlying normative and institutional conditions of TNGOs—what we refer to as the sector’s architecture—are expressed in restrictive legal regimes, societal expectations, and cultural beliefs that make it hard for TNGOs to pursue their expanded missions. The difficulties are not simply due to the magnitude and complexity of global problems or the failures of individual organizations. Instead, key stakeholders of the sector, including individual and institutional donors, the general public, and governments, have been too slow in shifting their outdated expectations about the appropriate roles of TNGOs. The gap between TNGO rhetoric and their ability to deliver on their promises is growing because TNGOs’ new strategies focused on sustainable impact are not matched by the required capabilities for executing such strategies effectively.

The modern institution of the nonprofit facilitates and carries forward centuries-old traditions of charity in which social value is consummated in the act of giving itself and in the virtuous intentions and actions of staff and volunteers. Although recent decades have seen the term impact become a ubiquitous buzzword throughout the sector, underlying societal expectations about how nonprofits should raise funds and operate have failed to change in step. Today, more and more TNGOs have adopted the rhetoric of impact and have staked their reputations on claims of not just being good stewards of donor resources, but of also making a demonstrable difference in the lives of those they claim to serve. Philanthropy is becoming more data-driven and outcome-oriented, stakeholders are demanding new forms of accountability and participation, and more sophisticated operational strategies are requiring longer-term time horizons and significant new investments in organizational capacities. However, the organizational forms and norms of the sector’s architecture are preventing TNGOs from fully embracing the kinds of changes needed to successfully adapt and evolve, and above all else, to reach their potential in serving their missions. We show, for example, how the architecture provides a permissive environment for ‘successful irrelevance’ (survival based on fiscal propriety, regardless of impact), how it binds TNGOs to a Northern donor-focused accountability model, and how it inhibits specific organizational investments in areas such as digital technology, measurement and evaluation, governance reform, leadership development, and collaboration necessary for long-term mission success

The need for collective action in addition to individual reforms

To make TNGOs fit for the future, individual actions and limited organizational change initiatives will only go so far. The sector must move beyond the false comfort of the status quo and confront the architecture with collective action. TNGOs have already decided what kinds of organizations they want to be, now they must work together to create an institutional and normative environment in which those kinds of organizations can flourish.

Order ‘Between Power and Irrelevance’ online at www.oup.com/academic with promo code ASFLYQ6 to save 30%!

Northern-founded NGOs: the time has come to face existential funding challenges

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Northern-founded NGOs: the time has come to face existential funding challenges

Guest blog written by Barney Tallack, a long-time collaborator of Five Oaks Consulting and former Director of Strategy at Oxfam International with 29 years of experience in the INGO sector. The views expressed are Barney’s. He is an independent consultant and specialist in INGO strategy, transformation, and governance, with a focus on European-founded NGOs. This post is based on his recent paper ‘The Existential Funding Challenge for Northern NGOs’. Barney can be reached at barneytallack[at]gmail.com

How the pandemic may work out for NGOs is uncertain

It would be folly to attempt to forecast with certitude the impacts on Northern INGOs of the COVID-19 crisis. Their ability to achieve the mission will change for sure   – in both positive and negative ways. On the positive side, for example, we might see a shift in normative thinking by citizens, politicians and investment funds on the need to address climate change, inequality and other global issues because the pandemic has once again highlighted our global interdependencies. On the negative side, we could enter an even more isolationist, nativist way of thinking that exacerbates rather than addresses our global challenges.

But what is certain is that the pandemic further accentuates longer term downward financial trends

I would argue that northern-founded NGOs’ sustainability (and that of their national members for those who have those) had already been a problem for some years. By sustainability I mean both financially and in terms of relevance. The current pandemic-induced crisis merely accelerates this.

In studying the long term income trends of seven of the larger INGO families, several challenges are apparent:

  • INGO income grew at a steady rate between 2003-2009, followed by a more rapid growth until 2015/6, followed by a plateauing and then decline
  • The growth has come primarily from significant increases in institutional donor aid to the point where this is now more than half of their income for many
  • All the NGO ‘families’ of (con)federated NGOs are dependent for a significant amount of their income (as much as 2/3 at times) on the largest member of their federation/confederation. This means that a decline in that member’s income disproportionately affects all of them
  • There are five markets – for both public and institutional funding (US, UK, Canada, Germany, and Australia) which these INGO ‘families’ are dependent on. They are also competing for the second-tier markets (in terms of volume of income) – Scandinavian, Netherlands, Switzerland, and Italy.

Northern INGOs were already facing pre-existing headwinds — political and public attention to international development has declined since the 2005 ‘Make Poverty History’ moment. The rise of nativism and the political environment since then means that ruling political parties have less of a mandate or are not as interested in the issues. Only 5 donors now give 0.7% or more for development co-operation and humanitarian issues. The public fundraising markets have been saturated in these same countries and the “cost of acquisition” of new individual donors grinds down the returns on fundraising investments. Humanitarian crises have increased but are frequently slow onset, protracted, and are frequently seen as political issues, making it hard to get media and public awareness.  

The economic crisis caused by COVID-19, and the need to service hugely expanded government debt will put further pressure on development co-operation budgets – in the near and medium-term. The endowment funds of the major Foundations have taken varying degrees of hit. Recruiting new individual donors at a faster rate than the rate with which existing ones are ‘lapsing’ will get harder. Nativism and hostile media have driven trust in INGOs down over the last years and these trends do not seem to let up.

Growing new markets or new (global South) members requires major investment over very significant periods and hasn’t led yet to the kinds of growth in income that would significanty improve funding source diversity.    

Alongside this, leaders of many northern-founded NGOs have been wrestling with the “relevance” challenge – in a world where most countries are or were about to become middle-income countries, where Southern civil society is (rightfully) claiming its space from Northern INGOs and where the ability to get big advocacy led impact is dependent on local rootedness for legitimacy and accountability.

Consequently, Northern-founded NGOs may be able to weather the immediate storm – but the underlying fundamentals which were a challenge for their financial sustainability before the COVID-19 pandemic have accelerated.

Therefore, now is the time to say: nothing’s off the table

Now is the time for Boards and Executive Leadership teams to make the tough decisions that have been looming for the last five years (or more). Four areas to explore are:

  1. How do we ensure we are relevant, what is our unique niche and the best role we can play – in the wider movement – to achieve the shared social justice mission?
  2. Where do we focus, to deliver at scale and with quality in our niche – and where should we be more robust (should we cut our presence in countries, or drop (sub) themes? Let’s be honest with ourselves!
  3. Do we really need to grow global South members – what is our rationale and how does this fit with our response to the increasingly vocal call for localisation?  Should we at least, in parallel mode, consider mergers between smaller global North members for greater resilience and cost-effectiveness?
  4. Be realistic about financial growth.  Question whether equating financial growth with more impact is the right approach. Set flat or lower-income targets.

Global north-founded NGOs do have options

There are options for the future of northern INGOs and their respective members. Three might be:

a) to transform: through a more focused role, niche, programming approach, geography and consolidated members – based on a role and ‘theory of change’ that can be articulated to all stakeholders

b) to ‘die well’: transitioning expertise, power, connections and other assets to other global North or South-founded civil society organisations (merge, spin-off or close)

c) to ‘die badly’ – through financial collapse, without securing an appropriate legacy and handover of partners, resources, and programs.

The world needs Northern-founded NGOs, even if in a different role, niche, form or size

Just as the high street retailers who were most challenged by the move of consumers to online shopping were the first to collapse in the early days of the COVID-19 crisis – those members of INGO families with pre-existing challenges will need to address these soonest.

The good news is that some INGO families and/or some of their members had already begun to do this, for instance through a much tighter focus on theme, target group, expertise, or geography.

A world with global challenges needs a global civil society – working in solidarity and based on complementary strengths –  alongside other actors if we are to overcome the negative impacts of the pandemic, and deal with climate change, inequality, barriers to citizens exercising their human rights and the other global challenges of our time. Realism now about the existential funding issues gives global North-founded NGOs the chance to continue and to address those global challenges.

Can Organizational Culture Help Explain Recent INGO Scandals?

Leave a Comment / Accountability, Change Management, Organizational culture, Organizational effectiveness, Uncategorized

Can Organizational Culture Help Explain Recent INGO Scandals?

In recent years, leading international nongovernmental organizations (INGO) such as Oxfam International, Save the Children, Amnesty International, MercyCorps and others have been implicated in scandals about sexual abuse and other forms of abuse of power and harassment. In this ‘pracademic’ essay, just published in the peer-reviewed journal Nonprofit Policy Forum (Open Access, yes!), I suggest focusing on organizational and sectoral culture as an explanatory variable for these crises, which are particularly hard-hitting for purportedly value-based organizations. In the case of NGOs, these are driven by six factors:

(1) particular individual leadership traits that may be prevalent especially in the emergency and humanitarian relief related sector

(2) the effect of power on leaders’ perspectives and behaviors

3) a culture of silence that makes it hard for NGO staff to speak up about toxic workplace behaviors

(4) the presence of deep power structures within NGOs which are not openly acknowledged and therefore addressed

(5) the myth of own innocence that leads NGOs to treat wrongdoing as aberrations instead of systemic problems; and

(6) a culture of limited individual and team-level accountability practices.

The extent to which these cultural failures can be addressed through formal policy and (self)regulatory measures is limited, given that culture is primarily about informal, covert belief systems. NGOs will have to do sustained and disciplined culture work themselves if the roots of the scandals are to be taken away.

A couple of warnings and notes: this essay is on the longer side. And I do not claim I am an expert in sexual harassment and abuse, either in the workplace or when NGOs interact with program impacted people. I am an expert in organizational effectiveness, dynamics, and culture as it relates to NGOs, and have a background in gender and gender and leadership as well. It is from those perspectives that I have written this essay. What I do is drawing links between organizational phenomena well researched in other sectors (public/government and private) and what can happen equally in NGOs, based on my 30 years of experience in the sector.

The other essays in this special issue of Nonprofit Policy Forum – written by well-known academics – are also available if you are interested.

Your comments on my essay are very much welcomed.

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Radical transformation: time to restructure? Or time to declare victory and move on?

Leave a Comment / Accountability, Change Management, Innovation, Organizational effectiveness

Radical transformation: time to restructure? Or time to declare victory and move on?

These are the views of Veena Siddharth, consultant on organisational change, advocacy and human rights. They do not necessarily represent the views of Five Oaks Consulting. You can reach Veena at veena_s@post.harvard.edu

 “It (Transition House) survived the seventies because the women who worked there were so fervently committed to the theory and the principles, and it survived after that because, year by year, they abandoned every one of them.”
(“The Radical Transformations of a Battered Women’s Shelter” by Larissa MacFarquhar, The New Yorker, August 12, 2019)

In a recent blog, Tosca Bruno-van Vijfeijken asks whether hiring and promoting “rebels” could be a way to transform NGOs. Her skepticism reflects the reality that the crisis many NGOs are facing cannot be solved by individuals.

A mismatch between increased ambition and systems

As NGOs have broadened missions to take on global problems, measuring progress becomes harder. The failure to radically transform contributes to a vacuum of accountability that is fertile ground for poor performance at the very least. Sometimes, it even leads to allegations of abuse, as we have seen in the last few years. The root problem, in my view, is a mismatch between increasingly ambitious objectives and systems inherited from another era.

Although I focus here on INGOs, multilaterals and bilaterals share a similar dissonance between their objectives and functions. UNICEF, UNAIDs, and the Global Fund are just a few of the multilaterals that join Transparency International, Oxfam, Save the Children, IPPF, the Red Cross, and Amnesty International in allegations that include bullying cultures, sexual harassment, lack of oversight, exclusionary internal networks and misuse of funds.

For example…

NGOs that thirty years ago specialised in stand-alone projects added campaigning, policy research and advocacy to tackle power structures and problems that transcended individual projects. Oxfam’s website, for example, says, “Eliminate injustice and you eliminate poverty”. CARE aims to “to tackle the underlying causes of poverty and social injustice” Plan International focuses on “significantly advancing gender equality by tackling the root causes of discrimination.” This expansion of the mission is not limited to development INGOs. Amnesty International moved from championing the individual political prisoner to addressing climate change, corporate accountability and “living in dignity” as priority areas of work. For their part, humanitarian organisations are signatories to the “Grand Bargain”, which aims for nothing less than a “Participation Revolution” in which those receiving aid make the decisions – a dramatic shift in power and authority.

Old structures persist

Yet…. the old structures persist. Donors still dictate terms of funding with short-term horizons without real recognition of the need for collaboration. Foundations and other funders give lip service to holistic approaches but are themselves divided into regional and sectoral divisions that do not support the cross-sectoral and institutional cooperation needed. Achieving the mission is impossible without unconventional alliances that require long-term investments and risk-taking. Such strategic alliances are distinct from the typical MOU with a corporate sponsor and may require finding allies on the other side of a political divide or reframing a divisive issue.

Systems with regard to planning, strategy, staff appraisal, evaluation and learning, fundraising, knowledge management and the internal culture form the scaffolding that determines what is rewarded inside organisations. Being clear about the overall goal while giving staff a high degree of trust and autonomy is essential, yet most NGOs still operate with Cold War-era internal structures related to regional and sectoral divides that are no longer relevant in a more connected era. While there are nods to more relevant approaches – such as developmental evaluation and adaptive management — existing systems tend to support technical expertise with static outputs.

Governance structures are also ill-equipped. The INGO boards in many of the recent scandals appear out of their depth to address profound questions of the skills and metrics best suited to the current environment. Board members may be appointed for their background in management consulting, the corporate world or the NGO sector, but few boards understand the challenges that Executive Directors face today in meeting both technical and political challenges.

What we need instead

One reaction to the scandals has been a growing business in the area of safeguarding, restructuring, and governance. This is necessary but insufficient. We need ways to establish long-term strategies with adaptability to shift tactics in the short-term, and develop boundary-crossing networks organised around change. Stress learning over static evaluation and increase the tolerance for investing in new areas. And we need Boards who understand the shifts this way of working requires in measuring progress and ways of working.

On a global level, the challenges are unprecedented, and the broader goals are exactly the right ones. If we are serious about tackling climate change, migration, political instability and inequality we need a starkly different approach to what NGOs currently value, as expressed through their systems and processes.

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Is hiring and promoting ‘rebels’ the way out for changing our NGO cultures? A skeptical view

2 Comments / Change Management, Innovation, Organizational culture, Organizational effectiveness

Is hiring and promoting ‘rebels’ the way out for changing our NGO cultures? A skeptical view

Should NGOs hire and promote more ‘rebels’ – i.e. unlike minded characters – if they want to ensure enough adaptive capacity to weather the changes in the external environment? Will that make us better at seizing opportunities?

The case for rebels

Years ago I was part of a Task Force on Culture Change, hosted by the International Civil Society Center. Some participant supported the view that hiring and promoting ‘rebels’ or ‘strange bedfellows’ was the way to culture change. By ‘strange bedfellows’ I mean people who are squarely dissimilar from many NGOs types in background, social identity, cognitive outlook, skill set, industries etc. This approach has been recognized in the academic literature such as that of the organizational culture ‘guru’ Edgar Schein as one avenue indeed. And we know from the innovation literature and practice that when people from very different disciplines and backgrounds are exposed to each other, this can lead to creativity and innovation. See for instance my short interview with Aleem Walji, head of Aga Khan Foundation USA, who himself drove innovation in Google and the World Bank before coming to Aga Khan, in which he describes aspects of this process. Leandro Herrero, of the book ‘Viral Change’ about change management and a frequent, I might say caustic commentator on organizational dynamics, highlights the role of organizational dissenters, such as in this recent blog post. And the recent surge of attention paid to organizational diversity strategies in the private and public sectors also points to benefits in terms of creativity and innovation. In fact, the NeuroLeadership Institute argues that our brains must work harder and consider a broader set of ideas when we are surrounded by people who are different, i.e. ‘rebels’ within our workplace – and thus we do better work.

My skepticism

While I see the point of ‘rebels’ entirely, I am somewhat skeptical of how much space they are typically given in NGOs . In my observation, many NGOs I interact with have a limited ability to work with ‘strange bedfellows’; in fact, they form strong ‘antibodies’ against incoming ‘rebels’ who have been hired to change the culture. We tend to primarily be open to information that originates within our own sector. I wrote about this in a 2018 essay for CIVICUS’s Annual State of Civil Society report. In fact, the view that ‘radical, new leadership’ is critical and the only thing that is going to make culture change happen causes me to be skeptic in two ways. One, can leaders with formal positional power really drive transformational change in our rather leadership-averse, consultative cultures? And two, do our civil society organizations truly accept ‘radical leaders’? Or are we in fact quite good at spitting them out soon after they have entered?

So what to do?

What is your experience with this? And how can we be more open and inviting to rebels, once hired? Have them be sponsored as well as mentored more effectively (by people who already have much informal capital in the organization)? Have important meetings facilitated by outside facilitators so that rebels’ ideas and suggestions are given enough airtime? Let me know!

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Desire but also urgency? Driving organizational innovation in NGOs: learn from two innovation masters

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Desire but also urgency? Driving organizational innovation in NGOs: learn from two innovation masters

Organizational innovation strategies – everybody in ‘NGO land’ is on the lookout for them. But how do you drive innovation, as NGO leaders and managers? Listen to these two innovation masters: Aleem Walji of Aga Khan Foundation USA, and Chris Proulx of Humentum. I recently interviewed them on Facebook Live as part of my series ‘Leading with Meaning’.

Here are highlights:

Chris on the role of urgency: NGOs may lack the urgency that spurs innovation in the private sector. The changeable wishes of private sector customers as well as shareholder needs for return on investment create this urgency. NGOs, on the other hand, tend to to be long term focused because of their mission. Moreover, the people paying for NGO services or outputs are not the NGO’s clients which means that the feedback loops are indirect.

Solution: bring in talent who are as such perhaps less committed to the mission (this can be culturally difficult to accept for NGOs). Build diverse and agile teams. And use lean project management methods.

Aleem on ‘connecting the dots’: Have people in your teams from across diverse sectors. Be able to ‘connect the dots’ by exposing a problem or asset to people from different backgrounds, people who normally don’t talk with each other – ‘unlike-minded characters’.

Have translators and bridge builders to help these people connect.

It is important that people across these different sectors respect and appreciate each others’ skills and worldviews, and are willing to listen and learn from people who are nothing like themselves. Over time, they develop a new shared vocabulary.

Second: Think big but test small: develop small scale prototypes with hypotheses you will test, disciplined data collection, failing forward and iterating as you go.

My reflection after listening to these two leaders: It strikes me that some of the advice of Aleem and Chris is not necessarily immediately palatable to the mindset of our sector. Clearly, however, NGOs need to integrate organizational innovation capacity if they are to remain relevant. So how does your NGO go about spurring innovation?

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Striking out with a bold new strategy in a shifting civic space in Asia

2 Comments / Change Management, Organizational effectiveness, Uncategorized

Striking out with a bold new strategy in a shifting civic space in Asia

Interview with one of Oxfam’s smartest civic activists: Lan Mercado, Asia Regional Director

Some INGOs are keenly aware that they cannot take continued relevance or legitimacy for granted. My interaction with several Oxfam colleagues, for example, in the last several years indicates that this is on the mind of quite a few Oxfammers. (And this is unrelated to the recent crisis around sexual abuse and other harassment and bullying issues which hit Oxfam as well as some others). The Transnational NGO Initiative at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, which I directed until very recently, hosted Lan Mercado – Oxfam’s Asia Director – in recent week. That gave me an opportunity to chat with her about Oxfam Asia’s new regional strategy, which I appreciate for its relative boldness.

Oxfam’s new regional Asia strategy….

The new Oxfam strategy ‘leans into’ a real change in role, for example. Its focus on data justice, and on a changed role as well as positionality vis-a-vis the Asian private sector are other examples. And it poses Oxfam in the role of apprentice in some areas – now how’s that for an aspiration for change in Oxfam’s mindset 🙂 !

…. is taking place in a changed civic space in Asia

Lan’s research while at Maxwell focused on how Oxfam Asia needs to change its role, programming, partnership strategy and ways of working given the strong shifts in civic space in Asia (and elsewhere). Civic space actually is not closing for all civic activists (though it definitely is for progressive and human rights-focused ones). What does this imply for Oxfam’s partnership strategy?

Listen in to Lan’s analysis of what this means for new Oxfam partnership strategies in the region. And let me know how you see this!

Anger and grievance among Amnesty staff: should the broader INGO sector pay attention?

2 Comments / Accountability, Change Management, Evaluation and organizational learning, Organizational culture, Organizational effectiveness, Uncategorized

Anger and grievance among Amnesty staff: should the broader INGO sector pay attention?

Introduction

When was the last time you read that an entire Senior Leadership Team (SLT) of a major NGO offered to resign? This happened recently in Amnesty International (shy of Kumi Naidoo, the relatively new Secretary General). It occurred after Amnesty made public (to its credit!) an independent report on the state of its staff well- being. The report put allegations of unfair treatment of staff, negatively impacted by a recent big organizational change process, and of racism, gender discrimination and bullying front and center as part of a longer standing cultural issue.

Why I write about this

I have followed these developments in Amnesty closely because I was part of a team that between 2014-2017 undertook a two part External Assessment of Amnesty’s Global Transition Program (GTP) . This big organizational change effort, as embodied in its informal name ‘Moving Closer to the Ground’, in effect decentralized Amnesty’s International Secretariat away from London to 11 Regional Offices, led (among others) to the appointment of many more global South staff and leaders, instilled a greater focus on gaining more global South members and supporters and led to the departure of a relative large number of staff who often had been with Amnesty for a long time.  In effect, GTP also led to some redistribution of power within Amnesty.  The Transnational NGO Initiative at Syracuse University, USA, which I directed at the time, undertook the External Assessment. Co-authors in this effort included Ramesh Singh, Steve Lux and Shreeya Neupane. In addition, I also was the co-trainer in an annual Senior Leadership Development Program for major INGOs including Amnesty since 2013, and in that process have heard many observations about Amnesty culture, including when it comes to interpersonal communication styles.

Our Assessment had a much broader scope than effects on staff of the Global Transition Program (GTP) alone, but it certainly included those effects. We included data on persistent and legitimate staff grievances as a result of especially weak change management capacity and practice, particularly during the first (crucial) stages of GTP implementation. We indicated that Amnesty’s Management seemed to consider these grievances in ways that we found to be unhelpful. Our report came out in May 2017, and from the Staff Well-being report produced by the consulting group Konterra which just came out it appears that our work did not make much of a difference – a not uncommon limitation of externally commissioned work!

It should be said that the internal communication culture of Amnesty was known to be ‘confrontational’ well before the Global Transition Program. By this we mean a style of communicating that is dominated by attempts to persuade others through internal advocacy style communication, the use of argumentation and attacks – instead of on skillful interpersonal communication that leads to greater mutual understanding, conflict management and collaboration. This communication culture, anecdotally, is not just reported in Amnesty, but also in some other campaigning NGOs. The phenomenon is described by David La Piana, for instance, in “The Nonprofit Paradox (Stanford Social Innovation Review, Summer 2010).

This made me reflect on some things[1]:

  1. Symbolically, the offer of collective resignation by Amnesty’s Senior Leadership Team was a necessary and useful action – this is irrespective of whether it accomplishes anything ‘structural’. It met the emotional needs of some staff (though not all) and the political needs of Amnesty’s  Board. 
  2. It gives the current Secretary General a free hand to start afresh with new leadership – even if Kumi decides to hold on to some SLT members while accepting the resignation of others. This can help with top leadership getting ‘unstuck’ with regard to certain ‘mental models’ of how staff grievances should be understood.
  3. Based on work I have done with other mid to large size NGOs who have gone through big change processes, I wonder if two realities co-exist in terms of whose voices counted or were privileged in the Staff Well-being report: on the one hand, there is a widespread, deeply shared and easily understood set of grievances. At the same time, it is my sense that there is also a set of voices that is critical of all the attention that has gone into ‘looking to the past’, who think that the power imbalances within the movement as well as the very identity of Amnesty needed to change, and who think the Staff Wellbeing report is (somewhat) overblown. The latter people just want to move on with the direction of travel that Amnesty is on, because they deeply believe in this direction and feel that the significant amount of change the organization went through was badly needed. I would have been interested to see in the Staff Well-being report, for instance, whether the latter voices had certain characteristics in common or not?
  4. And I also struggle with this question: on the one hand, a human rights organization cannot be seen to violate staff rights within the organization. And people certainly cannot work productively and contribute to worthwhile outcomes if they feel strongly aggrieved. On the other hand, all this attention is inward looking instead of outward looking, to rights holders who Amnesty aims to support and promote. And this is after the GTP change process itself already instilled a strongly inward looking climate for staff in the International Secretariat for several years.
  5. We all know there is a perennial debate within civil society as to what is the importance of having ‘passion for the cause’ and having ‘the right values’ (reflected in what some call the ‘soul’ of civil society), relative to the aim to professionalize. And it is obvious that mission and values-focused NGO staff are driven more by intrinsic motivations than by extrinsic rewards such as salary.  However, we as staff still need to be competent (professional) in how we communicate and treat each other; and we also may need to be more concerned with external effectiveness, and less with ‘good intentions and passion’.
  6. This in turn reminds me of the time I facilitated a senior leadership training, and we discussed the concept of a ‘psychological contract’. This concept (developed by Denise Rousseau) points to the set of – often unspoken – mutual beliefs and perceptions with regard to the informal obligations that may exist between employers and employees. As trainers, we asked each participant to indicate what their psychological contract was with their NGO employer. I recall how one set of participants indicated that theirs consisted of two things: having passion for ‘the cause’ and a willingness to work long hours for not that high a salary. I remember thinking to myself: but what about actual outcomes for the people or causes you work on? Outcomes did not seem to be part of the equation.
  7. This also brought back memories of the time when I set out to work in the international development field – a long time ago. I never saw myself as a ‘do gooder’ even though that was the assumption that many people had about young people like me. I did want to work on public causes, but I was weary of any notion of ‘saving the world’: the arrogance and ego that was personified in that idea was not something I was comfortable with. II just wanted to do meaningful work well. Please note that I am not saying I always succeeded! But doing work well was my main mission.
  8. Coming back to Amnesty’s current situation, this sentence in an editorial of The Times (after the publication of the Staff Well-being report therefore stuck with me: “Staff and managers employed … may pride themselves more on their commitment than on their professionalism. Being morally right all the time can induce an attitude towards fellow employees which is characterised by impatience and intolerance. Due process can come to be seen as an impediment to doing what seems to be the right thing, rather than as an assistance. Nothing is as “toxic” in the workplace as the resulting arbitrariness.” (The Times, February 6, 2019)

In conclusion, perhaps we as a sector should get better at balancing being ‘morally right’ (which is in any event depending on one’s viewpoint of the world), with being focused on skillfully interacting with our colleagues, so that we may support the creation of better outcomes. Why does our ‘moral outrage’ entitle us to treat others badly? Does this showcase a certain amount of ego and self-gratification, while masking as ‘doing good’? Should we apply a bit more humility, honesty and self-awareness?

This is a highly complex situation. What do you think? I look forward to hearing your comments and to learning from your perspective.

[1] I am grateful to Catherine Gerard, my colleague at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University (USA), who has been my mentor as well as co-trainer in the Senior Leadership Development Program since 2011, for inputs received.