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Organizational effectiveness

Organizational culture, national culture and how they come together in INGOs

Leave a Comment / Equity, diversity and inclusion, Evaluation and organizational learning, Miscellaneous, Organizational culture, Organizational effectiveness, Organizational structure, Uncategorized

Organizational effectiveness

Questions rummaging through my mind

How do national culture differences affect organizational ways of working — and ways of managing and leading?

How does the presence of many different national cultures among staff shape the organizational culture of an NGO?

To start with the obvious: The staff of INGOs typically consist of people from many different national cultures. This is even more so the case as many INGOs have focused on increasing the diversity of their staff body—including for managers and leaders. National cultures from global North no longer predominate, although global North-imprinted organizational cultures tend to remain in place for a lot longer. So how does the presence of all these national cultures shape the organizational culture of an NGO?

A new resource

Recently, I became aware of an interesting new research-based source on national culture differences—updated research by Erin Meyer, the American-French academic who works at the famous INSEAD business school in Fontainebleau, France. Her book, The Culture Map (2014) has been recommended to me by several NGO types. Erin has launched a new website, the Culture Mapping Tool which allows you (regretfully only on a paid basis) to compare specific sets of countries in neat ways with each other, based on the following dimensions:

  • Communications: from ‘high context’ communication styles to ‘low context’ ones
  • Evaluating: from indirect negative feedback to direct ones
  • Leading: from hierarchical cultures to egalitarian ones
  • Deciding: From top-down cultures to consensual ones
  • Trusting: from relationship-based cultures to task-based ones
  • Disagreeing: from confrontational cultures to those that avoid confrontation
  • Scheduling: from linear-based cultures to flexible time-based cultures
  • Persuading: from applications-first cultures to principle-first ones

The questions this sparked in me

Erin’s research sparked the following questions:

  • How does the presence of all these national cultures in INGOs shape their organizational culture?
  • What happens when the NGO manager’s leadership style, informed by national culture, is in clear tension with–let’s say–the espoused leadership model of ‘transformational leadership’, feminist leadership, servant leadership, you name it? This would suggest the person has to be one kind of leader in the daytime, but at night and on the weekend be another person? So much for authentic leadership and ‘bringing your whole self to work’ ideals in that case?
  • Who came up with these newer, aspirational leadership models that are now popular in some INGOs anyway?
  • As leadership and management of many INGOs increasingly is populated by a much more diverse set of people in terms of national culture, when and how will this make the organizational culture less global North-normed?
  • As INGOs have increased their leadership coming from national cultures in the global South, I sometimes see people being ‘spit out’ quite quickly by the dominant culture. Is this because the person’s identity (their lived experience, the non-NGO functional or professional background they may have brought, etc.) is different, and the predominant org culture is unwilling to ‘enlarge the tent’ and embrace this?
  • We know from the research on staff diversity that a greater diversity of people, while definitely beneficial to the organization’s outcomes, productivity, innovation, and creativity in the medium term, in the short term may lead to greater chances of miscommunication, mistrust, increased tension and conflict. As many NGOs are becoming more truly global, will the presence of an ever-greater number of national cultures further enhance these short-term challenges?
  • For those NGOs intent on increasing their global balance of affiliates, sections, members etc, will these new members submit to ‘isomimicry’, i.e. the expectation from the global North members that their organizations will look like them, or will they introduce different forms of ‘organizational being’ to truly diversify the NGO?
  • And what does this mean for change management approaches? To draw from another source on national differences in what’s expected from leaders and managers, (the GLOBE project, following the initial work on national cultures by Geert Hofstede, the Dutch researcher): surely differences in, for instance, performance orientation, power difference, assertiveness, uncertainty avoidance, future orientation, humane orientation, and ingroup collectivism affect how change leaders and change managers need to go about their work?

Many questions, few answers….. but let’s think about this together

I have few answers to the questions above (primarily some gut sense and anecdotal observations), but it would be very worthwhile to brainstorm on them together. Let’s talk if this sparks further ideas or thoughts! Ping me at tosca@5oaksconsulting.org

In the meantime, here’s an earlier blog post from me about why I am quite skeptical of hiring and promoting ‘cultural rebels’ as a strategy towards organizational change.

Links for further reading and thinking

A summary of dimensions derived from the GLOBE project, a very interesting long term research project on cultural differences in leadership and management models:

https://courses.lumenlearning.com/wm-principlesofmanagement/chapter/dimensions-of-cultural-difference-and-their-effect/

Erin Meyer’s Culture Mapping Tool:  (regretfully, the tool is no longer available for free)

Erin’s book The Culture Map

One could argue that being comfortable in a global North-based national culture is a source of informal power. Here is a handy visualization of this particular form of informal power, plus many others. My colleague-consultant Esther Kwaku and Iare co-created the list based on work we did for the International Civil Society Centre this past year. With credit to MEDA, the Canadian development agency, who had the list converted into this nifty graphic image (they liked the list as a prompt to spur useful conversation).

A short video with me about how I define organizational culture

When nonprofits conform to common financial management norms, they may sacrifice as much as half of their impact

Leave a Comment / Accountability, Evaluation and organizational learning, Organizational effectiveness, Uncategorized

When nonprofits conform to common financial management norms, they may sacrifice as much as half of their impact

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels

By George Mitchell, Associate Professor of Nonprofit Management at the City University of New York. He reports on recently published research, conducted together with Thad Calabrese, Associate Professor of Public and Nonprofit Financial Management, at New York University. (George, Hans Peter Schmitz, and Tosca are the co-authors of the book ‘Between Power and Irrelevance: the Future of Transnational NGOs’, and have collaborated for close to 20 years.)

Charities that conform to common nonprofit financial management norms may be sacrificing more than half of their mission impact over a decade. This is the conclusion of our recently published research on a large population of US registered nonprofits and NGOs (domestic and international ones).

As charitable organizations, NGOs have long been under pressure to make themselves look financially trustworthy by following practices like:

  • minimizing overhead
  • being fiscally lean
  • diversifying revenue sources; and
  • avoiding significant debt.

Many funders, watchdogs, and other stakeholders routinely evaluate NGOs based on their conformity to norms like these. But how does following these norms actually affect organizational performance? My co-author Thad Calabrese and I analyzed data from thousands of US charities over several decades to find the answer. Read more (short article) at The Conversation.

Or check out our original research here  (open access/no paywall) or here (paywall).

Let us know how you react to this — perhaps counterintuitive — research outcome! Email me at george.mitchell@baruch.cuny.edu, or leave a comment.

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.

Beyond Diversity Training – What Works (Part Two)

Leave a Comment / Organizational culture, Organizational effectiveness, Uncategorized

Diversity Training: Maintaining Local Nuance when Addressing a Global Challenge

This is Part Two of a guest blog post by Richard Eastmond. Richard is the former Senior Director for People, Operations, and Corporate Services at Amnesty International. He currently serves as an independent consultant. For Part One, see above. Richard is solely responsible for the views expressed in this post.

In Part 1 of this two-part guest blog on diversity training, we address how often-maligned “mandatory diversity training” for an entire organization can actually play a vital role in a much longer journey by providing quick wins early on. A related phenomenon INGOs must address when tackling the need for greater diversity and inclusion is how to maintain local nuance while applying a global strategy to address the problem.

Any one action reverberates across the entire organization

On the one hand, there is a challenge, in an era of acute sensitivity to ethics and accountability in INGOs, where the impact of one individual within a single part of a federated organisation—which, in many respects, acts an independent entity—can cause a reputational tsunami for the global brand. On the other hand, the question when endeavouring to make a change such as increasing diversity, therefore, is how to best balance the need for a global, standardised approach with the reality of implementing such a complex change across a global network of entities of very different scales, resource levels, and leadership maturity. (And this is all without even mentioning the local cultural differences and understandings of what “diversity and inclusion” mean that deeply affect the people on the ground.)

Allowing for local nuance in implementing diversity training

Due to these myriad factors, INGOs need to carefully think through them and their nuances before adopting a “levelling up” or standardised approach to implementing diversity training. For instance, an approach that may be wholly appropriate for a European context might totally miss the zeitgeist in North America and have little relevance in countries in Asia and Africa. What is deployed needs to be adaptive, flexible, and localised, and must recognise how perspectives differ from country to country due to social norms, legacy factors, and the political and cultural context.

When developing an approach to diversity training within your organization, it is therefore necessary to use the following question as a guide:

  • How do you account for different ways of thinking and the need for local nuance when approaching diversity awareness at a global level?

I look forward to hearing your perspective: please reach out to me on LinkedIn with your responses.

Richard Eastmond, January 2021


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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.

When we admire decentralized power in other NGOs but we struggle with it in our own

Leave a Comment / Organizational effectiveness, Organizational structure

“Leaders often praise decentralization when commenting on the INGO world, yet perceive various challenges of implementing decentralization when it comes to their own organizations”. Does this point to a tension between what we say and think as NGOs?

My post, part of the Disrupt and Innovate blog of the International Civil Society Centre, is based on interesting research by Long Tran, whose data, in turn, is based on a Transnational NGO Initiative interview study. Long’s article triggered these provocative thoughts in me. What is your experience with these trade-offs between centralized and decentralized organizational structures? Do we talk honestly about these in the sector? And how would you answer my questions?

Activist wearing sign 'We don't have time'

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

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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.

person in black suit hired an employee

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!

photography of waterfalls between trees

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!