Any talk about water won't rival the feeling of this swimmer who just jumped in (picture by Horia Varlan on Flickr)

This week I led students of Latin America Studies at Georgetown University through a Net-Map exercise (Thanks to their teacher Patricia Biermayr-Jenzano for organizing this!). They chose their own questions (a wide range, from personal family disputes to crime reduction in a Latin American small town) and started mapping it after a brief introduction. All of them had read some of my papers and case studies before, so one of the things that struck me in their feedback was how different Net-Map looked to them when they read about it and when they actually did it. Some of their comments:

“I initially was skeptical because I did not understand why a simple activity could be a method for creating social change.  Net-Mapping allowed me to view the world differently.  Granted, stepping back and analyzing the degree of influences in our lives should be a natural process, but it is something that we do not do visually.  By doing this activity and visually seeing our influences, it breaks the ice and fosters dialogue in a non-confrontational way.” 

“The level of sophistication of the tool far exceeded my personal expectations.  I was skeptical not because of the materials involved in the process (paper and pen) but because of the difficulty in determining who influences whom in most of the research in which I have participated.  I think the greatest advantage of the Net-Map system is the ability to look at an activity from a variety of levels.  My group worked on the scale of the individual, but seeing the work of the other groups made it obvious that Net-Map can be transferred to an organizational level or even perhaps to an international level.” 

“I had never done net-mapping or anything alike before. Honestly, when listening to the explanation I thought it was kind of a game. However, after doing the exercise I actually realized the great value it has. Using this hands-on method of visualizing problems or activities I believe is really useful. I believe that great ideas and problem visualization can be seen that may not be realized using other strategic methods.”

Yes, I fully realize the irony of this post, because, as I said in the introduction: talking about an experience is very different from experiencing it. So, get some pens, post-it notes and toys, print out the instructions, come up with a question that bothers you and involves many different actors and see what happens if you try mapping it. You might not start out as an Olympic swimmer but rather splash around in the shallow pool for a while. But even that will be a more interesting experience than reading stories about water, wouldn’t it?

]]> http://netmap.wordpress.com/2012/02/01/to-talk-about-swimming-or-make-them-jump-in/feed/ 0 Eva Schiffer Splash made by a swimmer jumping into the sea http://netmap.wordpress.com/2011/12/13/small-town-netmapping-can-informal-relationships-be-captured-within-institutional-analysis-guest-post-by-jody-harris/ http://netmap.wordpress.com/2011/12/13/small-town-netmapping-can-informal-relationships-be-captured-within-institutional-analysis-guest-post-by-jody-harris/#comments Tue, 13 Dec 2011 18:52:00 +0000 Eva Schiffer http://netmap.wordpress.com/?p=1643 ]]> My PhD research in Zambia is an evaluation of an NGO program that aims in part to align and coordinate certain activities within the Ministries of Agriculture and Health for improved nutrition outcomes (both food and health being essential elements of good nutritional status, of course!). A key piece of information, then, is how are different players in these sectors interacting right now, and how does that interaction change over the course of the project? Enter NetMap.

The key to the alignment strategy being used in this project is to start at District rather than National level, to create a model of coordination that can be used to advocate for scaling up to other areas or even other countries. Ministry staffing is minimal at District level, so I aimed to interview everybody employed in each District Ministry, from the Directors down to technical officers (around 5 people per ministry), and to snowball out from there to anyone else who came up in the interviews as crucial to the process.

This being the first time I had used NetMap, I was unsure how it would be received- how would people react to being asked to give up an hour or more of their day to draw pictures with an outsider? In anticipation of rejection, I made sure the process looked as professional as possible- putting together a regulation NetMap kit, sending formal letters of invitation to interviews, hiring a highly professional local assistant, and dressing as smartly as I possibly could in sweltering pre-rains temperatures. But the method held true, and just following the steps from actors to links to influence engaged everyone from the moment we started- as I had been promised it would!

Being on a smaller scale than much national-level research I have seen that uses social network analysis, I had wondered if I could use NetMap at the individual level; that is, could I map not only the formal interactions but also the informal interactions between individual players within each Ministry, since it is very likely that personal relationships shape collaboration, particularly in such a small population as in the district capital (a small, one-road town). One of my pre-defined links therefore was informal interactions, and my questions attempted to probe whether person X might have family ties to person Y, or whether person A drinks in the evenings with person B. But it turned out in pre-test that even small-town rural Zambia had too many players in this field for everyone to know everyone; people knew which organizations were doing what with nutrition, but not who was doing it, and the method defaulted pretty quickly back to looking at organizations rather than individuals. Still a very interesting picture, but I wonder if there might be something in this for my future research…

So, now I have a collection of beautifully colorful maps to process and a good idea of local views on the alignment of sectors for nutrition in rural Zambia, so watch this space…

I’m interested in understanding the complex relational dynamics occuring in a bilateral cooperation project in which I was directly involved with a managing role.
While running a net-map interview with one very experienced, highly placed French project manager, who lived and worked in international development in Burundi for 28 years and is married to a Burundian, I was struck by one of his comments. I asked: “What is the most important gain this Burundian ministry officer wants to get out this project?” He answered: “He wants to become richer in obligations.” At first I didn’t really get what he was meaning and I was clearly puzzled, so he continued: “You see, the real currency here is not the Burundian Franc, it’s finer than that. Sure, money is important to them, but what really counts is the favours someone can do and consequently the credits that these constitute for the future. That is to be powerful: to know that you have plenty of people that owe you something and that you can draw on that “bank” when you need.” No big news – you may say – this is true everywhere, not just in Burundi! Yes indeed, I may agree, and yet it was an eye opener for me, something I hadn’t really understood that clearly in my 5 years living here. In fact I hadn’t realised the adaptive potential of such strategy that, in my view, is much more than solidarity. Obligations do not expire and in a world where everything is still quite uncertain and precarious, and even more so after 15 years long ethnic war has quaked all landmarks, where the right of law is not assured and a minister today can become a taxi driver tomorrow, you may well prefer to invest time and effort in strenghtening your social relationships, so that they can be loaded with obligations, like savoury Parma hams hanging in an Italian Delicatessen, seasoning for the right moment to pick them down. This is their priority – increasing resilience through social bonds – rather than implementing project activities timely, according to the blueprint, as we expats expect. Call me naïve, I hadn’t gotten it, and I suspect many other development agents haven’t either, as the mainstream tendency is to focus on the content of what is done or has to be done and to neglect the importance of the impalbable web of social networks (which has little to do with the social networks on the web .

The body is more than a pile of sticks - group brain is more than a pile of brains (picture copyright by perpetualplum on flickr)

I love reading books by great thinkers, who (that’s how I imagine it) sit in their cabin in the forest, have amazing ideas that they slowly work through (or that hit them like lightening) and that they put on paper in solitary contemplation. And while most of us might not be at that level of genius, there is something to be said for solitary, in-depth thinking within the confines of your own brain. No matter how difficult that is getting with the increasing disturbance through social media (and social friends…).

Now crowd sourcing seems to be at the other end of the spectrum, solving problems by tapping into the minds of millions, letting everyone who wants contribute and improve the outcome. That makes it possible to integrate more diverging views, knowledge from more different domains and something we vaguely call collective wisdom.

But then, a lot of crowd sourcing is actually facilitated by mechanisms that help us pile our individual thoughts on top of each other, compiling contributions of single minds in front of computers (or cell phones or whatever). That is great for developing and maintaining something like Wikipedia, where we need a compilation of the true and tested knowledge of all known phenomena of the world, based on some kind of majority agreement.

But I wonder: Is it also the best approach to solving messy unclear problems, finding amazing innovations and unusual leaps forward? Or: How can you help a group of people not just pile their thoughts on top of each other but actually multiply what one person can come up with by helping them truely think together and (at least for a few hours) tap into their combined group brain?

I have found that a lot of group facilitation techniques are exactly about this, getting groups to the point where their sum is more than just a collection of the individual parts. And if you have ever suffered through a boring meeting of intelligent people, you know that just putting all the experts in a room and hoping they will come up with something amazing, will not lead you far. So what are the things that help you tap into the group brain?

1. Combine structure and freedom. In Net-Map we have a very simple structure of 4 steps (write actors on cards, draw links, write goals next to actors, set up influence towers) that moves the discussion forward and helps participants focus on the issues of interest. But beyond these steps there are very few limitations with regards to what people can discuss and it is this discussion around the map drawing in which the most interesting discoveries are made.

2. Don’t stay on the surface – explore your assumptions. The most frustrating group discussions are those where every participant assumes that the others share their assumptions while that is not the case. Talking about influence for example, let’s say I assume influence comes from being rich and you assume influence comes from having the best ideas. If we try to develop a strategy for becoming more influential together without ever looking at these assumptions, I will find your approaches unbearably naive and you will find me terribly cynical and all we get out of this is increased frustration and disrespect for each other. When we set up influence towers while doing a Net-Map, group members often have the most heated debate around the question of “What makes someone influential”. But these debates are heated in a good way, they are engaged because they point to the heart of the matter. And as participants unearth their assumptions, they show “where they are coming from” and start connecting to each others way of thinking in a more constructive way.

3. The fact that I am right doesn’t mean that you are wrong. Now this is the most difficult and the most rewarding challenge of developing a group brain. It means achieving true inspiration by breaking down the boundaries between my way and your way of thinking. We are trained in the kind of debate where we want to win, where, while I listen to you I make a list of counter arguments in my head to see how I can beat you. Try holding this thought in your brain instead: “We can disagree and both be right.” Feels a bit painful? Especially if this is about an issue you deeply care about… Sure, because what you feel is the crumbling of walls between you and the person you disagree with, and walls give you such a great sense of security.You know who you are and what you stand for. But they are also really in the way if you want to see what the world looks like.

In the groups I work with people tend to have very strong assumptions about what makes someone influential over a certain issue. Alone each of them will focus on one strategy and gather more money, learning, connections, black-mail material or whatever they think makes them influential. And they will tend to form coalitions with people who follow the same strategies, built on the same assumptions because this is just so comfortable (Isn’t it funny how we think a person is so clever when what we actually observe is just that they share our assumptions about the world?). If a group can learn to entertain the thought that I can be right and you can be right even though we disagree, they can start seeing that different people in their system gained their power through different means. And that an influencer coalition that combines these different influence sources can be so much more powerful than one that only includes one and fights with everyone else. Sure, you have to see where your boundaries are and maybe you don’t want to start collecting black-mail material… not because it doesn’t make you influential but because you don’t agree with it on ethical grounds.

4. Don’t force agreement, encourage respectful exploration. In the end, a group of diverse inspired thinkers will not (and should not) agree on everything. If you want to use the group brain to the fullest, don’t restrict it by the pre-condition that afterward everyone has to hold hands around the camp-fire and sing Kumbaja, don’t force people to end up with one common story if that is not where they are. Your goal (as a facilitator or participant) is rather to be connected with respect, trust and insight while staying diverse. You want the individuals to continue doing in their own brains what is best done in solitary thinking while trusting that they can share even their craziest ideas with the group and they will together cook a great meal out of this. Some things sweet, others bitter. Some pure, others mixed and spicy.

O.k., this is it for today. A friend of mine once said that reading my posts is like hearing me think, and this post is truely one of those, my attempt of making sense of what I see by writing it down and sharing it with you. It would be great to hear what you think, does this relate to your experience? Are there other things that are crucial when trying to activate the group brain? What are the things you should by all means avoid?

... and what lights your fire? (copyright by Neils Photography on flickr)

… or: responsibility without authority.

We’ve all been there and maybe you are there today: You feel responsible for the success of an initiative, change process or project but have little or no formal authority to tell people what to do. Or maybe you just have a passion for making something happen (in your organization, neighborhood, family) but you are not the boss who can order people to do it. Well, whether ordering people to do stuff actually leads to sustainable change is a different question. But today I want to talk about affecting change if you don’t have formal authority.

Some of the most amazing organizational changes and innovations come from the belly and not the head of organizations. And some of the most amazing potential changes just live a sad life in the heads of people who never manage to infect their surroundings with them. So, what do you need to do to lead without being the boss?

I think the first thing to do is to give yourself permission. A lot of people censor what they even try, because they think it is not in their job description to rock the boat. It might not be in your formal job description for this specific position in this organization, but it’s in your job description as a human being to try and make your little corner of the world as better place. Or, to look at it more pragmatically: If you ever want to get into a position of authority, you want to be noticed as someone who goes beyond the narrow letters of the job description and achieves amazing things, no matter what your position in the organization.

Discover what you burn for. The most powerful force in leading without formal authority is your own passion. It will guide you, sustain you when it looks like nothing is working out and draw people to you and your goals. Remember, people can freely choose to support your initiative (as you have no formal authority), so being engaging is one of your strongest assets. Achieving things that go beyond your formal authority can take a lot of energy and be exhausting. So focus on one or two things you really burn for.

Understand how influence works in this system. Every system (organization, neighborhood, family) has different ways how members can gain influence. Some typical ones would be: formal authority, seniority, being an expert, having new ideas, being likeable and engaging, bringing in money, being grumpy, being manipulative, being connected to influential people (inside or outside the system), being of the preferred gender, age group, race etc. Study your system, think about the people who seem to be influential, how are they doing it? What makes them powerful? Don’t narrow your mind when your think about this: In each system different people succeed to gain influence with different strategies.

Understand your own influencer profile. Look at your personality, background and position in the system: Which ones of the above  attributes of an influencer do you have already? Which ones can you realistically develop (changing your race or gender are obviously less likely than changing your level of expertise or grumpieness)? What influencer personalities do you admire and connect to? Don’t try to become someone else, rather become your best and most influential self by developing those parts of your personality and position which will allow you to lead.

Understand and develop your influence network. If you haven’t drawn a Net-Map around this issue yet, now is the time. Ask yourself: “Who are all the people, groups and organizations that can influence whether I achieve the goal I am passionate about?” And map all actors, formal and informal links, their goals with regards to your goal and their level of influence. Reflect on what you see: Where do the movers and shakers in this map get their influence from (see above)? Who are you linked to already? What links are missing? What actors or links hold you back?

If you are like most people, you will be connected to a lot of others who are similar to you and few who are different. Let’s say you are a young white male and your  influence comes from being an expert on the issue. I would take a bet that most of the people you go for lunch with are equally young white males and experts, while you have fever connections to people whose influence comes from seniority, bringing in money or making the rules. It’s nice and comfortable to have a peer group of friends of the same kind who share the same ideas. But to become a leader even though you don’t have authority, it is crucial to connect with those who don’t just share your influencer strategy but can bring the missing pieces to the table. Look at your map again: Who has the most different influencer assets from yours? Don’t pick someone whose values you don’t share (like the greatest back-stabber) but just someone who has a different role and personality. Could this person develop a passion for your goals? Or do your goals have a side effect that would be great for this person? Explore. Form coalitions accross organizational or social boundaries.

Connect and share. Now you better understand who you want to join forces with, connect and share with them. Sharing is crucial if you want to have a long term impact: Share responsibility and ownership, access to other network partners and maybe most importantly, generously and publicly share praise once you achieve something amazing.

And finally: Wherever you go, don’t leave your passion at home. Leading without being a boss is a much messier and less predictable process than giving orders. Serendipity is your best friend. Don’t lecture everyone you meet about your goals till they are bored to tears. But be ready to talk about your passion outside of formal work meetings, connect it to other people’s interest in the coffee break, with a stranger on the plane, with a fellow parent at the playground (that’s how I ended up giving a brown bag seminar at Deloitte Consulting, but that is a different story alltogether…) and be in it for the long haul. This leads me back to “discovering what you burn for”. Because that is the only way you will really want to carry it with you all the time.

Learn mapping - like the participants at our Net-Map Summer School in Italy

My readers often ask me: When do you give the next Net-Map training in my part of the world. As most of my trainings are organized by organizations with rather specific purpose, they tend to be open only to this organization’s internal audience. My next introduction workshop in Germany is different: It is part of a conference on sustainable development which is organized by the alumni of my old university in Lueneburg and it is open to the interested public.

Esther Kreuz, one of the newly certified Net-Map facilitators, who attended the certification course in Italy, will help me with this workshop: She will be the Net-Mapper in the room while I will do most of the teaching online, from my office in Washington. I’d love to welcome some of my German readers there.

If you implement 6 projects you implement 6 projects

Now I know from experience that training, learning and spreading new ideas is much more complex than an easy multiplication. I have trained some trainers who have by now turned into co-owners of the method, putting about as much passion into it as I do, talking, breathing, eating and dreaming Net-Map and teaching it whereever they go… While others of my students were happy to attend a training in good company but have never had the actual opportunity to use Net-Map in their work. So if I mapped out the actual map, with myself in the middle and all the people I have worked with and trained around me, it would be a less symetric map. Which also reminds me that it is not just the fact that you conduct trainings: Train good people and train them well!

If you teach 6 who each implement 3 project, your efforts lead to 18 projects

But still, the general truth remains: If you are a little person who thinks she/he has a great idea, go teach. And don’t be afraid of “giving your knowledge away”. It’s not like money, which, once you have given it away, alas, is not in your pocket any more. If you share your ideas freely and teach people to the point where they can become teachers, you will see your ideas grow, morph, develop and something overwhelming might come out of it, which you never would have achieved on your own.

If you teach 6 trainers who teach 3 students each who implement 3 projects each, your effort leads to 54 projects

Learn from others how to be more agile (picture copyright Luca5 on flickr)

I’m not sure. But it does sound very similar. As a response to my earlier post about agile international development, Mitchell Toomey of UNDP invited me to join their discussion forum around “development 2.0″ which basically looks at what development projects can learn from the way that successful web 2.0 start-ups work. Mitchell wrote a more elaborate post about how human development projects can become more agile, which shows that he is much more familiar with the technical side of agile and programming in general than I am. Other interesting stuff I read in the same direction is the development 2.0 manifesto by Giulio Quaggiotto and a response by Ian Thorpe who points out (and rightly so) that development 2.0 is more than tech, it’s remaking an industry. His view is closest to what I was thinking of, because when I apply agile concepts to international development, I am also thinking of projects that have no cell phones or computers or internet involved, or that, at least, don’t have those tools at the core of their mission. You could have an agile basked weaving project or an agile breastfeeding support project, where the core of what you do is: People interacting with people and natural things. But still you do this in an iterative, participatory, learning oriented manner. You might use cell phones to support the project. But you don’t start out with a cool app that you have to somehow build a project around…

One issue where I am sure the development 2.0 people could learn a lot from agile coaches (and not just from web 2.0 start-ups) is how to institute these radical changes in large hierarchical organizations. As I hear, even the US Department of Defense is flirting with becoming agile. I am sure that people who help a large command and control organization like this become more flexible would have some experience to share that would be useful for people who are interested in changing the way they work with or in the UN, USAID or gtz.

If you come to an organization (as internal or external Agile coach) and you want to implement Agile, this is not like saying: “We are going to use this new product now… but we will keep on working the way we did before”. It’s a radical change in what the organization does and how it does it. And as we know, the core reason for forming an organization is to organize chaos, provide stability and predictability. So typically organizations have a strong inherent force toward doing things “how we always did them” and are allergic against change. A lot of organizations are sort of ok with changing what they do (e.g. producing new products to follow market development) but changing how things are done is the scariest thing, because that attacks the glue that holds an organization together.

And that is the main reason why introducing Agile is not a technical as much as an organizational change task and why the Agile coaches got so excited when trying out Net-Map. Typically they are brought into the organization by someone who thinks Agile is a great idea and is looking for a partner in implementing it in the organization. The coaches should, however, not fall for the illusion that “the organization” wants to become agile. It’s always more complex than that. You will have people who fear loosing their power as experts or clearing houses as the new way of doing things is introduced, you will have others who don’t agree that you can trust people to deliver instead of micromanaging and controling every breath they take, some (maybe in the leadership) will wake up one day and realize that they underestimated the depth of change that they invited into their organization and get very nervous about it, because they actually just wanted an increase in productivity without a revolution in work flow organization or organizational culture.

As a coach you come into this situation and see all these people just as “the organization”, a mass of faces, having no idea where the secret and open supporters and saboteurs sit and how this specific change process fits into the history of this organization. In our Net-Mapping session, participants mapped out their own perception of specific organizational constellations they have to deal with and developed a deeper understanding of the core stumbling blocks and coalitions. That is a great first step. But imagine how powerful it would become if you started to use it with the people driving and impacted by the change. Interviewing your first point of contact / the person who initiated the Agile implementation would be a first step to understand the lay of the land. Then, in individual or group interviews you would talk with people who have very different perspectives on this, making sure that you are respectful to everyone, no matter what their stand is. So instead of saying: “These people are for or against Agile (the good and the bad people)” you would have to frame both perspectives positively, for example by saying that they are for stability or for change… Apart from getting a very fast in-depth understanding of the positive and negative, formal and informal power networks, you would also have a great way of understanding the root causes for people’s hesitations and allowing all of them to feel like they are part of this development within their organization, instead of feeling like this is something leadership is doing to them.

Some of the coaches were really excited about the idea of including initial Net-Map sessions into their approaches, so maybe I can soon write about how this actually worked.

Manifesto for Agile Software Development

“We are uncovering better ways of developing
software by doing it and helping others do it.
Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on
the right, we value the items on the left more.”

Have a look at the way it starts. It is not about “we have all the answers” but “we are discovering better ways by doing”, not just by theoretical thinking about it. In my years of working with international development projects I have seen all different kinds, but I must say, a lot of projects still are heavy on the right hand side. Let me take you through how I connect this manifesto to my experience to explain some of the things I have seen in international development. And tell me if this relates to your experience as well…

“Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”

Someone has a tool (whether it’s a new solar cooker or a new kind web platform) they are excited about and look for a place where they can implement it – and for funding to do so. If you have a hammer, the world looks like a nail… Some of these hammer and nail projects have really interesting unintended effects of a side aspect of the project, maybe the training meetings allow the stakeholders to network, even if the content they learn is less relevant. But how many projects are able, willing and allowed (by their funders) to have a close look at this, abandon their hammer and just focus on what really has an impact?

“Working software over comprehensive documentation”

 Some donors seem very focused on extensive documentation, pre-defined evaluation and filling out forms, and less insistent that the project or product actually works on the ground. Agile teams believe in very fast feedback loops, they might program for a couple of weeks, get to a point where a product (thought far from perfect) can see the light of day, be tried and tested and the feedback you get is fed into the next cycle of improving the product. Imagine doing that in a development project. Take your solar cooker or web platform prototype to the potential users after a few weeks, let them play with it, get their feedback, incorporate it in the next design and bring it back to them soon to play (or cook) some more. Continue to improve.

“Customer collaboration over contract negotiation”

At the coach camp we talked a lot about the fact that trust is crucial for being agile. And I think that is one of the reasons why a lot of people involved in development projects (whether funding or implementing) try to develop contracts and other binding commitments that are as waterproof as possible, because working with strangers (or new colleagues) from different cultural and socio-economic backgrounds and with different expectations makes it extremely difficult to develop trust. So the thinking is: If I don’t know if I can trust this one, I better have a really good contract to protect me. However, we often work in countries where a written contract has only a guiding function and is impossible to legaly enforce and it is the quality of the trust and collaboration with your “customers” on the ground, that is your strongest protector against abuse or fraud. But while that is something that many successful development practitioners know and do intuitively, that happens on the level of individual learning and is not supported by the general structures we work in.

“Responding to change over following a plan”

I think that is what resonated most strongly with me, because I have seen so many projects that were bound to execute the plan that they had come up with in the initial proposal, even if they found through their work on the ground that something else would work much better, a different problem was much more severe or conditions on the ground changed rapidly from the time they first developed their plans. I was once in a project meeting where the donor representative said: “You know, this is a learning project, so if you realize in the middle of it that you need to change your approach, that is fine.” I think we felt something like shocked relief that a donor would actually say that.

The agile coaches I met didn’t talk a lot about programming and code etc. but about how to support organizational change, how to encourage managers to be open to new approaches and how to deal with resistance. One of the most powerful things about this meeting was that it was a gathering of the tribe (as in “people of the same kind”): In their work as change agents they might often be the most radical, craziest person around, trying to convince their reluctant clients that being agile is actually possible and beneficial. And here they were, a large room full and within this room they were all mainstream, not radical at all. And the things that would spur endless discussions and scepticism outside would just get a “yes, I know” and the reassurance that the other person did indeed know.

If agile philosophies are to take root in international development (and I have seen donors and implementers who are leaning towards them, even if they call them something different), I think it is crucial to – once in a while – gather the tribe and just say “yes, I know” to people, who are just the same kind of crazy…

And now back to my question above… does this resonate with your experiences? And: Where do you go to meet your tribe?