When we received issue 32 of Capacity.org on fragile states, no one in Kenya expected that this context of capacity development would be our main concern in 2008. The first weeks of 2008 were traumatic for Kenya, with over 300,000 displaced people and 1000 deaths following the December 2007 election. So how did SNV-Kenya respond to such a dramatically changed environment?

For SNV Kenya in Eldoret it was clear we could neither continue with business as usual, nor go beyond our mandate and provide emergency relief. Instead, together with our clients/partners, we considered what role we could play as a capacity building organisation in this uncertain environment. Our main concern was that thousands of children were unable to attend school due to the conflict. It was also clear that if local education stakeholders did not act immediately, the gains made under the government’s ‘Free Education for All’ policy would be seriously undermined. There were two major challenges.

First, we needed to rebuild the (public sector) education capacity affected by the conflict. For example, education officers were unable to visit the affected schools to assess the situation, there were no clear national guidelines, and government departments felt overwhelmed.

Second, as Derick Brinkerhoff noted in his article in Capacity.org 32, in such emergencies, there is often a dilemma between the urgent need to restore basic services on the short term, and the desire to contribute to long-term capacity development. This dilemma emerged during an emergency coordination meeting in Eldoret, where none of those attending were from local organisations. There was therefore a danger that the humanitarian crisis and the (much needed) international response would undermine the capacity of local education stakeholders in the long term.

Threefold approach
SNV acted to complement the relief efforts by supporting local capacity. Education, as one of SNV’s strategic areas, was a good starting point; it was not an urgent basic service so there was time to plan. Our approach was threefold. First, we supported an emergency committee in order to demonstrate visible coordination of education stakeholders. Second, we offered a service contract to a local organisation, the Kenya Private Schools Association (KPSA), to carry out educational needs assessments. Third, we created linkages with affected communities (including teachers and parents) both within and outside the internally displaced people (IDP) camps, enabling them to be part of the solution. Meanwhile, SNV joined the National Education Emergency Committee led by the Ministry of Education. This was an important link to the national level and a necessary step towards scaling up the approach in other regions.

SNV teamed up with UNICEF, an organisation experienced in providing ‘hardware’ such as setting up makeshift schools, and providing education kits and logistical expertise. These capabilities blended well with the SNV’s ‘software’, in particular its ability to bring together local stakeholders, like the KPSA, municipal and district education offices, teachers, and street children’s organisations. As a result, 4200 children were able to continue with their schooling. SNV has continued to help many thousands of children from the IDP camps and elsewhere in the region, to return to school.

The Netherlands Minister for Development Cooperation, Bert Koenders, visited Eldoret in February. He commended SNV and UNICEF for their combined support, without taking over (even temporarily) the leadership role of local stakeholders. Many times we were attracted by quick-fix and bypass solutions, but we managed not to give in to the temptation. This is probably the most important lesson learned.

I am involved in an anti-poverty programme that has reached the end of its first phase. During the phase that has been completed, I developed a method that would allow us to monitor and evaluate the impact of the programme on the capacities of local organisations. However, only the reference situation (baseline) was established. The evaluation of the impact that could have been achieved in 2007 will now not take place due to changes in the institutional landscape in my country, Burkina Faso.

At the same time, the government is working with the World Bank to finance the second phase of the programme. The Bank is demanding that we now carry out an evaluation of the impact of the first phase of the programme on ‘social capital’, and elaborate a method that will permit the establishment of the reference situation for the next phase. Because the concept of ‘social capital’ is new to our country, I would very much like to make contact with some knowledgeable specialists who would be willing to share their experiences in this area of activity.

The evolution of leadership to a large extent is influenced and shaped by the socio-economic and the geo-political context. The context for nurturing leaders can be viewed as the environment that provides enough nutrients, light, air and water to produce organic leadership that is immune to corruption. It is a simple lesson from ecology. The metaphor of a swamp (no oxygen flow) versus a river is what describes the state of corruption. It is the healthy ecosystem that supports life.

When do organisations and societies reach a state when leadership corrupts, and how can we prevent such a state? To address this question, I will use metaphors from culture and ecology.

Paradoxically, deep in the sub-consciousness of the Arab/Muslim mind there is a notion that it is a nation with a global message (Resalat) commissioned by the Revelation of Islam to be the trustee and witness (Shahed) to covey harmony and peace by providing a new paradigm of governance and human development. Due to the remarkable instabilities created by both wars and oil money, the Arab/Muslim mind lost its ability to evolve and co-create a new version of organic leadership that was embodied by the prophet Mohammad (peace be upon him).

Simply, the Arab/Muslim nation could not create the balanced blend between tradition and modernity that would inspire a leadership that communicate to the local and global discourse with the same mastery. We ended up with two extremes – one model that involves either living with the past and detached from reality, and another that embodies the Western model without local identity and relevance to the local context. Both models provide a good recipe for corruption in leadership because they are not congruent with the ecology of organisations and society.

To address and transform this state of ‘mental drought’ (lack of water and nutrients), contamination (lack of oxygen) and the inability to produce energy (lack of sun and photosynthesis), we need to build the capacity of people who will be able to rehabilitate their enabling environment (habitat). We need also to transform the state of entropy and disorder of having ‘free ions and volatile elements’ to get ‘compounds’ that are stable and useful to all species, like water (hydrogen and oxygen) and salt (sodium and chlorine). This implies that we must live and celebrate the duality or the ‘compound state’ of matter and spirit, ‘text’ and ‘context’ and between sight (Bassar) and insight (Basseera), or the soft and hard parts of the construction of the world (Emartu Al-Kawn).

In brief, the conditions necessary for an enabling environment to evolve include the enhancement of innovation (Ijtihad), feedback mechanisms (Shura), and renewal processes through the selection/election of the fittest to lead. The fundamental requirement for achieving all this is to evolve and reform a new consciousness of the individual. The inner-self of humans (Dameer) must be nourished first, then all goodness will follow.

The notion of leadership is always masked by what is not said. When I examine it through the experiences of development projects and organisations in the Congolese context, I realise that it is marred by many weaknesses. It seems to me legitimate to say that leadership does not come for free. Confounded often by power, at a certain level, it becomes ipso facto the subject of ‘win–win’ deals and promises; in brief, nothing comes for nothing.

Comparing the cleavages that characterise even the structures of certain development organisations and projects, I ask myself what in the end differentiates the problems of political leadership – in the true sense of the words – from those that affect development organisations and projects.

In principle, the merit of leadership must be the consequence of competences or, rather, the capacities that make up those that unfortunately use dark paths of material and moral corruption in order to claim themselves the defenders of the interests of their ‘base’. This is just as true in ‘modern’ societies as it is in communities with oral traditions such as the Pygmies with whom I work.

Thus, ultimately, one should not truly speak about ‘free’ leadership, but rather their interests, whether immediate or remote.

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Like a dance, leadership is a delicate but simple relationship that depends on entangled, reciprocal movements shaped by expectation, timing, rhythm and, perhaps most important, transparency. By definition, the leader in a dance or in governance cannot hide his steps or keep secret her choreography and still lead effectively. When leaders fashion success with positive achievements, without acknowledging or reflecting on stumbles and failures, leadership corrupts. When leaders perpetuate the false notion that ‘the answers’ necessarily rest with themselves, leadership corrupts.

Courageous leadership is transparent; strong leadership is itself guided by those being led; and wise leadership poses the right questions rather than propagating ‘the answer’. It is courage, strength and wisdom that empower successful leadership to tango, even in the dark.

This response was written in the spirit of learning after joint reflection and conversations with other Olive OD practitioners – Noki Pakade, Faith Sax and Anne Kroon.

Maybe even posing statements about hype is itself no more than hype. How many of us can honestly say that we actually fully understand the concepts of ‘hype’ and ‘learning organisation’? Definitions of these words differ greatly. According to the Concise Oxford Dictionary, hype can be both ‘extravagant and intensive publicity or promotion’, and ‘something deliberately misleading, a deception’. The two meanings are quite different.
There is no doubt that one can find intensive publicity and promotion of the concept of the learning organisation around the world. Whether it can be labelled extravagant remains to be seen. For some, the concept may have lost its real meaning. In their experience it is used too casually – even extravagantly – in every document, every meeting and in all forms of communication.

For others, however, the concept is still fresh, energising, innovative and useful. Who decides when a concept that was once deemed useful for oneself, acquires the negative connotation ‘it’s just hype!’, and becomes less attractive to others? By the time the ‘learning organisation’ had became a fashionable concept in some development circles, it had already become passé for some first-generation users in the private sector.

Every fashion has a few trendsetters, but the majority of people jump on the bandwagon once it is rolling, and while others adopt later (or not at all). There may be all kinds of reasons for late adoption: insufficient need, the suspicion that change will be painful, the lack of links with the outside world where these concepts circulate, or a deep fear of proposing something new. We will find trendsetters and people who are already bored with the concept, as well people and organisations for whom the concept can still be useful in the South and the North, in new and old organisations, large and small, as well as in those that are well funded and those who are struggling for funding.

The concept of the learning organisation can evoke different positive or negative energy levels in people. There is no need to freeze the meaning of a learning organisation. It is allowed to mean different things to different people in different situations at different times. Let’s be pragmatic. Some see a learning organisation as an organisational system that learns at all levels, all the time, and acts accordingly. Does this exist in its purest form in your organisation? In any organisation? Pretending that organisations can reach this state might be deliberately misleading (the other meaning of ‘hype’).

On the other hand, there are organisations that value learning. In some, acting accordingly is encouraged and practised in different parts of the organisation. Learning by people who really value making a contribution to their organisation and to its mission is useful, even necessary.

Some see – or at least sub-consciously feel – a dichotomy between learning and day-to-day work, what the organisation delivers. Learning is seen as a luxury, only for those with a little time and money on their hands. This is nonsense. An organisation that focuses on delivery without learning can’t keep up with changing situations in the long run. On the other hand, learning without delivery misses the practice to become full learning, and so remains theoretical and ineffective.

Organisations in our sector often pay lip service to the value of learning as it can be highly profitable. It pays to present oneself to donors, peers and maybe even to oneself as a learning organisation. But the extent to which the people in the proclaimed learning organisation are actually learning is never really tested or questioned. Someone on the outside will have a hard time assessing the real learning character of an organisation, and the degree to which it is acting according to learning in another organisation.

Learning in an organisation is not something you do for the outside world. You do it for yourself, maybe with some spin-offs for the outside world. Where does the core value of learning originate in an organisation? It can start anywhere, but at some point – in our experience – it will have to be supported and nurtured by management. For individual or small group learning to be integrated into the learning of the organisation, the attitudes and the actions of management are crucial.

If learning does not lead to sufficient change in practice it becomes a ritual. Some live well with rituals, while others tend to get bored or frustrated after a time. If learning is not considered to be truly central to the fulfilment of the organisation’s purpose, it becomes a farce, a PR stunt. These organisations might be better of without the credo of being a ‘learning organisation’ as it will frustrate individual employees, intentionally mislead others and even limit the results of the organisation.

A bit of publicity about the importance of learning in an organisation is highly valuable. We cannot afford not to learn. We never could. We never will. Too much around us is changing too fast for us to ignore self-conscious reflection and experimentation by people in organisations. Organisations that are not able to stop and think, theorise and consciously take risks will die.

A bit of ensuing commotion, an impulse to change things in organisations in both the South and the North remains necessary. If that impulse is emphasised as a ‘learning organisation’, ‘capacity building’, ‘training’ or ‘innovation’ doesn’t really matter. If this impulse is called hype by some, then so be it. The essence will not go away.

Science tells us that we sleep so that the brain can process what we have learned that day. So, we should ask, what is the equivalent of sleep for organisational learning? Do weekends and holidays serve the same purpose as a good night’s slumber?

Whether conscious or not, the daily processing of organisational experiences and changes in our environment is a constant. Conscious learning requires that we notice events and information, reflect on them and try to generate positive responses – that we move with the times. The absence of deliberate learning activities puts the noticing and reflection somewhere in the realm of organisational ‘sleep-life’. Learning becomes as a dream, remembered briefly on awakening, sometimes with a lasting effect, but more usually lost forever, neither understood nor put to useful purpose.

Capacity.org asked a number of experts to react to this statement. Three responses are published below.

Sometimes ‘learning organisations’ oversell the effects of what they can deliver. The idea is easily used without taking into account all that it takes to have a process of learning within or among organisations.

Switching from a traditional organisation to a learning one is difficult. It takes personal conviction from the members, and new ways of getting things done. Once that happens, it takes time to make things happen in a different manner. It is not until the members realise the benefits of documenting their good practices, experiences and successes, and then start sharing them with their co-workers and peers in other organisations that things can begin to change.

The barriers to be overcome start from the bottom up, and the other way around, and a thorough follow-up effort is needed to promote change, and to encourage and remind people, especially when they have little motivation. Nonetheless, nothing guarantees that a learning organisation or a learning community will emerge. There are many things that need to be done in order to achieve it. The idea that it is a piece of cake, I think, is what is truly the hype.

I would like to thank you for publishing important and professionally useful information concerning the economic policies in ACP countries. The ‘networks and partnerships’ issue has helped me a great deal with our new structural orientation that is being used to network our hydraulic programmes.

The interview in issue 27 was an exceptional piece. Individuals such as Mr Sidibé are unique. With true support he will be able to contribute significantly to an administration that desires reform and good governance for the people.