Beyond the dotted line

Partnership in action

When invited to speak about the partnership, the senior manager of a local NGO started talking poignantly about his experience. Previously he had been responsible for a small regional office with four staff members, two vehicles and one telephone line. Following the disaster, the region was completely overwhelmed with international NGOs, journalists and TV crews, government officials and the army. The manager found himself caught up in a maelstrom, pushed and pulled by the urgency of events, accompanied by relentless media attention.

The disaster had created an intensely political environment in which he, as manager of an organisation founded by a minority group, was required to act very differently. In his dealings with the European NGO staff he felt extremely under-confident. When outsiders came in with systematic ways of working, no matter how well intentioned they were, he felt they were taking over. He was fearful of making mistakes, and of constraining the relief effort with his objections, so by and large he kept quiet. Of course his reservations leaked out in other ways, and were shared by other local staff, to the extent that an ‘us’ and ‘them’ dynamic between the two sets of staff was created. Over time, a number of factors undermined the effort to develop the capacity of local staff, but the feeling that local staff were not fully recognised by the Europeans was clearly one of the big ones. Nor were some European staff prepared to work for local managers: they would not recognise them as managers.

What causes this feeling of being taken over, which leads to the resentment and frustration that began to sour the relationship between two groups of committed, well intentioned people? What is at the root of this lack of mutual recognition? It is inevitable that there will be difficulties between staff trying to achieve things together, particularly when they are developing a new relationship under very stressful circumstances. A story told by the chair of the board of the local NGO might give an insight into how the staff of the organisation made sense of their own response to the crisis, and how this demonstrated a very different way of knowing from that of the Europeans.

Before the scale of the crisis was fully understood, the chair received a phone call from his sister. She taught in a school next to the hospital where army helicopters were bringing the dead and injured. She and other teachers visited the hospital to see how they could help, and quickly saw that there were so many dead that the hospital had run out of the sheets used to bury the bodies. She asked her brother to send sheets so that the bodies could be buried according to local custom. The chair encouraged his staff to go and buy sheets. In order to secure transport for them, he and his director were in touch with their contacts in the army who were already organising trucks to go to the area. Following a call from his regional office, it was clear that water would also be needed, so as an interim measure they bought bottled water to send with the sheets. Meanwhile, the communities that the local NGO worked with were beginning to respond in numbers to the plight of their fellow citizens and began to donate whatever they could to those made homeless by the disaster.

Replying to this and commenting on what she found when she visited the country, a senior manager from the European NGO remarked that she considered the local NGO’s reaction to the crisis ‘very unstructured’. One of the things she said she meant by this was that local staff had not carried out a needs assessment before organising their response.

What I perceive in this narrative is a difference in ways of knowing mediated by the power relations that go right to the heart of capacity development initiatives.

Systemic theory and capacity development

In order for the staff of an organisation to coordinate their activities, they need to generalise about what they want to achieve, but they must take up these generalisations in particular circumstances. In contemporary management theory these generalisations draw predominantly on systems theory, according to which a domain of human activity is understood to be a whole made up of interacting parts. So, for example, a logframe is an abstract generalisation, where ‘higher-level’ aims and objectives are disaggregated into ‘lower-level’ activities. Equally, an organogram, the diagram on which this particular relationship almost collapsed, is a schematic representation of a set of relationships.

Many capacity development handbooks draw heavily on systems theory and the idea of optimisation. The field of capacity and organisational development is awash with grids and frameworks that purport to help analyse and assess the state of the ‘whole’ organisation, usually comparing it to an idealised organisation towards which it can be optimised. Systems theories have proved particularly effective in engineering and the biological sciences from which they originate. They are helpful in situations that benefit from logical disaggregation, that function more causally or in which there is a need for optimisation, such as a manufacturing or financial process. In organisational terms they are also useful for senior managers, or for funders trying to understand in general terms what a development programme is trying to achieve.

A number of difficulties arise, however, when representations of reality are taken to be reality and begin to shape the work. For example, logframe milestones, which were simply the project designers’ best guess about how the project would unfold, can become sticks with which to beat project participants. Managers begin to bend their efforts towards previously best-guess milestones, perhaps at the expense of what is now required for the project to function. In addition, systems thinking often reduces complex and dynamic nonlinear phenomena to simple if–then causality and fixes them. Complex and fluctuating interactions among people, qualitative data and particular ways of knowing disappear in the schemata that are so prevalent in capacity development.

When we are dealing with social processes, we should be clear that systemic representations are reductive, simplifying abstractions that draw from a much more complex background of social reality. It is within this complexity that ordinary staff are obliged to operate, often sustaining the abstraction despite, rather than because of, the simplifications that have been made. But it is a very powerful and seductive way of seeing which can try to subsume experience to its particular logical scheme. Systems thinking is often presented as the best, or even the only way of understanding, particularly for European staff working in organisations in which systemic thinking is taken for granted.

In circumstances where Northern NGOs aspire to partner with local NGOs, local experience may be sought, but often as a way of subsuming it within a scheme of work that has already been planned. Putting it another way, local staff are invited to help optimise a system that Northern staff have already designed: they are invited to be parts in someone else’s whole.

The implications for capacity development

In the situation described above, both parties in the partnership survived the experience and grew stronger for it. Local NGO staff felt much more capable at the end of the process and were grateful for the working relationship they had had with their European partners, even though little formal capacity development had actually taken place. I am not implying that the ‘fault’ was entirely on one side: all difficult relationships are co-created. It is equally true that Northern NGO staff are heavily constrained in the working methods that they may be obliged to use because of their particular relationships with donors. No one is entirely free to work in the way they would choose.

But local staff had also struggled to get their own story heard, to be recognised, although they had responded skilfully to the particularities of their context, in which they were experts. European staff had intervened in a context where they had little particular knowledge, but came with abstract, generalised ways of knowing, grids, tools and frameworks, which had proven useful in other contexts with other organisations. They struggled to recognise forms of organisation that were unlike those with which they were already familiar. In trying to reorder the experience they encountered into the logical schemes they brought with them, European staff succeeded in alienating the very people they sought to support. The conflicts between the two groups were partly a struggle over power, recognition and ways of knowing. It was not so much about the dotted-line relationships, but about who gets to draw the lines, or in this case tell the story, in the first place.

Most capacity development initiatives take up contemporary organisational development theory as if it were the best, or even the only way of working. The staff of local NGOs can experience this as a form of domination if they do not feel fully recognised. They begin to suspect that we Europeans can only work in ways that already fit our intellectual schemes.

What is required of us instead is not to reach in the first instance for our organograms and needs analysis tools, but to pay attention to the patterning of our relationships with others, the emergent structuring of work that is happening before our eyes. In offering a critique of the orthodoxy that capacity development depends on systems thinking, I am arguing instead that staff engaged in the exercise might more fruitfully notice and reflect upon the asymmetric relationships of power that arise as they negotiate with others how to take the next steps together. I am suggesting that capacity development is the attempt to understand oneself and others in a way that results in mutual recognition through which both parties are transformed.