Organism or machine?

Such a logic is premised on a notion of people, organisations and systems as pieces of performance machinery whose capacity can be constructed and adjusted through a set of purposeful (and often externally financed and managed) interventions. This logic tends to underestimate the importance of politics, culture and historical contexts, and to rely on the application of ‘best practice’ solutions across contexts.

While such approaches clearly do work in certain situations, they have proven less effective in circumstances of complex institutional transformation or renewal. Cases studies examined in the ECDPM study also illustrate how key aspects of organisational capacity do not necessarily result from any purposeful or planned intervention, but rather have emerged from complex and difficult-to-chart processes of organisational learning and adaptation. Such processes are often implicit rather than explicit and are not necessarily guided by any recognisable intervention.

The study concludes that to help improve practice it is useful to think of organisations and systems as human or social systems that evolve organically in unpredictable ways in response to a wide range of stimuli and through multiple interactions.

From this perspective, capacity development can be viewed as less analogous to machine building, and more akin to shaping and influencing processes that are driven by local contextual factors including politics and culturally defined norms, values and practices.

Complex adaptive systems thinking

Systems thinking, and in particular the concept of complex adaptive systems (CAS) offers such a perspective. It takes the view that organisations and networks – whether simple or complex – are more analogous to living organisms than to machines.

Organisations and networks continuously adapt and change in the face of new situations, in order to sustain themselves. This process of adaptation is only partially open to explicit human direction, and more importantly, cannot be predetermined.

Capacity development as a form of change is, from this perspective, an emergent property that arises from the continuous process of organisational adaptation, which, over time, is characterised by moments of coherence, collapse and re-emergence. It can be understood as a process that is a necessary part of the life cycle of any organisation or system.

CAS offers a way to mentally frame what we see in the world and to think about how change can be influenced from the outside. It can be contrasted with more conventional frames of thinking, that are less able to explain the dynamics taking place within systems, such as detailed design, the charting of direct cause and effect relationships and planned change (see table below).

In so doing, CAS challenges the way development agencies go about influencing change processes. Capacity development outcomes cannot be simply engineered through the delivery of external inputs. Interventions need to be flexible and able to adapt to future and usually unforeseeable system behaviour. CAS therefore points to the need to take account of a wider range of approaches when addressing capacity development.

It also highlights the fact that even when one tries to support capacity development through purposeful intervention, there will always be larger forces at work that impact the way capacity emerges. These larger forces need, therefore, to be mapped, brought into perspective and taken account of in the design, implementation and monitoring of any intervention.

CAS does not offer all the answers, nor does its use suggest the need to disregard other perspectives. Rather, it offers another lens for exploring and understanding the way capacity actually forms and evolves.

Implications for practice

What are the implications for development agencies that want to improve their support for capacity development? The implications for practice are proposed below. These suggest the need to find a middle ground that takes account of emergence thinking within more familiar programme management processes.

1. Keep a focus on ownership. Ownership is critical to any capacity development process, because change is fundamentally political.

2. Approach capacity development more as a process of experimentation and learning than as a process of executing predetermined activities.

3. Apply a more evolutionary approach to design. Recognise that good design means being clear on what direction of change is desired, but leaving space for adaptation along the way.

4. Ensure that the design process engages local stakeholders in the determination of needs and strategies.

5. Invest more in understanding context in terms of political, social and cultural norms and practices that shape the way a country or an organisation understands capacity, change and performance.

6. Analyse more comprehensively the nature of change that is being demanded as a basis for determining which kind of support is appropriate.

7. Conduct capacity diagnostics as an intrinsic part of a change process and supportive of evolutionary design. It should be less about analysing gaps and more about recognising strengths.

8. Give greater attention and recognition to less visible aspects of capacity, such as values, legitimacy, identity and self-confidence, as well as other non-monetary forms of motivation.

9. Be more creative about options for support, such as which resources and techniques to apply, and be less inclined to fall back on international technical assistance as the default for delivering capacity development support.

10. Be prepared to accept/tolerate a higher degree of risk and failure as a way to promote learning and innovation and in acknowledgement of the fact that it is often difficult to know ahead of time what will work.

11. Invest in relationship building. The implementation of capacity development support depends tremendously on the relationships that are forged between local stakeholders and outsiders.

12. Be more realistic about the scope of external intervention. In the end, external partners are marginal actors, as compared to the influence of underlying domestic processes and forces.

These implications for practice suggest an overall need to shift from planned interventions toward more emergent ways of working. How far and to what extent this needs to be done in practice will depend on local circumstances. An intervention can either take on more of the character of a planned approach, or it can be closer to what is understood to be an emergent process.

Incremental approaches which sit somewhere between planned and emergent approaches, can offer a practical way to combine a degree of formal strategic intent and structured intervention where this is appropriate (or unavoidable), with a more adaptive and flexible approach to design and implementation that takes account of emergence and complexity.

Incrementalism is, therefore, much more than a way of muddling through without any plan, theory of action or strategy. On the contrary, it is a deliberate and strategic choice that is able to accommodate characteristics of emergent and planned processes, and in so doing, reflect on the 12 implications for practice presented above.

An alternative perspective

CAS offers an alternative perspective. While not holding all the answers, it does offer innovative insights that, if accepted, carry implications for practice. Development agencies need to think about how far they are willing to take on the implications of a different way of working.

The greater emphasis placed on flexibility and searching can give rise to unease about possible loss of control, direction and task accomplishment, at a time when agencies are under increased pressure to disburse, and to provide tangible evidence of impact. But if development agencies are serious about improving support for capacity development, then some far-reaching changes in the way of doing business cannot be avoided.

Between planned interventions and emergent approaches This table contrasts a selection of variables related to the design and implementation of capacity development (CD) interventions looked at from a conventional instrumental/ technocratic perspective on the one hand, and from a CAS/emergence perspective on the other. In practice, few interventions fully adopt either end of the spectrum. The 12 implications for practice presented ABOVE suggest the need to accommodate both perspectives in the design of interventions.