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Lessons learned = An expression appearing in evaluations. Often it means only lessons.
An irrelevant glossary in Smillie (1995)
We would like to really learn⊠not just keep on repeating that we are a learning organisation.
A research interview in 2015
In our sector, you have to have PME, and sometimes even R for research. It is part of what we should do as NGOs. And technically, most of the NGOs do. But it does not necessary mean that organisations would learn something. It is just done in order to be a kind of professional organisation.
A research interview in 2015
Learning in development organisations
âLessons learnedâ and âlearning organisationâ are terms that appear frequently in the vocabularies of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) engaged in development cooperation. The strategic plans of NGOs, from large international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) to small local ones, include aspirations to be a learning organisation. Every monitoring and evaluation (M&E) report includes a section on lessons learned that are expected to be taken into account when adjusting activities or designing new initiatives. A great number of institutional learning events such as training, workshops, seminars and organisational development (OD) are continuously conducted all over the world.
International development, in general, has for a long time taken pride in being a learning institution that draws lessons from its past and effectively produces new knowledge for learning purposes (Carlsson & Wolgemuth 2000; King & McGrath 2004; Powell 2006).The recent trends of evidence-based policymaking and results-based management have increasingly emphasised the role of knowledge and learning at different levels of development, development NGOs included (Hayman et al. 2016). Increased emphasis on learning has led to establishment of sophisticated knowledge-management systems (Ferguson et al. 2010) and systematic M&E procedures and impact assessment approaches that encourage combining accountability and learning (David et al. 2006; Guijt & Roche 2014). Learning in partnerships between northern and southern NGOs is especially called for (Mougeout 2017). NGOs continuously maintain their aspiration of being learning organisations (Senge 1990), flexible and engaged in continuous learning from their so-called beneficiaries and local knowledges (Roper & Pettit 2002). Organisational capacity building and OD processes in both northern and southern NGOs promote organisational learning and change (KĂŒhl 2009; Ubels et al. 2010). Literature on organisational learning in NGOs has tackled the question of how to create organisational culture supportive of learning, what kind of leadership is needed to maintain learning NGOs, and how to promote continuous cycles or spirals of learning (Britton 1998, 2005, 2012; Fowler 1997; Hailey & James 2002).
At the same time, critical accounts have pointed to NGOsâ difficulties to learn (Lewis 2007, 116). Despite their claimed flexibility, development NGOs are not seen to have the required adaptability in the face of changing development architecture and the world in general (Ronalds 2010). It has been also argued that NGOs have a tendency to forget their past rather than draw lessons from it (Lewis 2009, 2016; Smillie 1995, 158). The activist culture typical to NGOs is hindering learning. The NGO staff might prefer action over reflection, and organisations know how things should be on the basis of their world view rather than having the patience to engage with new knowledge (Edwards 1997). The learning potentialities of M&E are lost when they are reduced into mechanical performance of required accountability techniques (Lister 2003). A lot of documentation and information might be collected, but the challenge is to get the members of staff to actually read or use this (Matturi 2016). Continuously changing development fads and fashions can result in a kind of âperpetual presentâ in which no lessons are drawn from the past, and the future is âa place that is promised, and on which present activities are premised, but which never arrivesâ (Lewis 2016, 84). Learning from the past feels irrelevant as the next project, next annual plan, and next M&E system is already on its way.
In this book, I aim neither to provide straightforward advice for learning in NGOs, nor to offer a cynical critique of impossibility of learning in them (Biggs & Smith 2003). Rather, I will contribute to the continuous analysis of the very concepts and practices of learning in development (Johnson & Wilson 2009, 13â18). Drawing from organisation theory literature, my objective is to provide an empirically grounded and theoretically informed account of how learning takes place in organisations. I also pay attention to unlearning, forgetting and ignorance as phenomena closely related to learning but less investigated in regard to development NGOs. The idea for this book emerged during more than 20 years of research on and with development NGOs of different sizes and objectives. During these years I have met a large number of NGO practitioners both in the global south and north, who are committed to fighting inequalities and supporting improvements in the lives of those being marginalised, and who have allocated countless hours of their time to ensuring the success of NGO initiatives.
I have also met the most self-critical practitioners among the most motivated. The slow pace of envisaged changes and the endless project management procedures easily result in frustration and even cynicism. Some practitioners really feel they have been captured in what ethnographers call âaidlandâ (Mosse 2011). A land where certain knowledge practices, terminologies and performances determine the success of an NGO. Much time and energy allocated for learning is used for adoption of these practices. It is common, for example, that in institutionalised learning events such as workshops, the focus is on transmission of information about managerial tools rather than joint engagement in critical reflection on the goals, means and consequences of the work done. Traditionally, NGOs have had a strong ethos of voluntarism. Increasingly, however, working in a development NGO is a career choice and source of professional identity. Accordingly, practitionersâ enthusiasm is not geared only to âmaking things rightâ in consideration of the people they work with, but also to doing things in the âright wayâ, according to the professional standards of the industry. This kind of professionalisation is argued to lead to a loss of NGOsâ connection with the grassroots and a depoliticising of their agendas (Banks et al. 2015). After all, NGOs have been seen as harbingers of democracy, grassroots development, global solidarity and transformative change towards more just and equal world, rather than professional entities whose job is to do development.
With the professionalisation, capacity building and organisational development, NGOs in different parts of the world have learned a lot during the last 30 years. The question frequently asked, however, is whether they have learned âwrongâ things; those related to management rather than those closely connected with the lives of people they work with. In this book, I deliberatively focus on learning that is internal to NGOs. I am interested in seeing what kinds of learning take place in contemporary organisations and how these learning processes could be conceptualised. Instead of offering success stories of exceptional learning events in NGOs, I understand learning as part of a continuous change in organisations (Weick & Quinn 1999). The book scrutinises the âmuddling throughâ of everyday practices and continuous organisational sense-making that takes place in NGOs that have paid staff to allocate their working time for fulfilling the organisational purposes (Powell & Rerup 2017; Weick 2001, 2009). In this effort, I will draw from management and organisational theory literature. In so doing, I connect organisational learning with management practices and conceptualise development NGOs as organisations. Therefore, one explicit aim of the book is to explore the conceptual possibilities offered in these literatures in analysing development NGOs.
Learning and development management
When we look at the job titles, it seems that what people in NGOs do is to direct, advise, facilitate, coordinate and manage. Organisations employ plenty of project coordinators, project managers and monitoring offices, where the substantial knowledge for activities is often provided by external experts or volunteers when it comes to community development (Brown & Green 2015; Green 2012). NGO staff typically arrange meetings, workshops and training sessions. They conduct mobilisation missions, baseline studies, monitoring visits, and fill Excel sheets and write reports. They contribute to annual planning, annual reporting and, at times, revising the Mission, Vision and Strategy. Staff are trained on issues such as results-based management (RBM), outcome mapping (OM), the human rights-based approach (HRBA) and the logical framework approach (LFA). Until today, the main model of NGO work has been a project with a starting point and an end, and it has to be managed â planned, implemented, monitored and evaluated. With the introduction of a programmatic approach, individual projects have to be further connected with larger programme goals and strategic objectives. These institutionalised management practices often seem to occupy most of the working time of NGO staff.
Development practice, thus, is full of terminologies and procedures that come from general management literature. In a similar vein, development management literature widely discusses organisational learning and organisational change in development NGOs (Edwards & Fowler 2002; Fowler & Malunga 2010; Lewis 2008). Learning is an integral part of most development management approaches. For instance, each stage in project management should ideally include learning: from past experience, from other NGOs, from beneficiaries and other stakeholders, and from the continuous feedback received in the course of project implementation. However, much development research on NGOs has been quite reluctant to draw from theoretical insights of management or organisational theory. Rather, it has been critical towards these fields that have been perceived as harbingers of neoliberal managerialism and as means to strengthen the legitimacy of certain kinds of modern organisations that appear to straightjacket organisational life and hinder real self-reflection (Dar & Cooke 2008; Roberts et al. 2005). It has been argued that development management is a continuation of colonial administration, and thus, reconstructs the power unjust power relations it claims to address (Cooke 2008). Management approaches circulating in the international development systems have been seen as examples of a Gramscian hegemony of managerialism (Girei 2016), Foucauldian technologies of governance (Mueller-Hirt 2012) and outcomes of mechanisms of institutional isomorphism (Claeyé & Jackson 2012) that privilege certain donor accountability modes over local ones (Dar 2014).
Thus, management approaches that focus on projects and organisations easily sideline the wider task of development management; managing for development as a âprogressive social changeâ that takes place without such intentional efforts (Thomas 1996; 2000). While the everyday life in NGOs tends to be geared towards the management of deliberate development efforts, the critical reflection of the kinds of development that occur outside interventions and the overall assumptions behind their organisational idea of development are less focused on. NGO workshops infrequently concentrate on critical analysis of how colonial legacy or global managerialism is shown in their own conduct. More often, NGOs focus on learning prevalent approaches and become more competent development professionals within the existing framework. For instance, when improving their monitoring and evaluations, NGOs tend to opt to develop better indicator-based tools rather than trying to find alternative approaches that would better suit the complexities in the context (Horton 2010).
Obviously, both the adoption of existing management techniques and critical reflection on organisational goals fall under the general banner of organisational learning. However, their scope and dynamics are different. Using the much-cited distinction between single-loop and double-loop learning in organisational learning literature (Argyris & Schön 1978; Ebrahim 2003), the adoption of existing technologies is of the former type of learning, and critical reflection might lead to the latter type. Both kinds of learning have their own time and place in organisational functioning, as they address different learning needs. Through single-loop learning, organisations aim to be more effective and learn to do better what they do. As a consequence of double-loop learning, organisations might learn to do different, perhaps better, things. Moreover, organisations are not isolated islands. Organisational learning and organisational change are related to their institutional environments, and particularly to that of international development that shapes learning through mechanisms of institutional isomorphism (DiMaggio & Powell 1983; Lister 2003). Moreover, there are institutional tendencies beyond international development such as the global spread of the model of modern organisation (Meyer et al. 2006) and the overall managerialism typical of our times (Roberts et al. 2005) that effect c...
