change management

Using video in change work

storytelling — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 02:29:35 -0700

Video can be used to great effect in change and KM projects in order to 'tell the story' in powerful ways. This short video was used in a change project to encourage users to move to FOSS (Free and Open Source Software). The video was also part of a competition where users could enter to describe the moment when that"saw the light" about FOSS. In this way the story is told and emphasized using a variety of media.

KM & Communications

Family Planning Around Environmentally Sensitive Regions in Madagascar

carol — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 01:02:47 -0600

In January 2005, USAID/Madagascar requested the Health Communication Partnership (HCP) to assist the Government of Madagascar, specifically its National AIDS Control Committee (SE/CNLS), to develop a behavior change communication strategy targeting HIV prevention among youth and young adults. The Ankoay, or Eagle, approach was launched in April 2005 through the National Scouting Federation which unites six scouting organizations. The Ankoay program was assessed by the SE/CNLS after one year of implementation and was judged a national “best practice” in HIV prevention among youth.

In August 2007, through additional funding from USAID/Madagascar, AED launched Ankoay Doré, a second level of activities designed for youth groups that had successfully completed the Ankoay program. The initial Ankoay Doré approach added hygiene activities to HIV prevention. In early 2008, through C-Change, the Ankoay Doré model was expanded to include adolescent reproductive health and environmental activities. This report describes the accomplishments achieved by the C-Change activity through February 2009.

C-Change Madagascar Ankoay Dore Final Report - March 2009.pdf 418.78 KB
http://www.c-changeprogram.org/resources/fp-environmentally-sensitive-re...

KM & Communications

Social and Behaviour Change Communication Capacity Assessment Tool

carol — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 00:49:10 -0600

The Social and Behavior Change Communication (SBCC) Capacity Assessment Tool was developed for use in workshop and meeting venues in which an organization and a facilitiator work to determine an organization's competencies to carry out
SBCC programming in three areas:

Planning and design,
Program implementation, and
Monitoring and evaluation (M&E) and research

A facilitator administers the tool to members of an organization and provides the scoring along with feedback, which serves as a baseline and identifies the gaps in the organization that require strengthening. The same tool can be administered at a later point to provide data that shows improvements in specific competencies and where additional work still remains.

This flexible tool can be adapted for use across a wide variety of health areas, including HIV and AIDS, malaria, family planning and maternal, and sexual and reproductive health. Users are encouraged to adapt sections of the tool or use the particular components that best address their needs in assessing capacities of organizations implementing SBCC programs. Comments are welcome; send an email to cchange@aed.org with subject line: SBCC Capacity Assessment Tool

Information Provided by Carol Lombard, Department of Social Development Population Website

KM & Social Challenges

Key ideas for conflict and change management from dialogic

KMAadmin — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 05:56:27 -0600

Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895-1975) was a Russian philosopher, critic and scholar who wrote many influential works of literary theory and criticism. His works, dealing with a variety of subjects, have inspired groups of thinkers who have incorporated Bakhtinian ideas into theories of their own. These thoughts on language use are particularly interesting in Change Management and Conflict Management and include:

Language is learned through contextualized social interaction. (from: Marxism and the Philosophy of Language). It lives "in a living impulse toward the object", in a specific located social interaction.
Consequently all language use is language use from a particular point of view, in a context, to an audience. There is no such thing as language use which is not dialogic (having and addressee, real or imagined), which is not contextual, and which is not therefore ideological.
Any language has certain centripetal forces which work to render it monoglossic, a "unitary language" – there are forces of regulation and discipline; this includes literary expression.
Any language, however, as it is lived, socially, over a variety of social, professional, class and so forth positions, is really an interacting and at times contesting amalgam of different language uses.
Each of these "languages" embodies a distinct view of the world, its own sense of meanings, relations, intentions
People of different generations, classes, places, professions, have their own dialects, or ideolects; there are differences among genres, among activities, even from day to day. Bakhtin suggests that at any given moment of its evolution, language is stratified not only into linguistic dialects in the strict sense of the word (according to formal linguistic markers, especially phonetic), but are also into languages that are socio-ideological: languages of social groups, "professional" and "generic" languages, languages of generations and so forth.
These dialects contain within them traces and implications of values, perspectives, and experiences; hence any contestation of dialects is in fact a contestation of these embedded aspects. Language carries as part of its nature the viewpoints, assumptions, experiences of its speakers, and it does this because it is personally and socially situated, not an abstract system.
Bakhtin sees the "language" or ideolect of a class or social position, etc., as a potentially a prison, constructing its own set of understandings beyond which the person imaginatively cannot go -- a dogma, he says, "a sealed-off and impermeable monoglossia." Bakhtin therefore believes that one can think only what one's language allows one to think.
Specialised dialects (which are also social and ideological sites) can be internal as well, that is, a person can speak from different social sites; in fact the psyche is a made up of different socio/cultural sites, is inherently dialogic in itself.
Consciousness is "inner speech", which, like outer speech, is a social formation.
People can occupy different ideolects without being conscious of the disparity between or among them. A function of literature is to force the reader to recognize disparate ideolects and their (at times) conflicting ideologies -- "the critical interanimation of languages" is a term he uses for this forced recognition
To Bakhtin, language is inherently ideological. It is material, historically located, performative. Ideas, expressed in language, are located as outcomes of social and historical processes. As an interactive part of ongoing historical processes, language, and hence ideology, is open to change; and it is open to it through dialogue and narrative, interaction, history, and the parodic.
Within the same community one will find approximately the same vocabulary and grammar, as well as people with differently oriented social interests and perspectives.
We can view reading itself as dialogic, a process of entering into exchange with a voice or voices. This would revolutionize our reading of texts with which we "disagree", for we could see them as a process of interaction with our own views, not as a simple embodiment of feelings or positions we find alienating. One could think of such reading as being four-pointed: ourselves, our cultural milieu and the questions we have to face, the text, the text's milieu and the questions it had to face.

From Art and Science of Change Ubuhibi Media used with permission

KM for Conflict & Change Management

Storytelling in conflict management and change management work

KMAadmin — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 05:12:39 -0600

Stories are vitally important in times of change – they bring a sense of meaning and purpose to the human experience. Stories contain elements that enable us to 'travel forward in hope', even if we don't like our fellow travellers. Clearly managing the story of 'what is going on' is vitally important in situations of conflict and change. This is because people resort to violence and brutality when the story collapses. In change and transformation management, the work of the storyteller may include:

Accessing the conversations that are occurring in the situation. Experience has shown that this role is best accomplished by an ‘outsider’ who does not have a particular affiliation to any party to the conflict.
Helping to understanding the possible impact of these stories in the situation - especially if they evoke emotional responses or build 'vicious' or 'virtuous' cycles
Creating a story – either factual or allegorical. Allegorical refers to the representation of abstract ideas or principles by characters, figures, or events in narrative, dramatic, or pictorial form)
Asking key questions like 'how would you like it to be?'
Telling / reflecting a story and making adjustments as a result of listening to feedback
Identifying and reinforcing the useful stories that support a sense of mission, vision, values and purpose through conscious, on-going telling and mutation of the story.

Content provided by storytelling.co.za Storytelling Website

KM for Conflict & Change Management

Feedback, learning and change

storytelling — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 08:02:49 -0600

When most of us were at school failure was seen as something that was negative, should be avoided and often worth punishment. And yet most learning theorists agree that it is only through failure that we really learn – as opposed to just memorising. Failure is useful when it helps us critically appraise our own performance. This is evaluation is an example of feedback. A simple way to think of feedback is experiencing the output of your own performance as a new input.

Students of psychology and education are becoming increasingly aware of the vital role that feedback plays in how we learn. All complex systems (like your body, your organisation, your family, your community) change their behaviour or learn through feedback - even if this means weaving in and out of the best path (like Wiener’s boat example) rather than sticking to the best path in any strict way.

The concept of feedback was developed by Norbert Wiener, who used the analogy of someone steering a boat: “When the boat deviates from the present course, say to the right, the steersman assesses the deviation and then countersteers by moving the rudder to the left. This decreases the boat's deviation, perhaps even to the point of moving through the correct position and then deviating to the left. At some time during this movement the steersman makes a new assessment of the boat's deviation, countersteers accordingly, assesses the deviation again, and so on. Thus he relies on continual feedback to keep the boat on course, its actual trajectory oscillating around the present direction. The skill of steering a boat consists in keeping these oscillations as smooth as possible.” (Capra 1996:57)

Even if you cannot predict the outcome, turning up the volume of feedback will always produce more sustainable results. As long as all the bits are talking to each other, something better will emerge. Feedback can be seen as a flow of information, in the in-between spaces, that constantly invites new responses from all the parts, improving the quality of all relationships within the system and allowing a system to learn how to do more for less effort. Sometimes something completely new and unexpected can arise out of the in-between spaces and take the whole system to another level.

Feedback allows you to make those corrections to your own behaviour that are necessary to lift your performance to another level. But how, and from where, can we get effective, reliable and performance enhancing feedback in the systems in which we live and the organisations in which we work?

Many people respond quite negatively to feedback, irrespective of how well intentioned it might be. Many people resist useful feedback because they fear failure and rejection. They therefore experience critical feedback as a personal attack. People who live in short timeframes experience critical feedback as something that defines them as a failure. By contrast, people who live in long timeframes experience critical feedback as data on how to succeed and grow on their own learning path.

Those who resist feedback are unlikely to change their behaviour when they receive it. This has important implications for the way your organisation deals with performance appraisals and the way it helps members design career paths. Opportunities for feedback are often misappropriated to make people feel worthless and incompetent. For feedback to be effective, organisations have to link feedback and learning and commit to both as core values in their corporate cultures.

One solution is to engage feedback as an ongoing conversation in your organisation, rather than a formal summary of someone’s performance, at a single and arbitrary point in time, with an abstract mark attached to it.

if you are not failing at something, you aren't learning anything new

People often fear their appraisals or assessments, whereas they could be looking forward to an opportunity to learn and to grow both themselves and the organisation. This is what Weiner called “reciprocal modification” – the change in me is a change in you. This ongoing “conversation” is what is often referred to as continuous assessment as opposed to summative assessment.

Effective feedback also has implications for top performers. In the old days people who were getting 80% were “better” than everyone else and did not have to try as hard. In the philosophy of Outcomes-Based Education, people should not be measured against each other. Individuals should be measured against their own potential and expectations. If they are getting high marks it does not mean they can rest in the knowledge of their superiority. It means it is time to find a new growing edge, a new challenge on their learning path. If you are not failing at something you are not learning anything new.

Members of your organisation need to be coached in the mechanisms and dynamics of effective feedback and how it relates to their own learning path. They need to begin to see feedback as an opportunity to improve and grow rather than as a personal attack or a defining statement of their identity. It should also help people to experience their lives in long timeframes in which criticism doesn’t define them but is experienced as useful information on a long and fruitful learning path. It should also encourage them to experiment with behavioural changes in a way that is slightly demanding, but is relatively safe, enjoyable, creative and rewarding.

Some questions about the feedback you're getting

How are you providing feedback?
Is it working?
How would you know that it is working?
How do you respond to feedback?
Are you growing?
What tells you that you are growing?
What are the current mechanisms of feedback in your organisation?
How could you evaluate and improve their function?
How does cooperation pay in your organisation?
Are you ready to experiment with new feedback processes?

From Art & Science of Change - A Resource for Management and Leadership - (ISBN-978-0-9802550-3-4) Ubuhibi Media used with permission

Fireside Chat

How to decode your position of power

eugenie — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 03:01:18 -0600

While we all know something about power, working in conflict or change management requires a clear understanding of power and how to decode and understand it. So what is power really and how is it constructed? Our world identifies certain individuals as 'having power' and then proceeds to make them more powerful by talking about them in the media. Politicians, high profile business leaders, characters from the entertainment industry and those frequently in the public eye are often said to examples of ‘powerful people’.

A useful way of decoding any phenomenon is to go beyond the 'what is it?' question and rather look at 'what does it do?'. In organisations, power can do many things. It can speed things up, slow things down, alter trajectory, transform our understanding of ‘what is going on’ and divert attention to something altogether different. We each have some measure of power and your position of power could be defined by:

Knowing what you want – having a clear vision of where you are going
The timeframes of your visions and strategies – how far into the future does your story go? (tip: a Long Timeframe contains a greater sense of power than than visions with short timeframes)
The way you talk and think about yourself and your frustrations
Your ability to learn & pay attention
Authority over the way others perceive you and what they say about you
Your choice of language and metaphors
Control over the money and the PIN numbers
Control over the story (are you in your own story or someone else’s story?)
Ability to mete out brutality and violence in all its forms (such as exclusion / ostracising, disapproval, withholding sex and intimacy, firing, physical punishment, active / passive aggression etc..)
Knowledge / Know-How
Freedom of choice
Your ability to sacrifice / let go / move on / forget the past
Access to powerful, interesting people in positions of power (who are as smart or smarter than you are)
Know-how to access to information that will help your get what you want
The ability to tell a good story that arouses emotion on others
Access to the internet and an interest in communication & networking technology
Access to software tools that enable you to stay current and in touch with thought leadership from diverse fields
Having a good story to tell
Having interesting stimulating people with budgets whom you tell your story to
Your preparedness to experiment and try new things
The ability to network powerfully with the people with whom you desire to network
The scary stories people tell about you, particularly tales of what you have done in the past / the mythologies of violence you have enacted
The ability to make people uneasy or frightened and your ability to be unpredictable & ruthless (you might be able to do this better than you think!)
Your ability to actively work and play with your own metaphors
Keeping up with new metaphors, jargon
The ability to say NO and to absolutely, positively mean it
The ability to say YES and to absolutely, positively mean it
Knowing about power and how it works

Steve Banhegyi steve@storytelling.co.za
used with permission from the Trans4mation Blog

Fireside Chat

KM for Conflict & Change Management

KMAadmin — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 06:26:29 -0600

There is a wealth of know-how in Africa about how conflict and change can be mediated and managed in creative ways to the benefit of all. The KM, Conflict & Change SIG provides a space to discuss approaches to Conflict Management, Change Management and the management of post-conflict scenarios, particularly in an African context. Here we combine cutting-edge knowledge with ancient approaches and stories that can be usefully applied in a wide range of situations. In addition to exploring some unusual and very African approaches, we also look at continental efforts by NEPAD, the UN and the AU to ameliorate conflict.

A KM approach to guiding Change Management

storytelling — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 00:29:26 -0600

When engaged in Change Management project, we often use a KM framework to guide and share elements of the system's functionality with client. This simultaneously engages Systems Theory, Logical Framework Analysis (LFA), Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Dialogic approaches in project work. The novelty of this approach is that is both analytical and analogical simultaneously and creates a multidisciplinary framework for engaging complex information. It has proved particularly helpful in working with African government and NGOs. The process is generally completed within 3 days as an organisational ritual and outputs form inputs to the change process. The enquiry framework asks the following key questions when we assess organisational culture and the nature of a system:

What are the roles and the relationships that make up the complex social system under investigation?
What official criteria are used to measure the success of these roles? What unofficial criteria are used to measure the success of these roles?
How does information flow between these roles and in these relationships?
What skills sets are represented in each role? What are the sources of these skills? Which skills and skills sets are capable of dealing with what challenges?
What values and beliefs inform the behaviours of each of the roles in the system?
What symbols, metaphors and stories inform the different roles with regards to their experience of the challenge? What is the source of these symbols, metaphors and stories? How are they currently succeeding in meeting the challenge?
What messages and stories that relate to this challenge are currently being produced and by whom?
What are the kinds of data that are already being collected with regards to the system? Who is collecting this data? With what intent? How is this data then represented? Who has access to it? In what form?
What feedback mechanisms are functioning in this system? What is the information that is being relayed through these feedback loops? What are these feedback loops capable of changing?
What does each role have the power to change? What is each role unable to change?
What are the natural processes of social and behavioural change in the system? Can these natural processes of change be harnessed in any way?
What are the unofficial and spontaneous forms of governance that arise in this system?

The approach evaluates every value, belief and behaviour is by asking the following questions:

Who benefits from this value / belief / behaviour?
What feedback mechanisms sustain this value/belief/behaviour?
What alternative values, beliefs and behaviours can be imagined? Are these alternatives actualised or experimented with?
How do these values/beliefs/behaviours determine changes in the whole system?

Overview provided by Steve Banhegyi & Associates trans4mation blog

Fireside Chat