This summer i participated in BTC’s summer seminar (august 2011). I attended a 2-day session on “Systems thinking”. Good old school biology and chemics came up again: a system exists of elements and their (inter)relationships.
And as i am working in
this project in Vietnam where i focus on “institutional-organisational capacity development”, it’s very “done” to consider
capacity development as a system.
Here’s the “model” that may be useful to explain that system:
As you can see, this ‘system capacity development’ exists of the following elements:
- individuals
- groups
- networks (networks of groups; networks of networks)
Apart from the ‘elements’, there are ‘relationships‘ between the elements. That means the elements (individuals, groups and networks) influence each other in one way or another.
In the context of the project i’m working in, the elements are:
- individuals: directors, managers, staff (of:)
- organisations: government agencies, service providers, user organisations, social organisations, etc.
- networks: how are the organisations linked to one another? How are organisations organised among each other? Here we talk about the “institutional set up”, for instance, a coordination mechanism (clear division of roles and responsibilities of all actors involved, with according procedures to work, etc), or an accountability mechanism (who is accountable to whom? who checks on whom? what are controlling procedures? etc).
Relationships between these elements are endless. Some examples:
- the influence from individuals on organisations could be: leading (a director leads an organisation), demand responsive (a service supplier adapts to the demand of its clients), being accountable (the government is accountable to the citizen for its public expenditures), …
- the influence from organisations on individuals may be: motivating (the working atmosphere within an organisation may be motivating for an employee), regulating (cfr. the rules in a prison that count for a prisoner), …
- the influence from organisations on networks could be: coordinating (one organisation has the authority to coordinate the other organisations in the network, for instance to ensure waste management in a town several organisations are involved and need to be supervised as a whole: transport & road infrastructure division, environment division, education division, social/civil society organisations, village leaders, private company collecting & transporting or treating the waste, etc.), blocking (an organisation may not be supportive of the work that needs to be done within a collective of organisations), …
- the influence from networks on organisations: increasing knowledge and performance of an organisation through experience and knowledge sharing; slowing down activities and output of an organisation as many organisations may need to give their approval; …
- influence from networks on individuals and the other way around… think of some examples.
So, if we talk about “capacity development”, we have to address all ‘elements’ in our project, because they interact with each other. A typical example – training an employee may not work if not at the same time his working environment (organisational procedures, structure, culture, …) also improves.
So… a combination of the following “capacity developing” activities is optimal:
- to develop the individual level, you try to ensure individuals have the opportunity to learn whatever they need (e.g. on-the-job coaching, trainings, study visits, … to learn something technical, to learn from strategies or implementation methods, …)
- to develop the organisational level, you try to stimulate the people in an organisation to recognize what could be improved within the organisation to have a better output & outcome (eg organisational culture, organisational structure, human resources development, leadership, management systems & procedures, financial resources, …)
- to develop the institutional level, you may want to coach a whole consultation and decision-making process that ensures participation of many relevant actors (eg. government agencies, private sector, user organisations, social organisations etc), and that leads to improved coordination between the actors, improved controlling mechanisms, improved public service delivery for the beneficiary population…
… And for all of these developments, at any level, ofcourse, you need engaged, committed people who see opportunities to develop and improve… (counts anywhere.)
Good luck.
