the giant organic organisational learning cycle

A few posts back, I ended a status report on the 6thCP process with a question along the lines of:

is it normal to see or feel things happening as part of an organisational change process in a kind of staged manner?

Right now the answer looks like a glaring kind of a 'yes'. I got an insight into this today during what is probably the last big meeting of the preparatory phase of the 6thCP process. It was a good meeting, with a pro-active vibe and a good bit of laughter (despite an agenda that threatened to bore the living daylights out of people and to result in bruised buttocks).

In any case, i got my inkling while a discussion was going on about the newly created income generation cell, which I had sort of hoped would end up getting called a livelihood cell. The idea of calling it a 'livelihoods cell' appears to be more of my idea than anyone else's and, thus, it has not been given that name. Calling it a livelihood cell would carry certain implications for its functioning and its remit. Calling it an income generation cell seems more limited in scope. However, i held off from making a deal about this because I felt that there could be benefits derived from being more specific and focused here. This is what I foresaw:

Setting up a livelihood cell would bring together people from the different programmes. They would start talking about and trying to tackle large abstract issues and they would eventually have to narrow down their spectrum of issues to something achievable or manageable. Extensive discussions could take place around how NRD, GVK and WCD could perhaps work in a more effective manner together so as to encourage the emergence/support of more livelihood enhancing interventions/activities. However, the change would be distributed and may not have the potential to show solid results until deciding to shift onto the 'income generation' realm.

Setting up an income generation cell would also bring people together from the different programmes. It would start by trying to identify potential projects that could be taken up for achieving concrete results in terms of income generation activities for selected groups of individuals in different pockets. There would remain a disjoint between groups that were getting included and others that would get left behind. Questions would begin to emerge about how we broadbase what we have been learning. This would probably draw the cell to conduct a thorough inquiry into the efforts that it had made with different clusters/sectors and this would generate lessons learned that could be then taken up by the various programme units in a more systematic manner.

Both these stories are hypothetical, and the truth is that it could move in either direction. Clearly, this means I am in the 'complex' domain and probing will be the only way forward (for me, at this stage)... I feel that I am coming more to the conclusion that it won't make too big of a difference where the whole thing starts... If the team takes things seriously, has good quality conversations (and that isn't really just a little if!) and a fair dose of soul-searching it will gradually enable itself to do what it needs to do. In any case, I decided not to try and make noise about the livelihood issue - mainly because I couldn't decide whether it would really make a difference. It will be interesting to observe how the formation of the income-generation cell impacts on the rest of the organisation - especially the key programme units represented in it.

Anyway, the learning insight was this:

• Take several similar units of inquiry and engage in a thorough action research process into them over a period of time that seems reasonable in relation to the timescale of the change that is being sought (hard to predict in advance really).
• Then explore what worked, what didn't work and why, paying close attention to the way that particular factors (especially common factors) appear to have been influenced by context.
• Use this to distill achievements, lessons, challenges, questions and principles that can be upscaled or mainstreamed
• Repeat as required using new or existing units of inquiry as required

As I pondered this particular process later in the day, it struck me that this is a kind of archetypal action research process. Even a collaborative action inquiry would work the same way if the unit of inquiry is taken to be one of the collaborative individuals. It also seems like a kind of fractal pattern in the sense that it can be used on multiple scales, contexts and conditions. That makes it even more archetypal. Now if we could just see a little bit more evidence of this process being followed rigorously, with documentation that really goes in depth into how the change processes are taking place, I might just find myself starting to agree with Neelima about the idea that the whole organisation is one big action-research... Though I think I've said this before... that's not a little if :)

Peace!