Sylvia's Journal

Just as I was wondering whether this would be a trip where I would not encounter the usual ‘getting stuck in the mud,’ experience. Everything, in spite of constant adjustments and adaptations to a different context than the one for which the leadership program was designed, had gone well.

But then we did get stuck in the mud last night; at the same place where people usually get stuck in the mud: articulating a specific measurable result to which the district and regional teams will be (and are willing to be) held accountable 6 to 8 months hence and the notion of an indicator – the two often confused.

The problem usually is that even the facilitators don’t master the material well and the experts in monitoring and evaluation have a tendency to complicate things. In addition, the process of starting at the end is entirely new – the habit is to set a broad goal and then make a list of activities, state what these activities will accomplish (usually based more on opinions or past practice than on evidence and science). This is the plan. It is submitted and then people go back to work.

In our approach it is an iterative process with changes happening each time people learn something more, about their assumptions, about their baseline, about cause-effect relationships. In the usual planning cycles there is no time for this and so we end up with plans that tend to be the same from year to year with very little learning. We hope to change this but change is hard.

Some of the facilitators are getting it and they are my allies. Others are still in the mud. It was warm and sticky as we tried to wade to the other side of the proverbial river; the electricity went out multiple times; we had already worked for 12 hours non-stop and there were many of us with lots of opinions. Fingers crossed as we enter the last day.