One day, during tête-à-tête with a colleague from Engineers Without Borders, he challenged me to publish my failure report. (EWB regularly publishes failure reports based on the field experiences of its volunteers, people, and staff.) I am aware that admitting failures may be detrimental to my career, but this would align with my transparency and accountability advocacy. I have always encouraged every organization and senior executives to follow. The Failure Report 1.0 is based on my two years in Malawi and a brief stint in Nepal.
- Institutional Capacity Building is not a day or two activity. I worked with most organizations (and senior executives) that wanted quick and easy-fix solutions to the aged and chronic organizational problems. Even a candid and comprehensive institutional capacity assessment takes weeks. Understanding an organization’s culture, such as information flow to staff behaviour to document review, is essential. Stakeholder analysis doesn’t reveal anything. The assumption that the consultant-knows-everything makes it challenging to bring quality and sustainable interventions in a day or two. A global consultant colleague suggested I “just do my job and get paid.” I have failed to understand why organizations and senior executives want quick fix despite knowing that changes do take time and effort. Yes, I do not offer two-day solutions. In the future, I should be more professional, not be finicky on thoroughness and perfectionism but provide services that clients want. I have developed a self-assessment that would allow me to assess an organization in a day and develop interventions without visiting the site.
- Not enough impact measurement. It would be easy to blame the donors here since, for the most part, they only care that we measure process: Budget performance, number of training sessions or workshops held, number of t-shirts printed, number of reports produced etc. I fervently believe in enhancing impact through better data, and in the least-developed countries, this is a challenge as this requires more resources that donors are not willing to fund. If we have better data, we could demonstrate that some projects produce remarkable results in poverty reduction or capacity building, and others are not worth the effort. I feel that I have failed in this regard as I do not know my achievements and how to address this even though I have a robust M&E system.
- Communication issues. While working with many organizations on their communication strategy, I am appalled by the lack of senior executives’ sensitivity and unprofessionalism. After working for-profit sector for such a long time, transitioning to a non-profit required adjustment. I had to develop the communication strategy – the new environment, culture, and language made it difficult for me to communicate, which frustrated me a lot. Constant revisiting and continual feedback from colleagues helped me to improve the communication strategy. I always recommend not only organizations but the individual as well to develop a communication strategy.
- Talking the talk, walking the walk. My work demanded working in tight schedules that would extend beyond 12 hrs and weekends too. As I was particular in time management and notwithstanding any nonsense, my meetings would not last more than 30 mins. My colleagues would laugh about this. Many termed it as arrogance – yes, I am proud of my knowledge and experience – but I have never let that influence my professionalism. From now on, I will develop skills in listening and conversing with nonessential information during meetings. This may facilitate me in developing a partnership with senior executives while working on projects.
- Party Pooper. Ask any ex-pats how important partying is in international development. Not only the work schedule but my role also restricted me from attending informal social gatherings. I may have been a party pooper, but this also affected my networking. I need to learn few dance moves to groove to psychedelic music that make no sense.
- Mentoring. My job entailed providing mentors to senior executives and others as well. Professionally I am happy with the success, but few affected me professionally – sometimes, I was defending their actions, which I should not have done. Mentoring requires time and energy as well as commitment from both parties. I need to restrict mentoring to few but well-deserved candidates and develop a system and processes that will facilitate mentoring.
Of course, there are many more, but these are the ones that I would like to address next year.
Originally published: December 31, 2014
Thinking Out Loud 