IKM-relevant? Annual programme meeting, days 2 and 3

After exploring and discussing (on day 1) the various pieces of research work that have been undertaken in IKM-Emergent until now, the second day of the workshop started with a world café and continued with a ‘birds of a feather session’ (a marketplace / less-open space method) where we explored some ideas for the end of the programme and a potential IKM-Emergent 2 programme. The last day of the programme put us in action planning mode around crucial activities.

The key points that came up in the strands of work I was involved on this second and third day of the meeting:

• More attention will be paid to communication: internal communication to increase the awareness of all IKM-E members about each other’s work but also more external communication to engage with a wider group of development actors. The role of social media has been raised as a crucial point in case to leverage the great work of IKM-E to the wider world. Along with the Giraffe, IKM-E blog and the wiki, there is potential to use del.icio.us, to use Twitter (anyways I’ve been tweeting around the hash tag #ikm-e) and perhaps Slideshare or other tools.
• The various strands of the programme will come together in some respect to reinforce each other: ripples of participation, local content/knowledge, emergence, traducture, multiple knowledges coming together in an approach that recognises complexity and power issues.
• In the last 18 months of this programme, the IKM group will come up with various practical outputs which can be mobilised and used more easily by development agents to reflect on and adapt values, behaviours and practices: books, guidelines, checklists (of critical questions, questions and more questions), workshops, video explanations of our work, an overall narrative for the IKM programme that offers a comprehensive understanding of the issues we are questioning etc.
• One interesting output that we will be working on is the apply our work to the current change process in which a couple of development organisations are involved, to see how helpful it is and help these organisations reflect critically on their approach to knowledge-focused development work. This activity will culminate with a learning workshop in 2011 where we may prepare additional action research activities as part of a future programme.

A possible IKM-2 programme (Ewen’s vision)

• The IKM-2 programme in preparation will not just advocate for multiple knowledges and the likes but will actually consistently practice what it preaches and organise joint action-research work / collective inquiries (including participants from NGOs, knowledge institutes, community members, donor agency representatives, governmental agents, artists and the media) on a number of topics. This will help us: demonstrate the power, potential and strategic value but also the challenges of bringing together multiple knowledges. It will also help us develop a multiple accountability system that stimulates us to change perspectives and practices through joint action and ownership.
• This future programme will continue operating as a network of passionate and capable individuals creating opportunities for IKM to build upon existing work or new ideas, but it will also establish more firm relations with a wide variety of networks (and journals such as the KM4Dev journal) and institutions to accompany and strengthen our questioning work.

This has been an extremely juicy two final days with a delicious fruit salad of insights and ideas, approaches and concepts. The academic head and practice-oriented arms of IKM-Emergent are still working in a somewhat disjointed fashion, but that is as natural as waking up and not yet having adjusted body coordination; nonetheless the body is wobbling on and indeed moving forward. We have been dreaming profoundly and we are now putting our dreams to action. Let’s hope we can soon take a good walk and later on run to co-create relevant next (not best) practices of sustainable and people-centred development.

By the way, some pictures of this IKM-Emergent meeting are available on: http://www.flickr.com/groups/ikm_emergent/pool/

IKM-convergent? Annual programme meeting, Wageningen, day 1

A while back I blogged about the IKM-Emergent programme and its tendency to dispersion.

The programme has evolved since then and a number of things are coalescing on this first day of the all-peeps IKM-Emergent  workshop (which brings together the three working groups, but also a number of new guests that are working on issues related to IKM-E and/or that will be working for the programme from now on).

IKM participants getting their heads around common issues

A lot of very interesting ideas and insights came out from the wide variety of participants but what stroke me as key converging points are the following:

• Dynamics of change: A lot of us were wondering how to bring about change? Should we have a very upfront / head-on approach to change or should we rather follow more subversive ways of tilting the development system?
• Related to this, we seem to agree on the concept of intention as the driving force behind a lot of development work. In a change process, our words (i.e. lip service or love declarations to change) matter much less than our real intention to stimulate change.
• A lot of IKM-Emergent work seems to be concerned with raising awareness about development dynamics and biases at large and about specific lenses or approaches in particular: multiple knowledges, traducture (more on this later but I would describe this as the socio-cultural translation of concepts and approaches, not just the loss of meaning that is usually part of the linguistic transaction of translation), emergence etc.
• As in the launch event of the Change Alliance (read this blog post about it), the key difference between agency-driven and civic-driven movements. We need to support civic-driven movements – going beyond the faddism of just supporting them as part of the latest craze. Instead, what do we do to implicitly or explicitly to support these movements?
• The importance of critical analysis and questioning which can be the only focus area we provide as ‘agency’: we need to move from setting up water pumps and delivering food onto helping all development actors equip themselves with critical reflexivity as part of the survival toolkit that stimulates self-empowerment and (less biased) development. It is this reflexivity that helps us challenge ourselves, our discourse, our practices, our being.
• Accountability as a central practice that goes way beyond upward accountability towards donors. We need to be aware that we are (or should be) accountable to one another in all our development transactions and it is that accountability that generates the trust necessary to engage in development relationships and to open up a space for joint critical inquiry.

There was actually a lot more content in the discussion but these items stick out as pointers that came back time and again in the presentations and conversations.

This was day one of the workshop and the rest of the workshop sounds very promising! On the menu on day 2: looking back at the legacy of IKM-Emergent, limitations of the programme and the possible foundations of an IKM-Emergent 2. Keep watching this space!

Communications 2010 (Part 2)

I’m currently reviewing the Communications Strategy of IKM – originally written in 2007 and published as a Background Paper in 2008 – at the same time as producing a Communications work plan for 2010.

The Communications Strategy in 2007 placed a lot of emphasis on the the ‘stickiness’ of ideas and the need for IKM to develop an elevator pitch. Stickiness relates to how ideas stick and was developed by two brothers, Chip and Dan Heath, in their book, Made to stick: why some ideas survive and others die. In their conception, sticky ideas are those that are simple, unexpected, concrete, credible and emotional. And somehow linked to this in my mind is the elevator pitch: a short overview of an idea for a product, service, or project. The name reflects the fact that an elevator pitch should be possible to deliver in the time span of an elevator ride, meaning in a maximum of 30 seconds and in 130 words or fewer (Source: Wikipedia).

Although the original Communication Strategy was much enamoured of ‘stickiness’ and the elevator pitch, I now have my serious doubts as to whether these are the answer for IKM or for anyone trying to communicate complex messages. In addition, both of these approaches come from the tradition of ‘knowedge as truth’ and what we are increasingly understanding is that knowledge as truth is not important at all. Instead, it the sharing and negotiation of meaning that are important. To quote from Harry Jones’ 2009 joint ODI/IKM working paper:

While the translation and ‘transfer’ of knowledge have become widespread terms and are the focus of a number of initiaitives, some argue that the term is inappropriate. Many point to the complex and contested nature of applied social research which makes claims to stable, ‘objective’ and acontextual knowledge, embedded in some paradigms of evidence-based policy and knowledge-transfer, less appropriate (eg. Brown 2007, Walter et al 2008). Instead, it is important to recognise the contextual nature of knowledge and the complexities of its ‘use’. This means looking at knowledge interaction and the messy nature of engagements between actors with diverse types of knowledge. There is a growing literatuer advocating ínteraction’and collaboration as key activities to link knowledge and policy (Jones 2009, p. 25)

So what does all this mean for IKM’s communications? I think it means a new emphasis on personal interactions with those outside the programme as a way of developing shared meaning, rather than thinking that a elevator pitch or presenting IKM’s messages simply will do the trick. And more emphasis on developing the community of practice around IKM because it is only in the interaction between these individuals – and their interaction with those outside the programme – that current approaches to information and knowledge be changed.

It’s quite interesting that this post is also reflected in the current discussion on monitoing and evaluation (M&E) of km which is taking place on The Giraffe: Monitoring knowledge (management): an impossible task.

Communications 2010 (Part 1)

Since the development of the Synthesis report in 2009, IKM’s messages are now more clearly defined. And they aren’t half complex.

Not only are they very complex because they are concerned with what is a very complex field – information and knowledge for development – but also because they are not clear guidelines but, rather, they are a series of guiding principles.

This complexity – and I use this word in a standard, English dictionary way, with no deeper meaning! – poses serious challenges for IKM’s Communications Strategy but more about that in my next post in this series. In the meantime, here is a abridged version of IKM’s messages:

Multiple Knowledges
Although always implicit, there has been considerable development in IKM’s understanding of the nature and importance of the concept of ‘multiple knowledges’ or ‘epistemic diversity’.  At one level, this is almost a common sense response to the daily negotiations across disciplines and ways of life which take place within the development sector.  Valerie Brown has further helped IKM’s understanding of this with her demonstration of how types of knowledge are so often linked to roles.

Knowledge landscapes
IKM has been working on the conception of multiple knowledges in the context of the disconnection between policy, practice and academic research in the development sector.

Bridges
One aspect of using multiple knowledges in practice is the importance of the bridges – human, organisational and technical – which need to exist if gaps between knowledges are to be crossed.

Local content
Local content is important and it needs to be valued by both local communities and development organisations.

Implications of non-linearity
Notions of development practice which envisage direct cause and effect relationships between input and output in environments untainted by any other influences are entirely hallucinatory.  Unanticipated external events, the unpredictability of life (health, family, change), and the possibility – even desirability – that new factors and opportunities will emerge out of the experience of doing whatever is planned, coming into contact and relating with the other actors involved mean that the lifespan of any firm plan is always limited.

Critique of research ‘for development’
The structure of research ‘for development’ is seriously dysfunctional.

Tools for handling multiple knowledges
Good information desing – including both means of design and means of expression – has the potenial to greatly strengthen the transmission signal.

Research into participatory processes: what happened?

Kate Newman and I have been working with the IKM Emergent Research Programme to develop some research into the flow (and use) of information generated by participatory processes, with a particular focus on international development organisations. This is the story of our experience to date…