Measuring, reflecting, knowledge management, M&E and learning

It was really interesting this week to work intensively with one of our clients who is playing a leading role in stimulating a learning culture in her organisation. After working together for a day and a half we stopped to reflect on the learning process and she shared 2 important new insights. One is the importance (for her) of the fact that we were not working with pre-determined models or frameworks that she needed somehow to 'transplant' into her organisation, but instead were focusing on her particular organisation throughout, and what could be useful or appropriate there. The second insight related to her own learning process and what had made it powerful, and her realisation that the learning for her had been especially successful because it was collaborative, and she had participated actively in creating her own learning.

For me this second point was especially interesting, as it validates the idea that learning is best when it is a social process in which people engage and are involved together in working to learn, solve problems and be creative.

Too often we fall away from real learning opportunities, and rely on more linear approaches to capacity building, assuming that organisations learn in the same way that learning happens for us in school or as students, and that employees can then be 'taught' how to do things.

And frequently we then get caught up in a demand for 'measuring impact' of change and learning processes. I recently interviewed Nancy Coulson, an independent health consultant who works in Southern Africa, about the question of 'monitoring and evaluation', or 'M&E'. We have shared a concern that M&E processes, and the drive for measuring, can mitigate against real learning opportunities, and that M&E has become a self-sustaining 'industry' - particularly in the development sector - in which thousands of people are employed in almost ritualistic endeavours to assemble and package data and information in order to 'prove' to absent sponsors or donors that a specific project is working well.

See Nancy's interview here:



Yesterday we had one of our Kessels & Smit days in Johannesburg, and I realised how privileged I am to be working with such great colleagues. Philippa Kabali-Kagwa was with us from Cape Town, and I am very excited that she has now also joined the blogging community. I have added a link to her blog Shift is Happening on my list of recommended blogs. 'Shift happens' has become something of a key phrase in our company recently, incorporating the idea of change (and its inevitability), but also as an affirmation of the richness that comes with persevering through difficult change processes.