Life in the front line of the Haiti Earthquake

Does the Harlem Children's Zone hold the key to revolutionalizing the world?

My kids class

I recently reread Jared Diamond's excellent book, Guns, Germs, and Steel. It is an excellent overview of how a variety of factors gave some geographic regions the natural advantages that allowed them to dominate the rest of the world. He beautifully shows that, up until fairly recently, where you were born, rather than your lineage or "race" determines how rich your society would be. However, now that the world is flat and everyone has access to the same guns, germs, and steel; why have the differences continued? Why aren't African kids competing on par with European kids?

The question became even more intriguing after I read Malcom Gladwell's book, Outliers: The Story of Success. He looks at successful people from Mozart to Bill Gates and concludes that these people became so successful by spending the 10,000 hours required to master a skill and then being in the right time and place to take advantage of the mastery. This was the case with Bill Gates who, as a high school student, had nearly unlimited access to a mainframe computer when few computer professors did. It was also the case of Mozart, the son of a composer, who was forced to put in his ten thousand hours while still a young child. 

The beauty of putting together the thoughts outlined in these two books is that they make the case that anyone in the world could succeed if they put in the time to master the skill. Except it doesn't work that way. With a few rare exceptions, Africa does not produce many "Outliers."

The best answer that I have found lies in the story behind the Harlem Children's Zone (HCZ). As described in the This American Life episode, the HCZ CEO, Geoffrey Canada, was raising his second family in the 1990s are realized that the thinking about childrearing had dramatically changed from his first try at it. The new thinking was that parents had to be involved with their kids from even before the kids was born--eating the right foods, singing to the womb. Once the baby was born, there was a whole new philosophy of discipline and care. He encouraged his social workers to go out into their neighborhoods so see if this new thinking had caught on in Harlem. They found that it had not. Geoffrey then reworked the HCZ strategy to focus on helping the children by creating a "conveyor belt" to take them (and their parents) from baby college to college. The HCZ helps parents to care for their kids and prepare their kids for success. By not waiting until the children are reach the traditional school age, they are able to impact the children when they are easiest to touch.

The results that the HCZ has achieved are nothing short of amazing. They have transformed the neighborhood from one of underachieving kids to overachieving ones. They are proving that it is possible to transform education. The Obama administration is looking to duplicate the success through "Promise Neighborhoods."

What if we could take this idea global? What if we could launch baby colleges and develop conveyor belts to take kids to college? Could this be the missing key that would allow children from poor families from all over the world to finally be able to compete in this global economy? Is the biggest mistake that we make in education that we wait too long to begin educating our kids and thereby deny them the chance to achieve mastery?

Seth's mad at the "non-profits" and the situation is worse than he thinks

Seth wrote a strong post today highlighting how non-profits are failing to embrace the new social media technologies that seem perfectly designed to help them to fullfill their missions. He says that we should be agents of change and yet we fear it. His post was so painfully true that I almost couldn't finish reading it. From what I have seen in international development, we don't just fear new technology, we fear all change.

I started blogging as a way of joining in the discussion of how to improve international development projects. I have been working internationally for over twenty years and have become disenchanted with the lack of progress. One of my first posts was on how non-profits do not foster learning. I later wrote on the new challenges in the development business and the failure of USAID's excellent online document depository to foster learning.

I've never figured out why we don't do better to foster organizational learning and change and am ashamed by our collective failure. Somehow non-profits have become more afraid of failure than of the status quo. Too often we focus on short-term goals ("number of people trained," "number of schools built," "number of farmers using new techniques" and we lose sight of our broader goals.

The international development work that I do is full of projects that failed to have a lasting impact and yet negative evaluations are very rare. I've heard it said that the best predictor of success for a new entrepreneur is the number of businesses he or she has started--not the number that have succeeded.  In business, it is recognized that failure is probably a better learning tool than success. Yet non-profits hate to admit failure.

What if we admitted that our approaches were risky? What if we strove to either make dramatic changes or to fail brilliantly? Our track record would not be perfect, but we would certainly be remarkable and isn't that better?

DEC--A goldmine of information locked behind a weak website

Several years ago, USAID created a beautiful repository for all those progress reports, lessons learned reports, and technical studies that it generates: The Development Experience Clearinghouse. From its frontpage:

USAID's Development Experience Clearinghouse (DEC) is the largest online resource for USAID funded technical and program documentation, with over 62700documents available for electronic download.

The idea of the site is wonderful--to make all of the documents that are generated by USAID and its contractors publically available. I use it frequently when I need to research a new project or country. I love that my old reports are available through the site including quite a bibliography from our Hurricane Georges Project. I love getting the weekly email with the lists of all of the new titles. The variety is quite inspiring:

• Ataulfo mango in Chiapas : a value chain analysis
  
• Finance in value chain analysis : a synthesis paper
  
• Grassroots civic education and media for democracy in Egypt : final report
  
• Strengthening the accountability and transparency of the legislative process in the West Bank/Gaza (BATAN) : project final report
  
• Microfinance and HIV/AIDS : the role of donors and funders  
• A new approach to estimating abortion rates
•   Quality programs for orphans and vulnerable children : a facilitator's guide to establishing service standard

This past week's email contained around 130 titles. Sure, some of the reports are very specialized or just routine progress reports. However, there must be a lot of great information buried in this pile of reports. Unfortunately, it remains buried. I am intrequed to learn what was learned during the grassroots civic education project in Eygpt, but I fear that the report is just a routine, "we did what we promised to do" report. I don't have time to wade through 130 reports a week.

I would love to see one of two things happen:

1. Have the DEC website switch to a youtube format: The information page for each report would include both a counter to show how popular it is and a place to leave comments. You could easily see which reports are most popular (and in theory most interesting) for any category or country. The comments would let you know what other people thought of the report (or the project).
2. Have a New York Times  "Review of Books" style newsletter that also comes out each week. This review could highlight the best new reports and dig out some of the buried jewels. Alternately, this could be a great subject for a blog: The USAID Report Review. Ideally, you would have reviewers from the different fields and from different geographic areas. If the review or blog attracted enough attention, it could even improve the quality of the reports themselves as people actually competed to be highlighted in the blog. 

The options are not exclusive--the youtube-type site would make it easier to identify reports that needed a review. I doubt that USAID will take the chance of opening up the site to comments and ratings. However, what about starting a blog to review the USAID reports? Anyone intersested? 

The Risk of Sharing Ideas

What do you do with your great idea of how to change the world? Do you keep it secrete while you try to figure out how to make it work as your project or do you tell everyone that you know and risk having someone steal your idea? Seth Goldin blogged about the difficulty of selling ideas. In the non-profit world we rarely can be paid by an organization for developing an idea, however we do make our organizations grow by developing new ideas. We fear that if someone else hears our great idea, they will steal it and make their organization grow instead of ours.

The same thought seems to hold once we begin implementing our great idea. I recently directed a project to build capacity among local organizations. My organization was one of thirteen organizations to get a similar grant. During the implementation of these five-year grants, I was astounded at how few of my fellow implementers were willing to share even basic information about their operations. Some organizations told me that they were unwilling to share their projects' annual reports, because they contained information about their operations that were trade secrets.

In his book The Dip, Seth discussed how ideas are cheap, but champions are hard to find. I think this better matches my experience with ideas. I've come up with a lot of great ideas. However unless I have the time and energy to put into making them happen, they wither away. When I've discussed an idea that I want to implement (such as my failed idea for creating a movement to end poverty in the Caribbean that inspired me to start this blog), the discussion helps me to refine the idea (and perhaps help me to realize that it wasn't such a great idea after all!).

Seth concludes his article by stating that if you are not in the position to sell your idea, better to blog it and at least get bragging rights to have initiated the idea.  If you don't have the means to champion your idea now, wouldn't it be better to have the world become a better place because of your idea? 

Perhaps we need an Idea-a-Day website for non-profits where we can push our ideas out and hope that someone adopts and champions them.

Why are we always too busy sawing?

In sticking with the theme of why NGOs are not better at fostering internal capacity-building, I read the Mckinsey & Company entitled "Effective Capacity Building in Non-Profit Organizations" (August, 2001). The report was commissioned by Venture Philanthropy Partners as part of their analysis of how they can help the nonprofit sector. The report is an interesting look at nonprofit organizations by a for-profit firm.

My favorite chapter is the second one that is entitled " WHY CAPACITY BUILDING MATTERS – AND WHY NONPROFITS IGNORE IT." The authors cite a variety of reasons why NGOs don't do it, but they basically revolve around two points:
* NGOs are too busy implementing their work to think about improving their capacity
* It is very hard to get money for capacity building

Although I agree that both of these reasons are the excuses that we use, I am also a bit baffled by them. Why are we too busy implementing to take the time to improve and why do we give it such a low priority that we don't find the money to fund it? Somehow I don't think that we neglect training because we don't believe that we need it, but that it is hard to justify the investment. I would guess that for the private sector has an easier time justifying the time and expense because they hope to see the impact in their increased sales or profits. For the non-profit sector, perhaps we focus too much on our impact today and too little on our future impact.

My favorite quote on the importance of capacity building comes from the book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven Covey and is found in the introduction to the chapter on the Seventh Habit, "Sharpening the Saw":

Suppose that you were to come upon someone in the woods working feverishly to saw down a tree. “What are you doing?”, you ask. “Can’t you see,” comes the impatient reply. “I’m sawing down this tree.” “You look exhausted!” you exclaim. “How long have you been at it?” “Over five hours,” he returns, “and I’m beat! This is hard work.” “Well, why don’t you take a break for a few minutes and sharpen that saw?” you inquire. “I’m sure it would go a lot faster.” “I don’t have time to sharpen the saw,” the man says emphatically. “I’m too busy sawing!”

Why are we always too busy sawing to take the time to sharpen our saw?

"Lessons Not Learned" Why don't NGO workers collaborate more?

Several years ago, a friend of mine< Wade Channell, wrote a paper for the Carengie Endowment entitled, "Lessons Not Learned: Problems with Western Aide for Post Communist Countries.". The main ideas that I took away from the paper are that development workers are lousy at learning from each other. Although we might be friends and socialize together, the world of international development workers does not foster learning. He cited four problems of learning (my comments follow each):

* Incentives for Knowing, But Not for Learning: We are hired for the experience that we already have. In the 20 years I've spent working for different international NGOs, no organization has ever paid for any training for me except language classes. Whereas the private sector and even the Federal Government invests heavily in training its employees; NGOs don't. Additionally, I don't know of any professional journals related to international development, except for academic ones.
* High Incentives for Repetition, Low Incentives for Innovation: Donors only want to fund proven successes and NGOs write their proposals to satisfy what the donor wants to hear. This is especially critical when entering a competitive bid. The NGOs seek to divine what the donor wants to hear, rather than to come up with the best approach. The Gates Foundation has made significant waves because they are willing to fund projects that take risky approaches.
* High Incentives for Guarding Information: I was recently project director for one of thirteen projects funded by USAID to strengthen local organizations around the world. Each of the 13 organizations was given a five year contract to do similar work--this should have been an ideal learning environment. Instead, there was very little information sharing. Some organizations even refused to share their annual reports claiming that it would expose their trade secrets! Whereas I emailed my annual report and even my midterm evaluation to all of the other implementing organizations, only one and occasionally a second ever reciprocated.
* Disconnection between Performance and Awards: It is very hard to measure how well a program was implemented and whether its successes and failures are do to implementation or luck--I learned long ago that if you have good relations with your donor, you can explain away any failure.

The funny thing with this problem is that the individual development workers are committed to making a difference. It is the rare development worker that does not work long, hard hours trying to make their project a success.

So what is it that keeps us apart? Why aren't we a stronger tribe? This past year, I watched in dismay as USAID awarded contract after contract to professional consulting firms rather than NGOs. When I talk with my NGO friends, we all believe that we do a better job. USAID says that they cannot see any difference and it's easier to work with the private sector. That's a sad statement.

What would happen if we did begin talking to each other about our failures and problems. What if we shared honest case studies--not the trumped up success stories that we have on our websites. Could we use these blogs, discussion groups, and wiki's to promote this culture of learning and to reward true successes?

Is it already happening somewhere? Post a comment--let me know.