Discover and Harvest

I met Jerry Sternin at a conference at Save the Children five years ago. He was encouraging me to look into his work on “positive deviance[1].” My first thought was how could deviance be positive? Of course, he was referring the common bell-shaped curve and the 2% of the population on any given metric who lived out in the tail two or more standard deviations from the mean—statistical nirvana.

What Jerry found in his work in Vietnam, was the value of discovering the exceptions. When faced with rampant malnutrition and an impossible timeframe to have an impact, he was forced to look for families whose children were healthy and figure out what their mothers were doing differently. Simple variations in diet, adding rice-paddy shrimp and sweet-potato greens, resulted in healthier children. Having discovered these exceptions, he shone a spotlight on them, turning these mothers into evangelists and teachers. He reached 2.2M children over the first two years of the program.

Jerry discovered the power of what I call the “discover and harvest” approach to solving problems. Nothing could be further from the approach our organizations tend to take, especially in technology. The traditional approach is more an “assess and build” approach: assess the situation, gather requirements, specify the project, build it, test it and deliver it. The problem is that this approach has a dismal history. For example, 57% of ERP projects don't realize their ROI (Nucleus Research) and 66% IT projects fail (Standish Chaos DB). More often not, what we assess and build misses the mark.

Enter the “discover and harvest” approach. It’s all about finding those applications and uses of technology in the far reaches of your organization (and sometimes under your nose) that are already working. As Jerry would say “somewhere in your organization, groups of people are already doing things differently and better. To create lasting change, find these areas of positive deviance and fan the flames.[2]” Imagine finding a really useful application being used in one of your rural field offices.

Why don’t we see more of this in our approach to technology? It requires headquarters humility. The best answers, especially if it involves change, need to be from the inside out. “Maybe the problem is that you can't import change from the outside in. Instead, you have to find small, successful but "deviant" practices that are already working in the organization and amplify them.[3]” Perhaps the CIOs role is one of "Chief Amplifier." Find what’s working and can be taken to scale, and then shine the spotlight on it.

"Discover and harvest" has a number of benefits. First, it’s already working somewhere; it leapfrogs over getting a new system to work. The pilot has already been run. Second, some group has already adopted it; it doesn’t need to be sold. Third, it’s field-tested. Especially for international NGOs working in challenged rural settings, it works where technology is rare.

So how do we take a “discover and harvest” approach in our organizations? Run a contest for people to submit their applications and uses of technology. Then recognize and reward them (it doesn’t need to be a cash award.) Finally, put their name on the application. Most people take pride in what they do and want to be recognized for what they achieve.

Give it a shot. Let me know what you find.

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[1] See the Fast Company article on Jerry’s work, “Positive Deviant,” by David Dorsey, November 30, 2000; here: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/41/sternin.html . Compare the chapter on "Bright Spots" (easier-to-explain than positive deviance) in Chip and Dan Heath's, Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, Broadway, 2010.

[2] Richard Tanner Pascale & Jerry Sternin, “Your Company’s Secret Change Agents,” Harvard Business Review, May, 2005.

[3] “Positive Deviant,” Fast Company.

Michelangelo

“If the astrologists who centered around the Porta Roma had cried out to him as he passed that he still had before him a third of his years… and some of his finest sculpture, painting and architecture ... he would have laughed, tiredly. But they would have been right[1].”

Last Saturday I was honored by a Lifetime Achievement Award from my colleagues at Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN.) After hearing Jane Meseck, a friend and colleague from Microsoft, speak about some of the things I had done, I was humbled and speechless. I remember saying “wow” and “thank you” and paraphrasing Mark Twain that the rumors of my lifetime have been a bit premature.

Then I remembered a story about one of my heroes, Michelangelo Buonarroti. He lived almost 90 years and is arguably the greatest artist of the Renaissance. Irving Stone wrote a wonderful book about his life called "The Agony and the Ecstasy." In it he told the story of Michelangelo returning to Rome, where he would live the rest of his life, in 1534 at the age of 58. If someone had told him that he had a third of his life yet to live and some of his finest art yet to create, he would not have believed them. But it would have been true.

What this story says to me is that whether we have gray hair yet or not, there is always more to do, always more we can contribute, and we should never give up on our visions of how the world can be a better place. And that we can impact the lives of those who will come after us.

I said some other things that day and told the story of the truck. [2] But I don't remember much else.It reminded me that there is a story for each occasion, each crossroad. What will yours be?

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[1] Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy, New York: Signet, 1961, p 667.

[2] These stories and others are posted in my book in progress, "Letters to a Young Manager".

Social Media and Humanitarian Aid

I had a chance to dialog with Shawn Ahmed of “The Uncultured Project” about social media and Haiti for an upcoming panel discussion we are doing at this week’s NTEN conference. We used SKYPE IM—no big deal, except I was at 35,000 feet enjoying Delta’s GoGo WiFi service and Shawn was in Toronto. Here’s some of what we talked about:

Ed: Hi Shawn. How are you preparing for the panel discussion on Saturday?

Shawn: Basically, I've been reading/brushing up on the links you sent me in prep for the panel

Ed: Great!

Shawn: My gut feeling is that, the angle I could bring is that social media + disaster relief is less about the technology available and more about the willingness to use it and embrace it.

Ed: What do you mean?

Shawn: For example, things like Ushahidi make it very easy for aid agencies to uncover where the needs are of beneficiaries in a disaster.

Ed: I agree, assuming the cell networks are running.

Ed: I told a colleague at Ushahidi that they were a radical listening to beneficiaries; that's the headline.

Shawn: Perhaps because of decades of policy and politics, there still isn't a real-time social media data sharing BETWEEN orgs.

Ed: Give me an example.

Shawn: When I was tagging along with a UK charity during Cyclone Sidr in Bangladesh, they had the water purification equipment, but they didn’t have the jerry cans by which to give out the water.

Shawn: It's very conceivable that, had they publically shared this data, they could have found another org in the field that had a symmetrical problem: jerry cans but no clean water to give.

Ed: So one plus one makes a solution.

Ed: Talking about your field experiences will be important

Shawn: Yes. Similarly, when I was in the field, I was very open about the "lessons learned". For example, I was distributing blankets when our boat got stormed by locals because we didn’t have enough aid.

Shawn: I shared this data on my blog, but the charity I had gone with reprimanded me for this because they felt it made them look bad. Yet, thanks to sharing this data, there was at least one org that changed how it used boats in their initial visit into the field. Data sharing like this can improve efficiency and save lives

Ed: That’s one of the promises. But open sharing of data often brings the spot light to an organization’s business processes. If these are not button-down, then that’s a problem. I’m not surprised you got negative feedback. On the positive side, a market for information will allow the bright spots to shine.

Shawn: So org-to-org sharing in real-time is just as important as victim-to-org or beneficiary-to-org sharing

Ed: I agree; that’s one of the things we’re pursuing at NetHope.

Shawn: yeah, I see the org-to-org potential and power of NetHope.

Shawn: I fear most orgs may eventually embrace disaster victim-to-org social media, but not org-to-org sharing.

Shawn: Similarly, re: feedback loop, I believe there is a benefit beyond just for donors and those far away.

Ed: Such as…

Shawn: In Bangladesh, I noticed near *hostility* towards conventional media by the victims of Cyclone Sidr. Most were bemoaning that there were more cameras than aid.

Shawn: And this was compounded by the fact that many journalists were embedded with NGOs. So it wasn't uncommon to see an aid org driving an SUV - with no aid in it, just cameramen.

Ed: Ouch. If the people are not served, we are wasting our time.

Shawn: But about the feedback loop: my experience was VERY different during Cyclone Aila, where I was able to establish myself as a social media ambassador of sorts. So my camera was merely the eyes connecting them to a online community supporting, caring, and bringing aid through an NGO.

Shawn: This actually created a fondness and appreciation. In fact, a village elder approached me and my friend there with his profuse gratitude. The difference in Cyclone Sidr (being mistaken for media) and Cyclone Aila (being seen as an ambassador of sorts) was a difference of night and day.

Shawn: It meant a lot to the recipients as well --that they had a name that was being provided with their relief kits. So this just wasn't some org giving handouts...

Shawn: Granted, this doesn't replace the social-psychological needs of disaster relief victims. But, it creates a connection (when done well) that's perceived better than just hand outs (conventional disconnected aid) and lenses in the face (conventional media).

Ed: A key point: social media is personal!

Shawn: Yes!

Shawn: And most orgs don’t' get that. It's not another tool in the toolkit. It requires a rethinking and reframing that --sadly-- has not happened yet.

Ed: It's not digital radio

Shawn: Yes, exactly

Social media and humanitarian aid: we invite your participation in the conversation. Join us for our breakout session on Saturday at 3:30PM EST if you’d like to hear more. If you cannot attend, please post your questions and comments here.

NetHope Summit, Day Four - The Path Forward

In my religious tradition, the liturgy ends with the statement: "The worship is ended. The service now begins." This is an appropriate metaphor for our NetHope Summit which ended on Thursday. We have had what can be seen as a grand celebration of information sharing, which is the basis of all collaborations. Our work as NetHope continues to grow and evolve in ways that merit anew our commitment to the group, and merit the partnerships with our supporters. We have broken bread, toasted with wine, and practiced singing from the same page. Now we return to our home countries and organizations where the real work begins.

I want to encourage each of you who attended, and those who have followed from afar, to think about your key take-aways: what you have learned and what things you will change and put into practice.

To jump-start your thinking about this, here is my list:

1) I met dozens of new people from the membership and from our supporters. Making these connections and continuing the conversations is an important way to carry the Summit forward. I'm inviting each of you write me with your questions and connect with me on LinkedIn.com[1].

2) I saw a number of presentations with conclusions, charts and links that I want to study more. I look forward to review these on TAG, NetHope’s SharePoint intranet.

3) I was reminded how hard change is, not only from Chip and Dan Heath’s new book[2] , which I’m reading, but also in the bewildered and pained faces –as well as the arms-crossed disbelief-- that I saw across the meeting rooms and in 1:1 conversations. I need to paint clearer pictures about what all the changes mean for IT workers. We all want to know WIIFM[3].

4) I heard a number of personal stories, especially about the personal impact that the field trips had. The Masai Mara group had moving accounts and photos that I hope you get to see on the NetHope Flickr page (see www.nethope.org for details.) I’ve been a collector of stories, which you can read on my book project page, Letters to a Young Manager.

5) Following advice from those more knowledgeable is often wise. I was warned about wearing sunscreen and not eating uncooked foods. Yet I’m an advocate of “do something” and “ready, fire, aim,” which sometimes means you get burned and set-back. This was a case where “eating your own dog food” may mean literally choking on your words. To round out the clichés: caveat emptor! But nonetheless, move forward. If you catch the paradox here, welcome to reality.

During the Shared Services session on Thursday morning, Rui Lopes told an interesting story about the “NetHope plane.[4]” With apologies to Rui if I’ve not done it justice, here’s a paraphrase of the story:

“There was a person who wanted to go on a plane ride (Ed), so he acquired a plane. However, he didn't want to go on the ride by himself, so he tried to get some other riders, so that the ride would be more cost effective and so that he would have more fun, with companions. The plane was called NetHope, and the initial navigators were two guys named Ed and Dipak. Soon passengers (members) were added and the journey moved on. The plane was going to have several destinations (connectivity, ER, I4D, Shared Services, etc.). As the airline grew, a number of other employees were acquired to handle related activities (Joe, Jack, Frank, Barry, etc.) And we needed the expert services of some senior pilots (ADP: Jessica, Dan and Tom).”

What I heard in this story is that it takes a growing collaboration to move a growing organization and our collective missions forward. That's a fitting summary for where we are and the path forward. As I stated in my keynote to the BPO Conference in Nairobi on Friday: We cannot go it alone!

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[1] See my profile and send me an invitation at http://www.linkedin.com/pub/edward-granger-happ/0/77b/234

[2] Chip and Dan Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, Broadway, 2010

[3] WIIFM = What’s In It For Me. In other words, what’s the personal value statement for me.

[4] I heard this story second hand as I was out ill Thursday morning (see take-away #5).Thanks to Barry Sanders for filling me in.

NetHope Summit, Day Three - Build for the Field

Today was arguably the most important day of our conference. It was the day to visit programs in the Field. I was in the group that visited the Greenbelt Conservation Reforestation Project in the Gatamaiyo Forest Nature Reserve‎.

As I mentioned in my Monday keynote, we believe in building for the Field. We have been unpacking the meaning of this statement in the NetHope Collaboration Manifesto, which the Board of Directors has been reviewing. The latest draft states "The field workers delivering our organizations’ programs are our primary clients. Our IT solutions must work in the most remote and challenging parts of the world. In this, field workers are our most important teachers and critics. We seek to deliver technology that improves program design, delivery and impact in the Field."

One of the most important strategic questions we can ask as IT leaders is, who is our most important client? If you think about where our agency programs are delivered and connect the dots, it's obvious that our #1 client is the fieldworker. So seeing the technology that the Greenbelt workers are using to register trees they are planting was instructive in two ways. first, it showed how a combination of instruments could be used in a remote location to track progress; and second it underscored the need for simplicity.

The process for verifying the planting of a tree appeared to exceed the actual planting by about 10 to 1. I was told that this is a combination of World Bank and UN requirements. It seems to me the the monitoring and evaluation (M&E) time should not exceed the program delivery time. While the technology helped ease the data collection, the business process seemed antiquated. I could not help but think of Michael Hammer's edict about business process re-engineering: "don't pave the the cow path."

Nevertheless, it was appropriate for our group to get our hands dirty (literally) and plant a dozen trees. The photo above is the "NetHope" tree I planted in Kenya. It was fitting to leave a living marker that contributes to the ecosystem in an emerging country. We can do no better with IT in our organizations.

NetHope Summit, Day Two - On the Same Page

I'd like to talk about two comments that were bookends to day two of the Summit in Nairobi.

This morning, Weibe Boer, Associate Director of the Rockefeller Foundation, challenged us with two things:

1) To encourage our other back office departments (HR , Finance, Legal) about the what, why, how and benefits of collaboration;

2) To have a double impact as NGO IT leaders: first, on program delivery in the Field, and second, creating economic impact on emerging countries by where we choose to put our IT services.

The role we increasingly play as NetHope is advocating within our own organizations on the value of technology and the impact it can have on our work. Charlie MacCormack, Save the Children's CEO, spoke about this in a white paper on the NetHope web site. Charlie concluded that over the past 13 years "the same headquarters staff is supporting over two times the number of people who are working with children in the field. That type of productivity gain would not be possible without technology."

Our Board panel said similar things about increased technology investments in the midst of the recession. It's one of the few capacity building levers we can pull in our downsized organizations. Doing that together has proven even more impactful, realizing more than a 300% return on our NetHope investment. This is a collaboration that works, which other departments would do well to emulate.

Our Shared Services initiative is about building capacity, not necessarily by off-shoring IT services, as many of our corporate colleagues have done, but growing services to meet increased Field application demand. NGOs are behind the corporate IT services curve, and therefore usually do not realize the savings by moving functions to lower cost alternatives. If we have a small services staff, with only 8-hour by 5-day support, we are hard pressed to find the 30% plus savings that other organizations do. However, if we share services, we can grow support to 24 by 7 without increasing support costs.

One of the reasons we are in Kenya, is we believe that this increased capacity can be better delivered by an emerging country, especially one in which we deliver our program services. That these decisions can help the local economy is a "give-back" opportunity for us.

This evening, I had the honor of introducing Catherine Ngahu, Chairperson of the Kenya ICT Board, our host at this year's Summit. When I learned that she was very interested in the social side of technology, I could think of no better way to introduce her to NetHope than with the story of the Fallen Tree. I said that we are that village who sang from the same page and moved the obstacle out of the way forward-- no matter whether the challenge of insufficient staff, budget or equipment, when we all pull together and trust each other, we can move mountains.

Catherine then told a story about the importance of context that we would do well to heed in our technology work. It was about an ad campaign NGOs ran a few decades ago to encourage the poor in Africa to have smaller families. The marketing approach was to show a family with four healthy children in front of a nice home, contrasted with a family with eight children in front of a meager shelter. However, the poor kept having more children. When they finally asked them why, they said the ad told them that poor families have more children! This was a perfect way to end the day: ask and listen before you build. We can be on the same page with our audience as well.

NetHope Summit, Day One – The Big Rocks

We kicked off our NetHope Summit in Nairobi Kenya today. All 29 members were represented; with our sponsors and guests, we have 90 attending. It is very gratifying to see the simple vision of collaboration I wrote about nine years ago having become the force for shared technology in nonprofit organizations.

We heard welcoming remarks from Bill Brindley, NetHope CEO and Paul Kukubo, CEO of the Kenya ICT Board. It was over a year ago in Geneva that Paul and I talked about Kenya hosting a NetHope Summit. Hearing his welcome brought home more than the importance of the work we do as NGOs in the emerging world. Paul talked about how the shared services concepts he saw beginning in NetHope were being applied throughout the Kenya government organizations today. Now we can learn from their success.

This is one of the messages I touched on in my Summit address this afternoon: we need to have the humility to learn from the far reaches of our organizations, and the people we assist, how technology can be applied to benefit all. As IT leaders in NGOs we need to be clear that our beneficiaries and our fieldworkers are our top customers.

To make the point of the fieldworker as our #1 customer, I told Steven Covey's story about the rocks [1]

To paraphrase the parable:

A teacher placed a large jar on the table in front of the classroom and proceeded to fill it with large rocks.
"Is it full," he asked the class.
All the students said "yes!"
He then took a carton of gravel and added it to the jar.
"Is it full," he repeated.
Becoming more wary, half the class said yes.
He then took a carton of sand and added it to the jar.
"Is it full now?"
None of the students raised their hand.
The teacher added a pitcher of water.
"Now?"
"Yes."
"So what’s the moral of this story," he queried?
"That there’s always room for more," some asked [2]?
"No," he said;
“The point of the experiment is that if you don’t put the big rocks in first, you’ll never fit them in."

So I challenged the NetHope group: as you go out and visit field programs this week, and meet people who work here in Kenya and East Africa, ask yourself one question: What are the big rocks?
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[1]Stephen Covey story: First Things First, Simon & Schuster, 1999, pp. 88-89

[2]That may be our “normal” answer in nonprofit organizations; everything can fit under the umbrella of the good!