Getting good at disruption in an uncertain world: learning for international non-government...

Managing disruptive change

November 2015Author nameDateNovember 2015

Learning for international non-government organisations (INGOs) from Southern NGO leaders

Getting good at disruption in an uncertain world


November 2015The backdrop• Many drivers of disruption will affect how the SDGs are

implemented• demographic and geopolitical shifts, climate change, urbanisation, resource scarcity,

technological transformation

• Disruptors within the professional world of development are changing practice within both INGOs and national NGOs in the South• disintermediation, new donor nations, blurring of ‘civil society’ and ‘private sector’ ways of

working, online giving, changing regulatory space for civil society, rise of social enterprise

• INGOs are already preparing for disrupted futures

• Southern NGOs are key implementers for the SDGs and critically important partners for INGOs, but little is known about how they view or manage disruptive change


November 2015The project

Collating and sharing learning from Southern NGO leaders on how to manage disruptive changeMay Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec

Literature review

Workshop with IIED donors and partners

23 interviews with donor-savvy Southern NGO leaders across Africa, Asia, Latin America

Written outputs, DFID and INGO engagement (including through ICSC), learning exchange among interviewees

Agreement to focus on Southern NGOs


November 2015The project

Why focus on Southern NGOs?• The SDG commitment to ‘leave

no one behind’ demands effective organisational capacities to adapt and innovate

• Local and national NGOs are invaluable in building agency and achieving lasting change. INGOs need to work with Southern NGO priorities for change

• Southern NGOs can feel development disruption more acutely than INGOs. They are often closer to its impacts

• Southern NGOs are used to managing disruption in the here-and-now. INGOs need to understand these experiences so that they can better address future development disruption


November 2015What is disruptive change?Interviewees suggest disruption means many things:

•Disruption is life!... At moments of ‘stuck-ness’, disruption brings the energy to move again.•Our organisation has grown from something very small to something very large, all in the context of wars, conflicts, earthquakes, and changing donor priorities, government policies and spaces for civil society. This is an incredibly turbulent environment.

•Our reality is one of ‘consistently trying to overcome uncertainty’. The reality of the change process has been to learn to manage uncertainty on an ongoing basis.

Turbulence, uncertainty, a fact of life

•The idea of a shock assumes a steady state earlier, and that after a shock there is a return to the initial condition. [Conversely] the layman’s definition of disruptive change is ‘life will not be the same again’.

“Life will never be the same again”

•The first thing you think is always negative, but there are pluses and minuses.• ‘Disruptive change’ has a negative connotation. [But] …disruption might not be bad because [your organisation] can thrive on other peoples’ sorrow or misery. And there is also a positive dimension when disruption benefits everyone.

Positive as well as negative

•There is a risk that external priorities are somehow submerging the internal. There are stronger, if not bigger, issues … that create more disruption.. The relationship with government is the major disruption which we manage: particularly with change towards ‘loved’ and ‘unloved’ NGOs.

Externally or internally driven

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November 2015How to respond?Interviewees said responses to disruptive change can be:

Adaptive, reactive Proactive, innovativeor

Adaptation is dancing to somebody else’s music. Innovation is composing and playing your own music – and having the others dance to it.“Some organisations … are successful because they can survive through the adaptive capacity of capturing the mood: climate change is a good example. Any new fashion will force us to adapt: for some in a positive way; for others in a way that is too opportunistic for our mandates or missions to survive.

The typical kind of change in developing countries is reactive, and it happens when some event occurs in the environment and the system or NGO reacts… But it’s essential to think of innovation which comes from within. And innovation can also be disruptive.

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November 2015So what?The many meanings of disruption matter because, in Southern NGO contexts:

‘Mega disruptors’ like climate change are often obscured by disruption as a daily ‘fact of life’.

Addressing disruption-readiness here and now is a

vital stepping stone to ‘future-fitness’

How disruption is framed internally can affect how it is addressed at an organisational level (Harvard Business Review, 2002).

so

If INGOs use the idea of ‘disruption’ in their

strategic planning, they should consider framing it

in ways that allow the best mix of adaptive and innovative outcomes to

emerge

so

Reactive Southern NGOs often nimbly deliver on changing donor, INGO, and government priorities. They can appear very resourceful. But they may lack capacity to develop the organisational systems and innovation needed to chart their own futures in a disrupted world.

INGOs could usefully reflect further on what blends of

advocacy, partnership and financial support are most

likely to deliver adaptation that is also rich in innovation potential

so


November 2015So what for INGOs?By consciously becoming more attuned to Southern NGO experiences of disruption in the here-and-now INGOs can:• Build a stronger evidence base for what it will take to

build ‘disruption-readiness’ on systemic drivers of disruptive change

• geopolitical shifts, climate change, urbanisation, resource scarcity, etc

• Embody solidarity by becoming better partners to Southern NGOs

• with potential positive spillovers for overall development outcomes, shared pursuit of change, INGO legitimacy, and INGO strategic planning for new ‘disintermediated’ roles (e.g. through subcontracted technical support to Southern NGOs)

• Support ‘disruption entrepreneurs’ • people and organisations with scalable ideas that embrace disruption and could

accelerate implementation of the SDGs


November 2015Learnings for INGOsOur work reveals four kinds of learning for INGOs as:

Positive development

disruptors

Supporters of effective disruptive

change management

NGOs facing disruption

themselves

Disruptors of Southern NGOs

Supporting others

Direct agency

Embracing disruption

Adapting to disruption


November 2015INGOs as positive development disruptors

Where INGOs disrupt the status quo in ways that advance implementation of the SDGs.

Many Southern NGOs also see themselves as disruptive innovators. INGOs could actively seek to amplify the outcomes of Southern NGO-led disruptive innovation, and take inspiration from existing Southern NGO practice.



Insights from our interviewees:

We wanted to embrace a new movement of start-ups creating technology for the poor, and to create a connection to areas that need them. The fact that unusual suspects are joining this area is really disruptive.“

”I feel that there is a vast field of innovators; people with courage and capacities who are showing the way and can help us move forward, and use disruption not as something to fight against, but as a stepping stone for the transformation that is needed.

If you want to be disruptive, you need not to take the world as it is, but leave more windows open to the world as it should be. What that means at an organisational level is that you need to be very open to breaking stereotypes.

Most innovation is at the grassroots, in smaller NGOs. They can deliver, but they are not aware of… opportunities [to work with the private sector].

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Southern NGO-led disruptive innovation casts new roles for INGOsDisruptive innovation shifts ODA

geographies. INGOs need to make space for Southern leadership to

thrive.

INGOs can help partners build skills to craft ‘proof of concept’, and advocate donor support for

new Southern NGO-led innovation delivery models, e.g. through a shift in risk appetite.

We want international cooperation agencies to be open to innovative organisations that bring something different… looking at us based on usefulness, not geopolitics.

Donors seem to want innovative solutions, but they won’t finance things until you have proof of concept. There must be greater coherence here. It becomes very hard to have innovation in how you deliver services because the system tends to take you to proven and traditional ways of doing things.

Grassroots disruptive innovators may need support from brokers including INGOs to connect their innovation capacities to development outcomes.

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November 2015INGOs as supporters of change management

INGOs could better support Southern NGOs to manage disruptive change.

Southern NGO leaders have lots of insights into what makes for effective disruptive change management. INGOs could be more effective in supporting this.



Four broad categories of insights into the ‘disruption-ready’ Southern NGOs:Skills and capabilities

• getting beyond survival, building skills

Leadership and governance• ‘distributed leadership’, engaging the board

Culture and learning• working on cultural alignment, continual commitment to learning

Funding and coalitions• securing resources for organisational development, applying coalitions to

disruptive change management



Skills and capabilitiesGood reactive disruptive change management is also important for survival. But Southern NGOs with strong innovation capabilities may deliver better development outcomes than those in ‘reactive’ mode.

DFID’s civil society support could lead the way in building understanding and a Southern NGO community of practice on ‘disruption-ready’ innovation.

I don’t think reactive disruption management can lead to innovation.… It’s the survival mode in which NGOs and many organisations live in the developing world... [S]urvival is different to development.

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”Effective organisational change processes support and diversify internal skills to deliver desired outcomes.

‘Disruption-ready’ decision- making on internal skills and competences demands strategic reflection and organisational learning. INGOs need actively to support Southern partners to resource this.

If you let people pursue their passions and interests, they will always leave something.

Our management approach is different from the one you see in business school literature. We focus on people with the skills and traits of leaders, who can take decisions on their own in the field at any time.

We’re writing a new strategic plan; and part of my thinking is that we need to re-think the kinds of skills and people you bring into your governance model.

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Leadership and governance

Leadership behaviours and styles have a significant impact on how organisations experience disruptive change management.

Do ‘distributed leadership’ models deliver more effective disruption management? If so, there are implications for INGOs own leadership cultures, as well as for how they work with Southern NGOs.

Our leadership style is ‘distributed’: everything is based on personal responsibility; each one of us is a leader one way or another.. We had a funding shortfall twice where we stayed more than fifteen months without resources. And still people came to work.

With new leadership, we are very decentralised. Most operational decisions are taken in the field, which builds confidence and ownership in local managers.

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”Boards can be invaluable in supporting effective disruptive change management.

How much do INGOs know about the workings of boards in the Southern NGOs they partner with? Is there a case for supporting boards’ enhanced ‘effective change governance’ capacity, through grants, peer exchange, or information resources?

To confront changes in the external environment, many NGOs are.. changing the composition of their boards.

By the time we got the subcontract, we were told it could not be used to cover the cost of salaries for the previous six months…The board said they would make personal contributions to cover the shortfall.

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Culture and learning

Organisational culture can predispose Southern NGOs to positive or negative outcomes from disruptive change.

INGOs could partner with national and local NGOs in the South to reflect on links between organisational culture and development outcomes with a view to building ‘disruption-ready’ or ‘disruption-embracing’ culture.

It’s the culture of busy-ness that’s the problem. You never stop to reflect, and there’s a tendency to think that the bigger we are, the more successful we’ll be…

One thing we really wanted to embed is a culture of always identifying opportunities and areas for improvement. Also a culture of ‘action’ rather than talk. We [have] an online culture page [www.kopernik.ngo/page/our-culture]… We still discuss it every quarter... We go through the culture [statement], and assess whether we’re living up to it.

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”Learning is a key resource for disruptive change. At first blush, there appears to be a strong correlation between effective disruptive change management, internal mechanisms for learning, and rapid feedback from mistakes.

Many NGOs around the world struggle with short-termism in their operations. Organisational learning is vital. INGOs may need to allocate a bigger share of limited learning funds to Southern NGO partners, and try out new ways to learn from one another.

Every year, boards should have a meeting for horizon scanning, or for a consultant to come in and talk about patterns in the external environment.

In our organisation, for 22 years, we dedicated a week of each month to learning. This was our ‘home week’.

At every staff meeting we have an agenda item on ‘what we have learnt’ which creates space for all levels of learning — we keep track of this in a learning journal.

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Funding and coalitions

Effective organisational development and change management must be funded.

Effective organisational development (OD) approaches minimise the disruptive impacts of change, positive or negative. Flexible OD funding is in short supply, and can be hard to access. Could INGOs better integrate funding for this into project-based support?

Projects, in many ways, kill organisations. They make us lose our strategic focus.

You just can’t fund organisational jumps through project funding. MacArthur is one of our key donors, and gave us a grant to strengthen our organisation, to do a new website and produce a strategic plan. Without this support, we wouldn’t have a coherent strategy.

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”International networks and coalitions could play an enhanced role in enabling peer support and learning for management of disruptive change.

The international network or alliance can enable each [member] to handle [potentially disruptive issues] more effectively in their national setting.

There is no way you can deal with [climate change] only in the South if you are not connected to the same approach in the North.

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INGOs could consider supporting a peer to peer support network on managing disruptive change, or explicitly seek to integrate a ‘change management learning’ component within existing relevant networks.


November 2015INGOs as organisations facing change

Many INGOs are making and implementing plans for getting good at disruption.

There is inspiration for INGOs from Southern NGOs that are doing disruption well.



Transferrable insights:Southern NGOs are diversifying their skills in response to disruption in the operating environment. Gaps remain, e.g. in natural and physical science for climate mitigation and adaptation. INGOs can learn from diversification and help partners fill gaps.

In a typical screening in development agencies, you look at the number of years of experience, and you weigh them and so on. To us that’s not really the point. The person should be really driven and motivated to make a difference. It’s hard to judge that by looking at CVs. So our policy is to ask for a one-minute video first, about why [the candidate is] the best for the job. We get a sense for what kind of person they are; what kind of drive [they have]. That’s the first thing. Without that, it’s hard to run an organisation at the forefront of disruptive change.

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”Distributed leadership models in some Southern NGOs appear to deliver strong staff commitment, experimentation, and resilience in the face of disruption.

We try to be as open as possible so that people don’t have fear. Fear is a real block for creating change and learning.“

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Implications for INGOs

As civil society actors preparing for disruption, INGOs can learn from inspirational examples of organisational practices in Southern NGOs.

Could INGOs do more consciously to integrate learning from Southern NGO change management and disruptive innovation into their processes?


November 2015INGOs as disruptors of Southern NGOs

INGOs can cause negative disruptive change for Southern NGOs.

Southern NGOs have practical insights into how INGOs can minimise and avoid negative disruption out of their own operating practices. For many, there can be little practical distinction between bilateral donors and INGO funders.



Three broad categories of insights from our interviewees:

Competitive impacts of disintermediation• commitment to enhanced agency and empowerment

Changes of direction• changes in funding policies and priorities

Tendering and consortiums• terms of reference and proposal evaluation criteria



Disintermediation needs to be re-connected with Southern empowerment

Equal partnership can be sacrificed in the competition for scarce resources.

The dynamic now for us is the dynamic of competition as a result of disintermediation. What would have been ideal would have been for [Northern] members/partners to explore ‘equal partnerships’/responsive programming together. But they are not ready to do that because their own organisational cultures are not ready… [And so] in a way, we are disempowered by smaller CBOs who will work with them on the basis that they ask. The INGOs are maintaining old ethics and culture, and perpetuating dependence – even when they set up offices on the ground in the South… They should aim to loosen their structures significantly — so that they work towards genuine empowerment.

CBOs that are ‘INGO condition- or contract- takers’ can disempower national NGOs that are seeking to become equal partners.

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Many INGOs are seeking new identities in response to the dynamic of disintermediation. ‘Nationalisation’, relocation and decentralization are among the new approaches. A new dynamic of competition between INGOs (or former INGOs) and Southern NGOs is emerging. INGOs need consciously to create systems that further Southern agency and empowerment as they travel this road.

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Good partnership means more attention to INGO changes of directionSouthern NGOs know that INGO partners’ sometimes need to change policy or approach. But sudden change can destroy the social and institutional capital on which effective development interventions are built, and hamper efforts to maintain strategic direction.

A change in [INGO donor] policy is understandable... but changing the geographic focus is really hard for national NGOs to adjust to.

Why can’t they involve their partners in the change process; make them understand what the change means for them?

Impacts can be particularly hard on ‘locally embedded’ NGOs with the strongest community links.

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Many Southern NGOs relate to INGOs as donors. INGOs need to lead the way in donor good practice. Could grant agreements and/or terms of reference for contracts be ‘disruption-mitigated’, e.g through provisions on advance notification, simple impact assessment tools, or phased approaches to changes of direction?

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Funding, tendering and consortiumsConsortia can force Southern NGOs to compromise in ways that undermine long-term strategies.

In a consortium, you need a common understanding. That means that some part of the consortium may have to compromise. The compromise might be somewhere in the middle — or it might be dictated by the bigger agencies (because it can be easier to change the 30% than the 70%). But if we compromise on our approach, we also compromise on our long-term strategy.

An INGO’s core or unrestricted funding can easily become restricted funding for Southern NGOs.

“ ”Could INGOs pilot Southern NGO-centred ‘disruption impact assessment’ of funding, tendering and consortia arrangements, with a view to making adjustments in contracting and partnership practices and advocating change with donors?

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Mandating consortia.. gives an unfair disadvantage to local NGOs. For example, one requirement in a recent situation was to have a UK regulated bank account. That limits who can submit proposals to like-minded agencies. If it’s always the same ones getting the grants, it doesn’t open the way to innovation. ”For local NGOs, it can be hard to access donors directly, so they have to rely on international NGOs — who make their own restrictions.

Criteria can be exclusionary — to the detriment of Southern NGOs — and stifle innovation.

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November 2015Learnings for INGOs• Southern NGO perspectives on disruption are as often ‘here and now’

as connected to ‘mega-disruptors’ of development. INGOs need to adapt framings of disruption to reflect this.

• INGOs that aspire to real solidarity with Southern NGOs, as both change and adapt, need to behave like counterparts and partners not donors or competitors.

• Increasingly squeezed space for civil society is creating significant disruption for NGOs in the global South. Interviewees were critical of donor focus on governments to the exclusion of NGOs: INGOs need to step up advocacy on Southern civil society roles in delivering the SDGs.

• INGOs must be prepared to share scarce organisational development funds and pass more on to Southern NGOs for strategy and learning.


November 2015Learnings for INGOsWhat can individual INGO teams/functions do to help Southern NGOs craft best practice ‘disruption-readiness’?

Advocacy (policy and campaigns)

Innovation Learning

Interviewees suggested pathways for more effective grant-making and funding through support for ‘disruption-readiness’ (including via intermediaries such as INGOs). They stressed the importance of policy engagement on the operating space for civil society.

Many Southern NGOs already see innovation as a means to greater local ownership of regional or national development pathways. INGOs could, if invited, help Southern NGOs build the skills needed to engage effectively with the tools of the contemporary mainstream innovation landscape, and broker scalable outcomes.

Continual learning processes are a key resource for getting good at disruption. There are implications for INGOs’ internal processes as well as support to Southern NGOs. INGOs can get better at ‘disruption-readiness’ by learning from partners who live with disruption as a fact of life.


November 2015Learnings for INGOsWhat can different INGO teams do to support Southern NGOs to get better at disruption?

Evaluation

Programmes & ‘mega-disruptors’

climate change, urbanisation, migration, demographic change

Business models

Interviewees hinted that the idea of ‘disruption-readiness’ could help inform more effective evaluation of development outcomes, including by INGO donors and partners. Adaptive programming can generate insights for anticipatory disruptive change management.

INGOs can seek ways to link Southern NGO ‘disruption-readiness’ in the present to shared learning and foresight on how NGOs can get good at ‘mega-disruptors’. Climate change and urbanisation could be good starting points: their implications can readily be connected to existing experiences of disruption.

Interviewees suggested that tendering, consortia, and grant arrangements need to change if they are to minimise disruption to Southern NGOs. INGOs need to align their contracts with commitment to sharing OD and learning resources with Southern partners. Business models and core funds need to make more space for INGOs to provide contracted input to Southern NGOs at their request.

Getting good at disruption in an uncertain world: learning for international non-government...

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