Popular Posts

Sunday, September 18, 2011

Learning to love learning

      Over the last few weeks I've been immersed in work on measuring the outcomes and effectiveness of watershed management plans - stuff I've been looking at for some years now. The most common finding is that many plans aren't written in a way that enables their implementation and outcomes to be documented. Among the many other barriers to identifying the effectiveness of our plans are lack of time for overworked staff to look back at their achievements and a widespread culture of fear in public and private spheres. People are scared of 'getting it wrong'.
      This is so sad. In both business and government I see people who love their work. Giving them the tools and time to step back and reflect on their organization and its operations is part of the process of developing a form of reflexive awareness, and is a major step on the path to becoming a learning organization that 'gets' continuous improvement. This sets alight a love of learning about our work by way of monitoring, review and adaptive management - something environmental agencies talk about a great deal but find harder to do in practice.
      How much time and money to invest in monitoring and evaluation varies between organizations and their function, but I've seen a figure of 5-10% of project budget suggested by Katie Delahaye Paine, and this gives us somewhere to start.
      We need a very strategic and holistic yet targeted approach, especially if we are aiming to assess outcomes and effectiveness across the four social, cultural economic and environmental wellbeings. Sometimes minor tweakings of approach can enable us to create benefits across two or more of these wellbeings and we need to track this thinking and doing.
      Einstein, it seems, was a genius in more than just physics: one of my favorite quotes from him is 'Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.'