About Implementation
Not the usual model
The implementation model that is needed is one where ALL the citizenry can be
engaged, see results and GET durable benefits.
The American Opportunity Model
In most regards, the American economy is the most productive in all of history
mainly because it is built on the idea that ordinary people are able to work
productively and benefit from their own efforts and the efforts of the whole of the
society.
The American economy could be better ... but it has more great stories about rags to
riches than anywhere else.
The quality of life all over the world would be substantially better if the opportunity
model for economic development was universal, rather than being limited to just a
very small proportion of the world's population.
The challenge is to find a way to have all the population engaged in a process
that delivers socio-economic progress and development. It can be done, but it
requires a rather different mindset than is commonplace in the present national
and international leadership, and among the experts of the military and the
relief and development sector.
Process.
The process that works for relief and development where there are huge
opportunities and limited resources is one where there is: (1) getting facts; (2)
planning; (3) mobilizing resource; (4) activities; (5) measurement; (6) feedback;
and, (7) improved activities.
None of this can be done efficiently unless there is a management function ...
and management information for decision making.
Implementation is not ... or should not be ... limited or constrained by the
implementation structure, but is constrained by resources and by people, their
knowledge, their initiative and their culture.
Structure
Structure can be anything
There is no need to have structure ... at any rate not a formal structure. What is
needed is anything that can function to take resources and use them so that the
results are of value to the community. The activities are valuable and value
creating when the resources used have less value than the results being
achieved.
Structure can be informal. Formal organizations are not a requirement ... what is
needed is getting results and getting socio-economic value created. All sorts of
organizations can provide the structure, including private organizations, faith
based organizations and not-for-profit organizations.
Informal initiative and formal entities
The structure for implementation needs to take into consideration the enormous
value of informal initiatives and not focus only on formal entities. The structure
should make it possible for good informal activities to expand and replicate, and
not be a constraint on their success. Formal entities should be assisted, but only
to the extent that they are doing things of value.
Projects
Projects are widely used to implement relief and development activities ... and
there is no reason why the project framework should not be used to handle the
administration of resources including the approval, control and disbursement of
funds. But a project should not be used to “push” activities into the community,
but to help the community get activities it wants and needs into the community.
The project should get its priorities by listening to the community and learning
from the community about the priorities and what would really be helpful in the
community.
Oversight ... accountability to the public
There needs to be a well recognized structure, process or system to ensure that
there is oversight and accountability to the public. Many different groups should
be doing oversight including (1) the community itself; (2) the central governing
authorities; (3) the funding organizations; and, (4) representatives of the public.
Oversight should not be onerous and should not “get in the way” of success, but
it should be clear that oversight that turns up unsatisfactory performance will
attract consequences.
Oversight helps to make activities more effective ... people do better work when
there is someone paying attention. And oversight helps to get feedback about
help and improvement needed. Oversight also helps to get the information that
is needed so that the public can be informed.
Reaching the community
The community is the primary place for implementation. There are all sorts of
community organizations that make a community what it is. All of these
organizations should be assisted in appropriate ways to improve the socioeconomic condition of the community. Within a community there are some
organizations that benefit because, for example, something is built, and other
organizations that benefit because they are doing the building. The catalyst for
both of these benefits is money that is being deployed to facilitate the
development process.
A typical example of this might be a hospital that is being upgraded in some
way, and a local contractor that is being paid to do the work.
Getting the Facts
Getting the facts ... getting reliable facts
Facts ought to be easy to access, but in general there is very little baseline fact
that can be used without considerable effort. Effort is needed to compile data so
that that can be used for analysis and planning ... and care has to be taken that
the data are not compromised because of misinformation and spin.
Some facts ... not all the facts
Some facts are needed in order to start anything, but all the facts are not needed.
At the outset, enough facts are needed so that a strong strategic plan can be
formulated ... something being done in part in the writing of this book. There are
some facts known that have enabled this book to be written, and perhaps serve
as part of a strategic blueprint.
More information would enable a strategic plan to be improved ... and corrected
where it has major flaws. But the value of more information is to start to get
action plans formulated where activities can be implemented that will deliver
value to people and communities around the country.
More information about more things
Information has costs, and more information should be about more things rather
than being merely more information about something where there is already
adequate information.
I consider I have enough information to write this book at this level of strategic
abstraction ... but I do not have enough information to do a good plan for any
community in Iraq ... or any specific organization in Iraq. Getting this
information in a systematic manner is something that will facilitate success ...
trying to operate with inadequate information makes socio-economic progress
much more difficult.
Planning a Strategy
Planning with a lighter touch
Planning is needed, but it needs to be something that facilitates and improves
rather than being a part of a process that ends up being simply authoritarian.
Planning needs to have a strategic component so that the overall concept for
progress is articulated. Arguably this should be done at a national level, but it
should be done with a light touch, and not have a strong hierarchical element.
Rather it should serve more to guide than anything else, and be a framework to
help move things in a progressive direction.
More than anything else ... the American way
The purpose of planning at a strategic level is simply to get implementation on
the right track ... and to get something moving that might be successful.
The American Way
Soon after I first crossed the Atlantic from the UK to the USA in the 1960s I realized
that Americans optimized their business and economic activities far more rapidly
than was the norm in Europe. The Americans did the least amount of planning
before they built something and made money with it. Of course, in the 1960s Europe
had embraced planning almost as much as the Soviets, and was moving rapidly
towards economic stagnation and inflation (stagflation) and was losing wealth
rapidly.
But for me the lesson was clear. It was doing something that mattered ... you plan
simply so that you can do something, and do it now. If it works the plan was good,
and you do more of it. If not ... fix it and try again. For decades this strategy worked
very well for Americans and gave the Americans a dominant position in a lot of
industries.
Eventually some other countries understood, and for some years now others are
now doing this better than the Americans.
In the context of Iraq, the aim of the exercise is to get people in Iraq to do things
that are going to be of value to them as individuals, as families and as
communities. The goal is to help this to happen as quickly as possible and with
the minimum of death and disruption.
Planning ... how this is to be done
The planning that is needed more than anything else is actually how to enable
others to do it all ... without too many false starts and failures.
How does one structure something so that the structure does not get in the way
but simply facilitates someone making a success?
And at the same time, how does one use money as a catalyst, as a major
resource, and concurrently maintain a high level of accountability?
None of these questions are easy to answer, but in practice they have been
answered many times over by successful corporate executives over the years.
High performance corporations have figured out how to get people throughout
the organization to make good decisions with rather little interference from the
top, and they have a system of management information so that when things are
going well, the top has no need to interfere and get in the way.
This is not a result of democratic process ... but it is how management has
evolved so as to use economic resources efficiently. More management
information flows in this management environment in one day than flows in a
typical government setup in years. Something like this needs to guide the use of
resources in the context of rebuilding Iraq and moving Iraq forward to a
prosperous and peaceful future.
Planning Activities
Distributed planning
The aim is to have socio-economic development initiatives that are the main
priorities of each community. Part of planning process at the community level is
to encourage leaders of the community to articulate what they would like if
there were no constraints. This can be pulled together into some form of
community master plan. It does not have to be perfect, but it should give a
strong sense of the direction the community wants to go.
After local authorities and traditional leaders have determined priorities, rapid
plans need to be made about how this can be done and what resources are
needed. This should be done as fast as possible, but no faster than a pace that
suits the community. Getting local community consensus about development
investment priority might well have a bigger impact on peace and security than
any number of tanks and soldiers with guns.
How is something going to be done should be answered locally, and constraints
identified. It is easy if everything is available except money, but usually there
will be any number of other constraints that need to be addressed. Mainly these
constraints need to be solved at the local level with local people ... and as needed
with interaction with people in the Iraq system of governance and control.
The process is important as well as the outcome ...
And the plans must ensure that there is an adequate level of transparency and
accountability so that the results of the socio-economic development
interventions are on the record and accessible to the public stakeholders.
Mobilizing Resources
Getting funds for priority activities
In most circumstances, getting funds for priority activities is not at all easy. All
the donors have their own processes for project planning, appraisal, approval,
implementation, reporting and evaluation. From the beneficiary country's
perspective each donor has a very different procedure. A single beneficiary
country has to follow the procedures of each and every one of the donors in
order to get assistance, and the result is very unsatisfactory.
My Experience as Acting Aid Coordinator
I was called in to help with aid coordination in Namibia soon after its Independence.
A UN pledging conference attracted more than $700 million in pledges, but
converting pledges into useful development assistance was a big challenge. Every
single donor had a unique set of procedures ... and priorities ... and understanding
of what they had pledged. The process was totally determined by the donors and
totally ignored all of the beneficiary country's priorities, planning and its financial
control processes.
To add insult to injury, the issues of currency and language had to be taken into
consideration ... and when it came time to report on project performance ... each
country had its own way of requiring the reports.
Looked at from the point of view of the beneficiary country ... a chaotic mess.
In addition to the problem or procedure there are people problems. Most
funding is controlled in ways that rarely have much to do with using the funds
in the best possible way for the public and society at large, but more to do with a
narrow agenda that gives benefit to decision makers and their cronies.
The public knows a lot about where they would like resources to go, but the
process of getting available resources in the right place is much more based on
politics and power than equity and performance. While there are a lot of fund
flows that ought to be going to the best possible activities for socio-economic
progress, virtually nobody knows what these might be ... a lack good of
information and a preponderance of misinformation, some of it approaching the
level of fraud.
The unusual situation in Iraq
Far more than usual there is the opportunity now to get available resources in
the right place in Iraq. At high levels, resources are available ... the challenge is
simply to make it possible for these resources to get to places where the
resources can be used in a valuable manner.
One has to expect a lot of powerful organizations to try to maintain a
dysfunctional status quo so that the “leaks” in the fund flows can be exploited to
their advantage ... that is, business as usual. This is not what should be allowed
to happen.
Implementation - Activities
Small is Beautiful
I like to think that I understand macro-economics. Macro-economic
performance, as I see it, is a result of lots of small decisions throughout an
economic system.
Small activities that use small amounts of resource and do wonderful things for
the community, for the society, for the family, even for the individual are worth
doing. When small activities are encouraged, and everyone that has the ability
does what they can, the economy soars and the socio-economic situation
improves. Lots of small activities add up ... and really means something in the
aggregate.
Big things promise a lot ... but in the implementation most of the promise is
replaced by a less optimistic reality. What might have started out as a huge
value adding solution often ends up as value destruction and another problem
to be fixed.
There is no one best way
Where there are hundreds of things to do, and all sorts of people and
organizations engaged in doing things, there is chaos. I have some modest
understanding of chaos theory, and have some appreciation of the problems of
organizing for good results in complex and chaotic conditions. The situation in
Iraq has a lot of the characteristics that make chaos theory the most suitable
management regime.
Getting the best results out of chaos is not something academic planners do very
well ... in fact the record shows that they do it very badly. The “gosplan” type
economy of the Soviet Union is one example, and I will argue that the “project”
planning of the World Bank is another example.
Small activities can easily be done with very little formal organization and
management. Other things needs to be done at a larger scale and with more
planning and oversight. Some things are best organized on an even bigger scale
at the national level.
Everything should be done in the manner that is best for the particular effort. It
is not only scale that varies. The mix of resources also changes from one
situation to another. In order to get the best possible results, available resources
should be used in the most efficient way.
Getting Good Results When There is Chaos
I was a participant in a Organization and Management Conference in the
early 1990s run by OSI. One of the sessions was about managing in chaos. I
forget exactly how the game was played, but I think we all had numbers,
and a number of balls circulating in the group. If a ball was sent to a person
number 10, the ball then had to be sent to number 11 ... but where was
number 11?
When the game started it was absolute chaos, and balls were all over the
place. In a few minutes people figured out where to stand so that they were
next to the person with a number different by 1 from ones own.
And then the rules were changed ... for example 10 had to send to 20, 11 to
21 and so on ... another period of chaos, but fairly quickly everyone figured
out where best to stand.
There is a powerful capacity for human beings to problem solve. In complex
chaotic conditions many small decisions can get a workable answer far
more quickly than the academic planners , no matter how big their
computers.
Human resources and natural resources are two key resources that
should be used as effectively as possible for success in development.
Frequently, they are more abundant than money and machinery, and
should therefore be used in preference to money and machinery.
Money and machinery should be used to the minimum and to
compliment locally available resources to achieve maximum value
adding.
What this suggests is that we should organize to empower a lot of people and
organizations to make decisions, and then encourage people and organizations
that seem to be getting it right and getting good results. There should be metrics
to identify good performance.
Make best use
In almost any organization there are some people that know how to improve
performance, either because, for example, they have long experience or they
have good analytical abilities or they can bring in some relevant knowledge not
presently being exploited.
Good management will figure out how to use this improvement potential in a
practical way ... either by some form of ad-hoc effort or by some systemic change
in the organization. But it will get done. Procedure, rules and regulations will
not get in the way of doing something that is worthwhile.
Getting the Most for the Least
I was responsible for running a factory at one point in my career. There was a
serious capacity constraint in the foundry, and something significant had to be done
quickly and at modest cost.
The first step was to use some high end corporate consultants to advise on the
problem ... they charged a big fee and recommended a $5 million capital
expenditure project. The second step was a rather less prestigious consulting firm ...
who had rather more modest fees and recommended a rather more modest capital
expenditure program. My third step was to figure out myself what would be best to
do, consulting with the experienced staff in our organization, some of whom were
not at all academically trained.
The local factory workers and supervisors knew what would work, and what would
increase production enormously, at a very modest cost. Instead of investing millions
and waiting for perhaps 2 years, we invested around $150,000 in some incremental
equipment, and also two weekends of maintenance overtime installing and making
changes ... and got the same results that the first consultants were projecting at an
investment that would have exceeded $5 million.
Lots of small initiatives
Lots of small initiatives that are within the capacity of the beneficiary
communities to absorb can deliver rapid progress. Initiatives that the
community considers to be priority and implemented by local people with
mainly local resources can have a big value adding impact. Many small projects
can be implemented by the private sector, community groups, NGOs etc. as
soon as activities have been identified and there is an implementation
arrangement agreed. If funding is available communities can plan their own
development with their own priorities and draw upon the program resources
according to what they see their needs to be. The expectation is that there will be
a very large number of small initiatives that are the right size for each individual
community
Measurement
Make measurement ... do the accounting
Nobody in a good corporate organization does very much without there being
some sort of measurement, and for everything to do with money, there is the
accounting. Measurement and accounting is the norm, and is everywhere in a
good corporate organization.
But in the public sector, in the relief and development sector, and in almost
everything to do with Iraq there seems to be very simplistic measurement and
the minimum of accounting ... and almost nothing visible to the public.
Performance metrics ... cost and value
The community is the place where results should be most visible, and within a
community there are some organizations that benefit because, for example,
something is built, and other organizations that benefit because they are doing
the building. The catalyst for both of these benefits is money that is being
deployed to facilitate the development process.
A typical example of this might be a hospital that is being upgraded in some
way, and a local contractor that is being paid to do the work. In this example, the
performance metrics have three primary elements: (1) the cost; (2) the activities
paid for; and, (3) the results.
The cost is the total funds disbursed and resources consumed ... a relatively easy
accounting exercise. The activities paid for is a bit more complex, but still fairly
normal analytical or cost accounting. The results need something that goes a
little bit beyond more metrics about the activities, but more into the value to the
beneficiaries, whether it is a group of people, a community, or the society at
large. Good results have value ... and good development performance is when
the value of the results is considerably in excess of the cost. It should be possible
to put a money value on results ... not always easy, but something that ought to
be possible.
There is another useful metric which is to relate the actual cost of the activities
with a norm for the cost of these activities. This has always been a standard
practice in any position where I have had a management responsibility, and it
helps to encourage good operational performance as well as being a strong
technique for the control of inappropriate disbursements.
In an environment where value basis analysis is being done, the process of
development can be of great value to many, and be financially sustainable for all
the organizations without requiring subsidizing fund flows from outside.
Benchmarks
The complexity of the linkages in multi-sector community development makes
measurement, analysis and managing of linkages difficult, if not meaningless or
impossible. However, it is comparatively easy to measure some of the results,
commonly referred to as benchmarking. For example, a community can decide
that it wants to build classrooms for an addition 1,000 students, and it can quite
easily report progress against this benchmark. In many situations benchmarks
are not enough to constitute a useful complete framework of management
information.
Feedback
Without feedback ... there is no management
And when there are metrics, and there is information about costs, activities and
results ... there also needs to be somewhere for the information to be used. There
are two ways in which this information should flow: (1) within the organization
to improve performance; and; (2) to the public so that they are informed.
The feedback within the organization should result in a culture of continuous
improvement. While this is not easy, continuous improvement is the best way of
getting the most out of available resources. Why do something the same old
way, if it is possible to do better.
The feedback to the public is an essential to help maintain the ethics of
leadership. When powerful people can do anything they want ... they will, not
particularly because they are worse than anyone else, but simply because that
seems to be human nature. Conversely, when people know that their actions
will be seen and they will be subject to public scrutiny, behavior is always much
better.
Structure
Improved Activities
Without improved activities ... there is no point
The implementation process goes from planning to organizing to implementing
to measurement to feedback ... and then starts all over again.
The process is very basic and builds on simple control theory. By learning, it is
possible to improve what is being done, and get better results in the future than
has been achieved in the past.
This has been a major weakness in the international relief and development
sector in the past because almost all of the implementations were designed
within a project structure and were “one-off” initiatives. This does not facilitate
learning, and explains in large part why the relief and development sector has
exhibited a very weak learning ability.
By establishing metrics that integrate the community itself into the measuring
framework, there is a perpetual basis of measurement, and a reality to
performance that can be tangible for ever. A community has a perpetual life, and
measurement of the community's progress has meaning at any time.
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