Date: 2025-05-02 Page is: DBtxt003.php L0913-TVM-MMW-000020
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TrueValueMetrics ... Peter Burgess Manuscript
Making Management Work for Relief and Development |
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Chapter 20
Distributed Decisions |
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Letting Go
The best way to progress There seems to be a pattern about success ... it is that people who know about the problem and know about the solution get to make decisions that solve the problems, and get to make them quickly. This is the empowerment that is needed to help make success in the relief and development sector. This is not easy, especially for people who have been trained to be managers in their formal education, and have gained their career experience in organizations where all problems are pushed “upstairs” in the hierarchy and the solutions are expected to descend from above and be implemented mindlessly by the peons. This was the corporate mindset at the start of my career in the 1960s. Europe was way behind the United States and Canada in changing to a distributed decision making structure, and I was in the middle of this with the first wave of corporate computers and electronic data processing (EDP). At first EDP further centralized decision making and management information, but it did not take very long for this to change to a distributed environment both for the information and for the decision making. We used to make a big effort to ensure that decisions were good, that is, they served the goals of the company, and were effective. We used the phrase “NIH” to refer to “not invented here” because we found that if the idea and the decision was “owned” by the people concerned, the results were far better than when the decision was “owned” by the management hierarchy. This is not rocket science. It is basic common sense and acceptance of human nature. But “letting go” in the framework of the World Bank or the United Nations, or most government organizations, and a lot of large organizations is very difficult. It is also especially difficult in a lot of organizations that have a “south” culture rather than the modernized performance culture of the corporate “north”. The best way to let go is to have a multiple step effort:
Keeping Track Good management information is needed to support letting go. Having a strong management information framework is a good foundation for distributed decision making, and “letting go”. The management information does not have to be a lot ... it just needs to be enough so that all concerned know what is happening in terms of costs, activities and results. The decisions are not a concern ... only performance. Hopefully there will be a lot of decisions and the performance will be excellent. If the information suggests that things are going wrong, then it is time to step in and help improve the decisions, and figure out what went wrong. This should happen quickly ... in days or at the most a few weeks after things are not working out. Community Where can community fit in? Community is a natural focal point for relief and development planning and incremental support. Clearly something different from the Gosplan type World Bank style centralized development planning and decision making is needed. A planning framework that is community centric may well be the answer. Decentralizing to the “south” government is a step in the right direction, but really not enough. There are some things that work well at the national planning level, but many more that optimize around plans done at the community level. In my work over the years I have always been struck by both the similarities and the differences between different communities. Different communities had different problems, different resources and different thinking about how best to move forward. There were different ways of organizing and providing community governance, and different relationships with the national organizations and the political structure. With so much difference, any common solution for all communities was much more likely to be wrong that ever to be right. The priorities of the communities is a very good way to change the key drivers of relief and development sector performance. Much can be accomplished very quickly as soon as small practical activities are supported. But this can only be done if the right sort of information that is relevant at the community level is available. Oversight The oversight structure is also a part of making success of distributed decision making. With oversight, it is possible to know what is being accomplished, and then to make judgment about performance and the need for intervention. If things are going well, leave well alone. If things are not working out, then it is time to become pro-active. In many cases something that is struggling can be put back “on-track” with the intervention of outsiders with some additional external experience. |
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