Dennis Whittle

The World Bank as Convener First, Lender Second?

2011-07-27T17:15:08-04:00

"Are you sure we should do this in the World Bank atrium?"

"Yes, sir," I said. "Why not?"

I tried to act confident, but I was terrified. It was February 1998, and on the phone was a managing director, second only in power to the president of the World Bank. He was known for asking questions that were actually orders. Arguing rather than obeying was considered ill-advised.

"Well," he said, "we may have outside visitors that day. Do you think they should see some of those crazy ideas that staff may come up with? What if we relocated the event to the basement, out of the way?"

A small innovation team, with encouragement from Jim Wolfensohn, the Bank's president, had decided to launch the first-ever Innovation Marketplace, a one-day event when any Bank staff member (regardless of title or seniority) could propose an idea for helping the Bank better fight poverty. We would award $5 million to help fund the start-up of the most promising ideas. We had decided to hold the event in the atrium of the Bank, a beautiful space that soars thirteen stories.

The only problem was that the atrium was almost never used for public events; it was always eerily quiet and deserted, even sterile. You never wanted to linger there - you always hurried through. The culture of the Bank at that time was such that everyone worked behind closed doors, beavering away on in-depth country or sector studies designed to find out the right answers to various development challenges. Staff emerged only for the occasional review meetings, or to go on mission to the countries they worked on.

My, oh, my how the world - and the World Bank - have changed since then. A couple of months ago, I went back to my old stomping grounds to witness an Apps for Development competition. Not only was the Bank's atrium a beehive of activity, but there was even techno music pumping up the mood of the crowd before the announcement of the event's winners.

Stephanie Strom recently wrote a nice article in the NY Times about how the Bank is opening its "treasure chest of data" for researchers and others around the world to use. The articles has good insights into the benefits of making data public; and the fact that the World Bank (previously among the most secretive of aid institutions) is now making such huge strides is sure to encourage other agencies to do the same. (The UNDP also created a very impressive open data portal for some of its projects here.)

Sharing data is a big leap, but there is now a window of opportunity for the Bank to do something much, much bigger. Back in 1998, with my heart pounding, I stood my ground with the Managing Director, and the Innovation Marketplace was a huge success; by cutting through the usual layers of bureaucracy and giving everyone an equal voice, the event allowed all sorts of good ideas to bubble up, any many of them soon became major strategic. In some sense, we were democratizing the World Bank, even if for only one day.

Building on that success, in early 2000 we went on to launch the Development Marketplace, which allowed anyone in the world (not just the Bank) to propose an idea for funding. The planning of this event also generated a lot of controversy (and not only from senior managers this time), but it was a big success, too. And though I left the World Bank shortly afterwards to co-found GlobalGiving, the Bank went on to replicate the Development Marketplace many times, including in some seventy countries around the world over the past decade. Country directors would sometime report that it was the first time they had been able to get civil society groups and government officials in one room together talking about ideas and solutions rather than just arguing.

Nonetheless, despite their success, these marketplaces have remained peripheral to World Bank's main business. In the decade since my departure, many former colleagues complained to me that the Bank was failing to innovate in ways that would keep it relevant for a changing world.

That may be about to change. Bob Zoellick, the Bank's current president, recently talked in a speech about the "democratization" of development, where the Bank and other aid agencies no longer pretend to have a monopoly on understanding problems and devising solutions. Bank experts would still have a great deal of technical expertise, but the role of Bank staff would shift. Instead of trying to find and hire the elusive "best expert in the world on subject X," the Bank would hire very good experts who are capable of leading a conversation among other experts, government officials, and regular citizens about the most pressing problems and the most viable potential solutions. Bank staff would in a sense become "hosts" of conversations about what to do, and then would have the ability to financially support the initiatives and approaches that arise from these conversations.

Hosting effective conversations is hard, and it may be the most in-demand skill at the Bank in the decade ahead. If the Bank can make progress in this area, however, the payoff for the institution could be large. In addition, by modeling openness and an ability to listen, the Bank would be putting indirect pressure on governments around the world to do the same. If regular people are able to comment on and even contribute to the design of World Bank projects, they are surely going to begin demanding the same treatment from their own governments. The resulting increase in citizen voice and government responsiveness could end up having a far more important impact than any particular Bank project(s).

Zoellick has assembled a solid team to help the Bank remake itself. Sanjay Pradhan, Randi Ryterman, Aleem Walji, and others are helping lead a conversation within the Bank on ways to cultivate new thinking and approaches. As the NY Times article notes, significant culture change is going to be required, and that is always tough. And change will also demand hard thinking about the World Bank's business model, which currently relies on generating a spread on its loans and other financial instruments. Incentives within the institution remain tied to the ability of staff to make loans and help the institution generate the income that it needs to operate.

The good news is that the best staff at the World Bank are leading the way. A while back, some of my former colleagues hosted an informal all-day Saturday session for health officials in a Latin American country. No ties were allowed, and there was no rigid agenda. When I told one of the Bank conveners that I was sorry he had to work on a Saturday, he told me that it was one of the most productive days of his career. "For once, we did not give them a long lecture," he told me. "We just served them pizza and kept the conversation headed in the right direction, injecting bits of information but not pressing my own views too hard."

As a result, the health officials swapped stories about what was working and what wasn't in their country. They were able to be candid about their failures as well as their successes. The conversation was not about What is the RIGHT ANSWER? Rather, it was about What are some reasonable things to try in our country, and how can we best evaluate the results? The participants liked the experience so much that one of the officials present hosted a similar session, with Bank help, for other countries in the region. The effort led to a great deal of social capital that allowed successes and failures to be honestly shared, thereby speeding experimentation and improving feedback loops.

My friend told me he felt he had helped advance reform more on that single day than in months of formal meetings and expert presentations. Instead of being a Bank expert pushing for the RIGHT policy, he was helping a country's own experts iterate toward an approach that would work in their context. Furthermore, the trust and social capital that emanated from these meetings led the countries involved to seek several hundred million dollars of funding from the Bank to support their reform agendas. The revenue from these loans in turn enable the Bank staff to provide additional intellectual support, including hosting more conversations.

Got to Admit It's Getting Better

2011-07-26T19:09:00-04:00

"Over the last one hundred years, the physical well being of the world's population has improved far more than in all of the previous natural history of humankind."

Charles Kenny's recent book Getting Better is an antidote to the pessimism many of us feel about the state of the world. Those of us in international development are frustrated we have not been able to find a toolkit of approaches that reliably increases growth in poor countries. Kenny acknowledges this frustration, but shows that many indicators of wellbeing have improved rapidly even in the absence of consistent economic growth:

"Global average life expectancy increased from around thirty-one years in 1900 to sixty-six by 2000."

In terms of GDP, there is an increasing divergence among countries in the world, with many of the poorer falling further and further behind. But with respect to other indicators of wellbeing, there is a striking convergence. Infant mortality has plunged by over half in eighty percent of the world's poor countries in the last fifty years. Literacy rates in sub-Saharan Africa rose from 28 to 61 percent from 1970 to 2000. Some very poor countries such as Vietnam have achieved 95% literacy. Democratic ideas and practices are spreading rapidly (notwithstanding big setbacks and uneven progress), and violence is way down: global homicide levels, for example, are about one-third of what they were in England in the Middle Ages.

How can this be? It turns out that it is not very expensive to improve these aspects of wellbeing. This is because of tremendous innovation in technologies and ideas in some domains, ranging from vaccines to understanding germs to oral rehydration therapy to increased agricultural productivity. In the old days, even the wealthiest and most powerful of kings died early for lack of the cheap modern vaccines that keep the most vulnerable and poor people alive today.

The state of Kerala in India, with a per capita income of $300 per year, has been able to achieve a life expectancy of 72 and a literacy rate of 91%. By comparison, the U.S. has a per capita income of $29,000 and has a life expectancy only five years greater than Kerala. Lest we think that achieving those extra five years of life expectancy requires huge resources, take the case of Costa Rica. Life expectancy in Costa Rica is two years greater than the US, but income per capita is only $6,500, and Costa Rica spends only $305 per capita per year on health, compared to $5,711 in the US.

Getting Better is full of facts and figures such as these. Kenny neither minimizes the remaining problems (poor people do have fewer opportunities and poverty does equal misery for millions of people), but he does want to zoom out and take the long view so we can see we are making progress. He does note that the spread of even the cheap and effectives innovations he discusses has been uneven -- and thus there is great scope for further progress.

Progress must often come on the demand side rather than the supply side, Kenny argues. In many (not all) cases, there is enough money in the budget for education and health programs, but people don't demand the right services for lack of knowledge about their potential effects. How to do better marketing is thus a key challenge for the aid business -- an area in which we have made only modest investments. Relatively small investments in transparency measures can also help stimulate demand as well. Local people are often told that there are not enough resources in the budget to do X, Y, or Z, but once local people are able to see what the money is actually being spent on, they are able to bring to bear pressures to get what they need.

Kenny closes the book with suggestions for how to catalyze the flow of ideas and hasten the uptake of innovations in health, education, and other areas. This is the weakest part of the book, but at least he is offering a framework for further analysis and experimentation. The bad news is, as Kenny says, we don't know how to make people financially richer. The good news is that we do know how to make them better off, and that fact should motivate us all.

RIP, Aid Watch

2011-05-24T14:24:23-04:00

On May 19, Bill Easterly and Laura Freschi announced that their blog Aid Watch was ending, after running about two years. I was shocked and (after checking my calendar to make sure it was not April 1) dismayed.

Who else, I thought to myself,was going to call B.S. on the foibles and failings (and sometimes nearly criminal negligence) of certain aid agencies? Who else was going to relentlessly debunk the egomaniacal schemes of certain self-styled aid messiahs? Who else was going to have the guts to speak truth to power? Who else was going to remind us that so many new programs had been tried in the past, with disappointing if not disastrous results?

Who else, I asked myself, was going to demand each day that aid simply "benefit the poor?" Who else was going to point us toward new ways of providing aid that actually take into account what the poor want? Who else was going to contrast the failures of closed, top-down aid systems with the successes of open-access systems that provide fast, rich feedback systems? Who else was going to redefine the debate about aid?

Aid Watch was controversial from the start. Bill and Laura did not hesitate to take on sensitive issues, and they did not cloak their criticisms in vague bureaucratic language. Typical evaluations of aid programs are dense and oblique, with shortcomings buried under mounds of data and jargon. After a couple hundred pages of analysis touting the benefits of a program, official evaluations often tip their hat to failure with a paragraph beginning "But challenges remain..." And then phase two of the same program begins with only a modest modification to a fundamentally failed design.

Aid Watch specialized in cutting through all of the obfuscation to say bluntly "This does not work. We should stop it now and do something else if we really care about helping the poor."

In their valedictory post, Bill and Laura promise that the work of Aid Watch will continue, with longer and more in-depth pieces under the guise of Aid Watch's parent -- the Development Research Institute (DRI), at New York University, where Bill is Professor of Economics. I, for one, am very much looking forward to the next chapter of Aid Watch.

Treating Employees as People

2011-05-23T15:44:16-04:00

Over the period 1998-2008, the stock of the companies voted "best to work for" appreciated nearly seven times as much as the stock of the average company.

The most admired companies on Fortune Magazine's list had double the market returns of their competitors over a seven year period.

Only 13 percent of unhappy employees recommend their company's products, vs. 78 percent of happy employees.

Those are just some of the findings reported in Dave Ulrich and Wendy Ulrich's book The Why of Work. The authors argue that companies that treat people as just another factor of production are increasingly at a competitive disadvantage. Conversely, companies that engage their employees in a meaningful way have higher market returns.

Why? The authors offer the following possible explanations:

Employees are committed, productive, and likely to stay with the company

Customers pick up on employee attitudes and are more likely to do business with the company

Investors have confidence in the company's future, giving it a higher market value

The company's reputation in the community is enhanced.

There are many approaches to creating a meaningful work environment. One of the simplest (if still rare) is just to treat employees like real people, with valuable insights and instincts for what is best for the business. Another is for the company to engage with the broader communities where it does business, by providing mentoring and volunteering and/or by financially supporting schools, clinics, and other social initiatives. In other words, by treating the broader community members as real people.

What if all businesses treated their employees and customers this way?

What if USPS Really Listened?

2011-05-02T11:56:31-04:00

Fatal error: Unable to open file

That was the response when I clicked on the Email Us link at the US Postal Service website this morning. Earlier, I had stood in a long line at our neighborhood post office while the one postal clerk on duty valiantly tried to process all the customers. While waiting, I looked around and noted once that the run-down facility looks like something from the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. (At least in the Soviet Union, there were more clerks on duty, even if they were not always friendly.)

The clerk in our neighborhood station has always been nice to me. She labors under horrendous conditions, but if I smile and am nice to her, she always reciprocates. Though the lines are predictably very long at the station during certain periods, and USPS never provides more clerks to assist, I try never to complain to the lone woman on duty, because I know she has no power to change things.

While standing in line this time, I decided I would give some feedback to the US Postal Service itself. I looked around at the walls in vain for a sign saying "Questions? Comments? Call us at xxx or email us at yyy." Then I realized I have a USPS app on my iPhone. Great! I thought, and fired it up. Alas, the app provided lots of information about zipcodes and rates but no way to give feedback. Darn, but at least they would have a twitter account, I figured, and ran a search on my phone. Someone had in fact claimed the @usps name, but had made no tweets and followed zero people.

So I gave up and was finally waited on by the nice lady, who was relieved my particular parcel was easy to process. Then I went home, and sat down at my computer and thought I would give USPS one last try. Success! There it was on USPS.com -- a link saying Questions? Comments? Click here to email us. I mentally apologized to USPS before clicking, and then my screen went blank and said: "Fatal error: Unable to open file."

How many agencies or companies do you know that make it nearly impossible for users to give feedback? They are usually the ones whose leaders say "We hear loud and clear from our customers that..." But the truth is that they don't hear loud and clear at all. They only hear sporadically and indirectly, through surveys and analyzing data.

What if each supervisor at USPS had a dashboard that had real-time feedback from customers from email, twitter, text message, and the USPS website? And what if the supervisor's boss could see that feedback in real time? And what if, maybe even more important, the public could see the same feedback in real time? How would that change incentives and behavior?

What if this were on the desktop of each USPS supervisor,
on the wall of each post office, and viewable by
everyone on the web or smart phone?

My own guess is that my neighborhood post office would be a lot cleaner, there would be plenty of clerks during peak periods, and they would rarely run out of supplies.

Extra credit: Which company or agency do *you* think would benefit most from such a dashboard?

An Expedia for International Aid?

2011-04-25T15:46:09-04:00

Will the successful aid agency of the future look more like Expedia -- a platform on which users can make their own choices -- and less like the travel agent of yesterday, experts to whom the public was willing to delegate decisions?

That is Owen Barder, writing about the transformative impact that transparency of information -- in conjunction with new technology -- will have on international aid. No one has better insights into this topic than Owen. Two points bear particular emphasis:

A) Information from beneficiaries and users about project execution and quality is key to motivating real change. Much of the effort to date has focused on releasing information about spending rather than results.

B) Donor agencies are not best placed to decide the format of data reports. The most effective data tools will be created by others using raw data provided by the agencies. In that context, I was pleased this week to attend the ceremony announcing the winners and runners up of the World Bank's Apps for Development contest.

You can read more from Owen on this topic here.

Happy Is as Happy Does

2011-04-04T14:06:08-04:00

Artists create and critics analyze; few artists analyze well and few critics create good art.

That was my reaction to Martin Seligman's new book Flourish: A New Understanding of Happiness and Well Being, due in bookstores on April 5. Seligman, the godfather of the positive psychology movement, shows that he is an artist rather than a critic or theoretician.

In his new book, he sets out to expand the concepts outlined in his 2002 book Authentic Happiness. The earlier book described happiness as a combination of positive emotions, "flow," and meaning. In his new book, Seligman adds two more elements he considers critical: accomplishment and personal relationships. Together, these elements add up to well-being. Mix in some some self-esteem, resilience, and optimism, and you get flourishing.

If that sounds a little confusing, that's because it is. Conceptual coherence and theoretical frameworks are not this book's strong points. Seligman describes several exercises that are easy to do and result in a significant and lasting effect on people's self-reported sense of well-being. (For example, each night, write down three things that went well that day and why.) Coming up with these exercises is high art -- the description of their effect is compelling and left me promising myself to do them.

But instead of arguing his case by demonstrating it, Seligman spends too much of the book looking over his shoulder at his more theoretically inclined psychology colleagues, who are the high priests of that discipline. Seligman openly discusses the inferiority complex that lurks in the psyche of many experimental scientists such as himself, and he sets out to settle some scores with past and current colleagues. While this makes for entertaining reading for those with experience in the academy, most readers will be bored and distracted from the main question: what can people do to flourish by their own standards?

A quick look at his website suggests that the book could have been a great evidence-based how-to manual. And some of his insights could really lead to greater well being for society as a whole over the long term. But Seligman seems to feel that how-to manuals are not academically respectable, even if they are backed up by good evidence. This led him to write a book that is neither fish nor fowl. It is part theoretical, part instructional, part storytelling, part selling, and part personal introspection. Seligman admits that he refused much editorial assistance or feedback on the book, and it shows.

Though the writing and structure of the book are irritating, I wonder whether there is not something to Seligman's approach. There is a whole new genre of writing on science and social science that feels almost formulaic in its style. As much as I love books like Nudge and Freakonomics, there is something predictable about them. The cover design and colors, the tone, the just-so turns. A friend the other day described some of these books as fast-food reading: they taste great and go down easy and give you the illusion of learning. But the next week you actually don't remember much other than you were delighted by reading them. By contrast, readers who persevere will remember many of the points that Seligman made in this book -- and will act on at least some of them.

What We Are Doing With Funds Collected for Japan

2011-03-21T13:02:04-04:00

In the days since the earthquake in Japan, GlobalGiving has experienced an unprecedented outpouring of generosity from individual and corporate donors. While overall giving has not been as swift or as large as the support to Haiti last year, donations through GlobalGiving are more than double what they were in the same time period after the 2010 Haiti earthquake.

I asked John Hecklinger, GlobalGiving's chief program officer, to describe how the money is being spent, and here is what he had to say:

Very early in the crisis, we launched a general fund to collect donations, and we set a funding goal of $90,000, confident that one or more of our partners would assist on the ground. After a major disaster, we typically set up a general fund, as it provides a convenient spot for first-responder donors, various partners, social media advocates and traditional media outlets to send donors. We disburse those funds among specific projects that emerge over the following days and weeks.

Over this week we have seen the donation flow accelerate, and after talking with our partners on the ground, we raised our funding goal to $4 million. International Medical Corps confirmed they were filling gaps in local infrastructure and supplies, and they posted the first specific project. Save the Children, Architecture for Humanity and Mercy Corps were next, posting projects specific to their roles in the relief effort. As of this writing, donors have given over $1.4 million, and we expect at least a million more from corporate partner campaigns.

We now have an enormous responsibility to the people of Japan and to the donors trusting us to allocate the more than $1.3 million collected in GlobalGiving's Japan Earthquake and Tsunami Relief Fund as of March 17, 2011. Donors use GlobalGiving because we disburse funds quickly, and we find local organizations that would otherwise be difficult to fund. The situation in Japan has been uniquely challenging for us, as we do not have an extensive NGO network like we have in the developing world. Yet, in less than a week, and in a difficult communications environment, we are working with several local responders. Their work will be available for funding alongside the international NGOs.

So, here is our strategy for allocating the funds collected in our Japan Earthquake and Tsunami Relief Fund: On March 18, 2011 -- one week after the first tremors -- we will disburse $725,000 from the fund to International Medical Corps, Save the Children, Architecture for Humanity, Peace Winds, Japan Platform and Lifeline Energy. Including donations to specific projects posted by several of the above organizations, as well as Mercy Corps, we will disburse $814,820. These organizations are helping on the ground right now, coordinating local NGO response and providing direct relief and supplies.

We are not disbursing all of the funds we've collected, because the situation at the nuclear plant may further complicate matters, and we want funds to go to organizations best positioned to help, striking a balance between speed and caution. We will continue to disburse funds weekly, and each donor will receive disbursement updates and progress reports from the field. Over time, we expect in-country Japanese organizations to receive a larger portion of ongoing disbursements. We welcome feedback on our approach, and we are committed to complete transparency. We designed our website to spark dialog about the work being done, so please provide feedback to GlobalGiving and the organizations implementing the projects in Japan.

It's clear to GlobalGiving that NGOs have a role in relief and recovery in Japan, and it's clear that donors are willing to support these efforts. Japan is the nation most prepared to deal with this type of disaster, but the situation is unprecedented and evolving. Just as the U.S. government was not fully equipped to deal with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and NGOs continue five years later to play a role in recovery, all indications are that the scale and complexity of the situation in Japan demands a citizen-led response to complement government efforts. We are honored to be part of that response.

52nd Time Is the Charm

2011-03-14T15:07:47-04:00

One afternoon in late March, in their offices in downtown Helsinki, Jaakko Iisalo, a games designer who had been at Rovio since 2006, showed them a screenshot. He had pitched hundreds in the two months before. This one showed a cartoon flock of round birds, trudging along the ground, moving towards a pile of colourful blocks. They looked cross. "People saw this picture and it was just magical," says Niklas [Hed, co-founder of Rovio]. Eight months and thousands of changes later, after nearly abandoning the project, Niklas watched his mother burn a Christmas turkey, distracted by playing the finished game. "She doesn't play any games. I realised: this is it." -- Wired, 3/7/11

By now, everyone (including me) has heard of Angry Birds, the hugely popular game and bestselling iPhone app of all time. Apparently 75 million people play it and waste an estimated 200 million minutes a day playing it. The Finnish company that created the app just raised $42 million in new capital to fuel new creations.

The nearly instant success of companies such as Amazon, eBay, Google, Facebook, and Twitter often give us the impression that successful products spring from the first idea -- or first few ideas -- of an inspired genius. Instead, those are the exceptions.

Some things I like about the Angry Birds story:

The company had developed 51 other games before they became successful with Angry Birds, and it was on the verge of bankruptcy less than two years ago.

No one had any idea during the development process that Angry Birds would be such a hit -- they nearly abandoned it several times.

The founders did not fire Jaakko Iisalo even though he had previously pitched hundreds of dumb and/or unsuccessful ideas to them. What if they had said "This guy is a loser -- let's ignore him?"

More in Wired.

Poetry and Development

2011-01-26T12:25:18-05:00

A small group of us meet occasionally over dinner, ostensibly to talk about new ideas in international development. Mostly we just have a good time; sometimes we forget to talk about development.

My friend April asked one day, "Why don't we read more poetry? What if we started off each dinner with some poetry?" At first I thought this idea was a little nutty -- like a lot of April's ideas, to be honest (please don't tell her I said that). What does poetry have to do with development, anyway? But then I realized that good poetry makes us happy. And that development is about enabling people to be happier.

So on this cold and rainy afternoon, I am going to tip my hat to April and publish the following poem, which makes me very happy. It is by my god-daughter, Evelina Kats, who gave me permission to print the unedited version below. I recommend both the written and audio versions.

HOME BY THE FIRE

the fire that has burned all day
lets fly warmth and
a column of silver smoke brings faces, shapes, a battel begins

the warmth clayms the hearth
whilsaling with high pich, shreachsks of terro
as the cold retreadts and warmth ancreases,
we kindel the fire and,
pink, blue, purple and orange flames
dance upon the crackling logs hissing

the hissing continues
but the colors fall back as there
leader the most powerful
emerges yellow, his queen purple, dances with him
his brother claims the embers
keeping them orange

my puppy, pursuaded by the flame
transforms into a pussie before my very eyes
ling down by the fireside
she chews a stick
crunch, munch, hiss,

I am home by the fire
after a long rainy
day at school.

-Evelina Kats (2010)
Reprinted by permission of Evelina Kats and her parents

Listen to this poem

More poems in comments section here.

Helping Outsiders Become Insiders

2011-01-18T13:47:02-05:00

Here is a talk I gave at TEDx YSE (Young Social Entrepreneurs) in December 2010. I talk about how I accidentally discovered the pleasure and privilege of helping outsiders become insiders.

More posts here.

Ben Ramalingam on Aid and Complexity

2011-01-07T12:05:23-05:00

The whole system disguises rather than navigates complexity, and it does so at various levels - in developing countries and within the aid system. This maintains a series of collective illusions and overly simplistic assumptions about the nature of systems, about the nature of change, and about the nature of human actors.

That is from my interview with Ben Ramalingam. Ben is a consultant and writer who is currently writing a book about complexity and aid to be published by Oxford University Press. I recommend his blog Aid on the Edge of Chaos. My full interview follows:

Why did you decide to write a blog?

Perhaps appropriately for a blog on complexity sciences, I started to write my blog through a combination of chance and random events. I was working on a book on complexity and aid, having led an ODI working paper on the same topic, and at a meeting I helped organize in London in July 2009, someone suggested a blog could be a useful focus point between meetings, and I said I would start one, but didn't do anything on it.

Then just before the meeting report was published in October, the friend who was working on it called me up and said, 'so what's the blog address, Ben, I want to put it in the report!' And within 60 minutes I had set up the blog, the URL and posted the first piece. So it was very much an unplanned thing, which has started to become more and more important to me as time has gone on and as the readership has grown.

Do you enjoy it?

What I really enjoy about the blog is how refreshing it is for someone like me who has spent almost a decade working at ODI on policy and research issues. But it is also challenging. It is refreshing because you can share ideas as they emerge, see which get traction, get feedback and trigger some debate and discussion, which is invaluable. It is challenging because demands you be transparent about your thinking process from the outset.

What viewpoint do you provide that other blogs do not?

As for my viewpoint, well I don't think it is unique to my blog necessarily, but I hope to provide a different way of looking at and understanding the challenges faced by international agencies. What might make my blog unique in the aid blogosphere is my attempt to do this by drawing on the latest thinking in complexity sciences and testing its relevance for the problems faced by international agencies. There are aid blogs, there are complexity blogs, but I think mine might be the only one that focuses on the intersection of the two.

Click here to hear more about how Ben got interested in issues of complexity and aid through work on knowledge management and policy processes

Your call your blog Aid on the Edge of Chaos. What do you mean by "chaos"? Why - or how - are we on the edge of it?

The Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico is the leading think-tank on complexity sciences, and they have been pushing boundaries in this area since they were formed in the mid-1980s. Stuart Kaufmann, one of the Santa Fe luminaries - he was one of the early recipients of the MacArthur Genius grants - spent a lot of time trying to understand how organisms evolve in an ecosystem. Their work showed that ecosystems can be in three different states - a solid-like state when it is frozen into a rigid set of relationships, a gas-like phase when relationships are fluctuating chaotically, and an intermediary liquid-like state at the interface between the two, when frozen components of an ecosystem are extending and exploring new possibilities. This is a metaphor for where I think the aid system should be trying to locate its efforts.

Another way to look at it is to draw on the blog post you wrote a couple of weeks back, that all of us working in the aid system have to hold our beliefs lightly, know why we hold them, but also be open to change them. Aid on the edge of chaos is a metaphor for an aid system that could do exactly this - hold its beliefs lightly. This principle, writ large, will help aid agencies extend and explore new possibilities. Frozen, outmoded beliefs will not help aid agencies adapt to a rapidly changing world.

Your blog "[explores] complexity sciences in international development and humanitarian aid." Why is it beneficial to understand complexity sciences?

The most important thing you get from the complexity sciences is different ways of looking at, thinking about and understanding the world. In my view this is the most important thing you can have in development or humanitarian aid or in any form of public policy.

Complexity sciences give us new insights in three broad ways - they help us rethink the nature of systems and how feedback loops sustain or challenge a system; they help us think anew about the nature of change processes as dynamic and unpredictable; and they help us think about the nature of human agency - as adaptive agents reacting to each other and evolving new ways of doing things, and self-organising in often astonishing ways.

So why is this of relevance for aid agencies? My starting point is that international aid has been built on a very particular way of looking at the world, and this continues to dog its efforts. As a senior USAID colleague put it, because of our urgency to end poverty, we act as if development is a construction, a matter of planning and engineering, rather the complex and often opaque set of interactions that we know it to be.

In his forward to the ODI paper I led on, Robert Chambers wrote that a huge amount of development and humanitarian thinking and practice is still trapped in a paradigm of predictable, linear causality - i.e. is still locked into an engineering mindset, which is maintained by mindsets that seek accountability through top-down command and control. In fact, he argued that in recent years there has been a growing emphasis on mechanistic approaches.

The whole system disguises rather than navigates complexity, and it does so at various levels - in developing countries and within the aid system. This maintains a series of collective illusions and overly simplistic assumptions about the nature of systems, about the nature of change, and about the nature of human actors.

So the end result of all of this is that poverty, vulnerability, disease are all treated as if are simple puzzles. Aid, and aid agencies are then presented as the missing pieces to complete the puzzle. This not only gives aid a greater importance than perhaps it is due, but it also misrepresents the nature of the problems we face, and the also presents aid flow as very simple.

Instead of engaging with complexity, it is dismissed, or relegated to an afterthought, and the tools and techniques we employ make it easy for us to do this. We treat complex things as if they were merely complicated. A good definition of this difference was provided by the Millennium Ecosystem project, launched by Kofi Annan in 2000. It involves over 1300 experts worldwide, and it provides a state-of-the-art scientific appraisal of the condition and trends in the world's ecosystems. And it has distinguished between complicated systems, which can be modeled mathematically, and complex systems, for which there is no mathematical model which can say, if X is the situation then do Y. Sustainability, healthy communities, raising families have all been given as examples of such complex systems and processes. Peacebuilding would be another, women's empowerment, natural resource management, capacity building initiatives, innovation systems, the list goes on and on. Complexity science pulls back the curtain on these processes and it can force you to think about the world you live in in a different way.

Click here to hear Ben discuss an application of complexity science to agricultural approaches in Bali.

There is much more debate about this collective illusion now - just witness the rise in aid blogs and aid snarks and aid transparency initiatives. We are starting to accept that development is not just about throwing money at a problem - although it seems this has to be re-learned constantly. This was given a new angle very recently - at a meeting this week, Bill Gates said that he had been very naïve about the possibilities of the Gates Foundation solving global health issues when he started their programme 5 years ago. And this was after putting almost half a billion dollars in.

How well do aid organizations operate in complex environments?

One of the most interesting complexity perspectives is the idea that has come out of Rosalind Eyben's recent work at the Institute of Development Studies. Ros used to run DFID country offices across Latin America and was also the DFID chief of social development, and her argument is that there are a number of people in aid agencies do deal complex, non-linear, realities on a daily basis, but they do it under the radar, below the wire, away from the watchful eyes of head offices. One of the most common responses I got from the ODI paper was 'thank you, this explains a lot of what I have been experiencing for years'. People instinctively recognize in complexity sciences a set of ideas that is useful for talking about the challenges aid agencies face.

But these same people also have to spend a huge amount of time filtering complexity, making their good work fit the hungry machine, to feed what Andrew Natsios has called the aid counter-bureaucracy, which increasingly demands positive numbers and simple narratives.

People always talk about the challenge of speaking truth to power, the ongoing Wikileaks is just the latest and highest profile manifestation. But in our sector, there may be as much of need to get power to speak truth. Andrew Natsios could only speak out about the complexity of aid, and the idea that measurability was inversely proportional to development relevance - his words, not mine - when he was no longer in USAID. While he ran USAID he couldn't say that - he perpetuated, perhaps even strengthened - the counter-bureacratic system. Why? There is a real, unspoken, but intensely felt, human cost to living with this level of cognitive dissonance.

Anyway, rant over. Our collective strengths are that we are already know and understand complexity and the limitations it places on us, in the shadow informal world of our organisations. Our collective weakness is that we aren't honest enough about it, when we need to be.

Do you think other sectors (medicine, architecture, etc.) can teach us how to approach complex problems?

There is some fascinating work in other sectors which have some connections - medicine, healthcare, education, conflict analysis, military planning, economics and so on. There can of course be lessons across these sectors. I am not sure 'teaching' is the right way to look at it though - the key to my mind is to approach this as an interdisciplinary learning effort - to bring the best people from those other environments to talk to the development and humanitarian community.

This is partly what a group of us dotted around the aid sector been trying to do over the past few years with a so-called emergent meeting series in various locations around Europe. This has brought people like Ralph Stacey, Dave Snowden and Jean Boulton to run workshops for the development community, providing a range of insights and different ways of engaging with these ideas. I think there is scope for more such engagement, to help re-think some of the critical problems faced in the development sector. Take urbanization, working in fragile states, climate change - any of the real challenges require us to reach outside our usual boundaries. But the starting point has to be to bring different people together.

A good example is the work being led by Bill Frej, former head of USAID Afghanistan, now Development Diplomat-in-Residence at Santa Fe. He has invited a diverse group - of which I feel very lucky to be a part - from around the world to come together in February to establish a collective dialogue on complexity science and how it might help aid strategies in fragile states. I will be spending some time at Santa Fe before and after - and am excited to learn as much as I can about potentially useful ideas for the aid sector.

What can the development sector teach other ones?

I think the main lessons are about values and context. One is a positive lesson, one is negative lesson.

The positive one is on values. Values are the reason we get intelligent, passionate people to stay doing jobs at low rates of pay in difficult conditions - the private sector would love to hear more about that, as would every other sector. Aid agency staff stay put because they believe in the organization, its values and what it does. Our values - at their best - act as minimum rules, knitting together disparate offices with a sense of shared purpose, igniting innovation, motivating people to do more with less.

The negative one is about context, and the importance of understanding it. We have shown time and again, whether it is structural adjustment programmes, or maternal health efforts, or social empowerment, that one size fits all simply doesn't work. The whole world could do with being reminded of that constantly, I think, especially right now. At the risk of sounding cynical, the development sector has a pretty constant flow of such lessons which sadly is not likely to dry up any time soon.

Thanks for your time, Ben. I look forward to more discussions.

Art at a Distance

2011-01-07T12:02:20-05:00

"Several hundred people attend our openings over the web."

That is what Megan Lange at Robert Lange Studios (RLS) in Charleston, SC told me recently. Mari and I stopped by there while attending a conference in that city. The building and its space drew us in; the art kept us there.

I recently went to several studios in Manhattan, but none had the business model - or vibe - of RLS. RLS's approach may point the way being successful in the art world without having to be located in NYC, London, or Paris.

Though headed by Megan and Robert Lange, the studio is a diverse collective of artists mostly under thirty and mostly from the South. Many of these artists keep a blog, where they show early drafts or working models of their next piece. The individual blogs aggregate automatically into the RLS 'Super' Blog, which appears on the main site. That blog in turn feeds into RLS's Facebook page, which has nearly 4,000 members. Prospective buyers are able to watch the works unfold, make comments, and interact with the artists, the gallery, and each other.

As a result of the quality of their art combined with their business plan and execution, the gallery has been able to weather the recent economic crisis - and even grow. When I asked why, Megan told me that she believes people still want to buy art, but are unwilling or unable to pay the large sums they previously had paid in New York, Paris, or London. Instead, they want quality at the lower price range RLS is able to offer.

Many clients never visit the gallery in person. The web site photos are good enough to convey quality, and buyers can gauge from the discussions on the blog and Facebook what they might like. Those who come to the openings via webcam are able to appreciate the vibe and reactions of those visiting in person. According to Megan, the gallery even ships several pieces a month overseas.

Impressive. And an example for businesses in other sectors as well.

More posts at DennisWhittle.com

The Tyranny of Ideology

2010-12-21T10:25:07-05:00

Berlin

Here is one of the best lectures of all time. It should be required listening for anyone interested in better understanding the world - or trying to change it. I recently listened to it for the second time; it is one of those things that never gets old.

The lecture is by Isaiah Berlin, delivered at Oxford University in 1955. The subject is Alexander Herzen, and more specifically his masterpiece My Past and Thoughts, written in 1868.

Herzen

Once you listen to the lecture, you may want to read the book, too, which is fabulous. There is no more powerful inoculation against our tendency to fall in love with silver bullets and all-encompassing frameworks and ideologies.

Listen to my podcast with the lecture here.

www.globalgiving.org

More posts at DennisWhittle.com

When Aid Works: RIP, Rene Le Berre

2010-12-20T14:43:40-05:00

"René Le Berre, a French entomologist who helped inspire an international campaign that saved millions of West Africans from the parasitic disease river blindness, died Dec. 6 in L'Aiguillon-sur-Mer on France's western coast. He was 78.
Onchocerciasis, the formal name for river blindness, had once been a scourge in the fertile river basins of tropical Africa."

That obit is from the NYT.

When I joined the World Bank in 1986, my first memory is of my colleague Bruce Benton yelling in French over the phone across the Atlantic to Dr. Le Berre. I remember wondering what he was yelling about. Bruce did not join many meetings or participate in the various fads and "sexy" initiatives in the Bank. He just steadily and consistently worked with Dr. Le Berre and his program for twenty years, from 1985 to 2005, saving hundreds of thousands of lives, sparing millions of children from affliction, and reclaiming millions of hectares of land for habitation and cultivation. All at a nominal cost, representing a tremendous return on investment.

A very nice brief by the Center for Global Development on the impact of the river blindness control program is here.