By Paul Knipe, Bert Maerten, Kate Moger, and Aleema Shivji
This blog was originally published by Alliance on 29 July 2024.
In October 2023, a group of us seeking to support ‘transformation’ in NGOs came together, facilitated by Mary Ann Clements, in an Action Learning Set (ALS). Six sessions later, we’ve enjoyed deep listening, learning and making connections across different parts of the ecosystem.
We wanted to share some of what made this process so special: the ways in which it enabled us to practise curiosity, to practise holding different perspectives, and to offer each other a safe, brave space in which to acknowledge the multiple ways in which transformation is hard – personally, and professionally.
The container that action learning is designed to provide is intentionally a space to challenge ourselves to new and different kinds of action so it can be a powerful tool to support change in our practice and, hopefully beyond that, our sector more widely. It is also grounded in the idea that, to be able to lead change well, we have to reflect on how we and our own teams actually change. In other words, we have to both reflect on how we are doing it and then make changes and learn from the process. This is a layer sometimes missing when we focus on the systemic issues only and how much others need to change and yet is a critical and important partner to it.
In the process we learned to take time to listen to one another and listen well. This helped us also reflect on thinking carefully about what we are asking and to learn by asking questions. Together we created a brave space to ask ourselves different questions and challenge our own practice. We might come from different organisations, but we’re all part of a system, that’s what connects us and we reflect on how challenging the process of transformation is and why we need each other to do it and to do it well.
An issue that ran through most of our conversations and reflections was the mindset change required for (if not, demanded by) transformation. Even if accurate, the expectation and its content are not free of biases, including our very own mental models (and interests) that frame the articulation of the desired mindset change.
When sharing experiences, we noticed that new thinking and practices already exist, but are unevenly distributed. Often, they are at the edges of the organisation and system. How can we bring those forward, or indeed up, in the organisation? What needs to be done to gain attention in places where the incentive for the status quo is the strongest.
To the extent that transformation often involves a sense of loss (real and/or perceived), what are we doing to help people along this journey? Especially in the subjective, personal, emotional matters of the mind(set). After all, the call for transformation can be confronting. At best, people will grapple with it. More likely, they may feel threatened or somewhat intimidated by it.
We learned that it is vital to meet people where they are, rather than where we want them to be. This is the hardest bit if you are passionate about transformation and when it is your primary focus. To us, the need for the changes feels so self-evident, but it likely is not to others where the tyranny of now demands their full attention.
We reflected that our traditional tools do not serve us well on the journey of transformation. The sector has a strong bias for ‘planning’ change. Yet, transformative and mindset changes are not easily ‘planned out’. Our usual tools of strategies, plans, policies, action plans often do not serve us well when we work with emergence and ambiguity.
We completed the series feeling sincere gratitude for each other’s wisdom and generosity: both in terms of the honest sharing and, perhaps even more importantly, the willingness to sit, listen and work with our questions, doubts, anxieties and opportunities, for several hours at a time.
We were also grateful to Mary Ann for the flexibility in the facilitation that empowered us to move from a ‘classic’ ALS structure into a more open format. This enabled us to seek and share threads across our collective experiences – and in so doing to model the systems change approach that NGO transformation desperately needs but struggles to realise.
Practising this kind of meta-cognition in a group: seeking to understand more together about how we are thinking and learning and replicating or disrupting the normative discourses of the group, is a fascinating and unusual opportunity – especially in our experience of ‘aid’ organisations – but to learn how we think and think how we learn is critical – because mindset matters. It underpins how our sector thinks, behaves and acts so needs to be at the root of transformation.