Facilitating learning across research consortia
In this essay I suggest why it’s helpful for large consortia conducting research and engagement to undertake collective learning, what this looks like in practice, what people might learn about and finally how learning might be facilitated to improve the chances that participants learn and learn well.
Why facilitate collective learning?
Donors in the global development sector tend to disburse large amounts of research funding to consortia around specific themes in line with detailed proposals. These consortia are often led by large multi-national management consulting firms and might comprise a range of other organisations that differ in size; in whether they are public, private or non-profit; academic, consultancy and/or policy focused; as well as location (Europe, North America and Australia/New Zealand on one hand and those from Africa, Latin America and Asia-Pacific on the other).
Within some categories there are often yet more differences. For instance, academic organisations comprise people specialising in a range of disciplines including economics, history, anthropology, psychology, amongst many others each with different world views and practices.
People from a variety of backgrounds with ‘homes’ in distinct teams and organisations (with particular missions, values and culture) need to work together toward a shared purpose. They are in effect forming a new organisation, albeit temporarily. The organisation’s purpose might be to promote the use of knowledge in policy and practice in Indonesia; or it might be to ensure key decision makers across Africa have evidence and advice to deliver effective programmes to support dryland communities.
Although the way in which people in the consortia should work together is often spelt out in proposals, we know that plans often get pulled apart by reality, by unforeseen events as well as unintended consequences of the work, which can pull them away from their purpose and operate in ways that are unethical or not in line with their values.
Moreover, starting up a new organisation requires setting up a range of things from scratch: roles, (power) relationships, physical premises, practices and a new collective identity (even if this might be shaped by the lead contractor). Individuals may experience changes to their personal identity with some having to move location and spend less time with their colleagues. Some people might ‘ride the wave’, while others may struggle. Some might feel they benefit personally from the process, while others may feel they do not and find ways of resisting. Everyone will react in some way. For instance, where people are unsure about how to take up a new role or practice, they may fall back on habits and practices that are appropriate for their ‘home’ organisation but not for the new organisation.
Over time, consortia might find themselves grappling with a range of issues including research quality, research use, major social, political and/or economic crises, budget cuts, a need to reduce carbon emissions, sudden shifts in donor preferences, changes to the internal political context, the persistence of coloniality, the departure and arrival of key personnel and high workloads/burnout amongst many others.
These might be articulated through micro-gestures, subtle emotional cues, apparently irrational responses and reactions and/or the ‘Freudian slip’. Some people might be consciously aware of some of these issues, but not all. Other issues go unnoticed and can formally ‘fall between the cracks’, even if they leave some people feeling stressed.
Where people are conscious of key issues, but there isn’t a safe enough forum to raise them, people engage in 1-2-1 conversations with trusted individuals as a way of venting. Key issues might find their way on the to-do list of the executive director and other senior managers, leading them to fire fight alone and often burn out as a consequence. They might in turn commission a consultant to come in and make recommendations. However, while all this might make people feel better temporarily, they won’t necessarily change consortium-wide dynamics in the medium to long run with problems likely persisting.
In a context where a consortium is being buffeted about by both internal and external issues, it helps for its members to think and learn on a regular basis and tend to these issues collectively rather than individually. Consortium life unfolds through communication and conversation amongst its members. Therefore, changes in practices of the team are likely to start with changes in the conversations they have. As people talk about what they are doing differently, they are likely to think and act differently. Further, paying attention to one’s own practice with others can be transformative for oneself and one’s colleagues. And finding the words and the courage to talk about aspects of one’s work which usually remain unaddressed can inspire teams to work together more productively overtime.
What does it mean to learn?
What does it mean to learn in practice? Learning is the acquisition of knowledge and/or a skill aimed at improving one’s own practices. People are learning all the time informally, but this can also happen through deliberate and structured processes as I say here. Although learning often happens on one’s own, it’s often more effective when done with others through conversation - so it’s also a social process. People benefit from feedback. And one’s capacity to put knowledge into practice will likely depend on the contribution of others. Learning can induce anxiety as it assumes one doesn’t know and is uncertain about something, which can affect one’s identity. So it’s an emotional issue too.
Learning has a political economy element. For example, creating and funding space to learn means that it needs to be a priority which in turn requires senior management consent to, for instance, set in motion particular processes and/or release funds.
So how might learning happen deliberatively? As we say above, learning is best done in groups and teams. These might be obvious and outlined in an organisational chart. But if not, people can organise themselves based on having similar functions entailing e.g. groups of researchers, operations staff, communicators; or based on being in similar locations entailing e.g. those based in Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, or a combination of these and other affinities. These teams and work groups might be seen as a resource for leaders and managers. Groups of 8 to 10 are a good size beyond which members might struggle to be heard.
But for e.g. research to be policy focused, sufficient budget and personnel will need to be allocated to the communications team, the research team will need to integrate use and usability into their research process, while those based in different locations will need to collaborate closely. Moreover, meeting solely within one’s group might promote ‘groupthink’ and can lead to divisiveness. E.g. communicators might think researchers can’t write, while researchers might come to think the operations staff are obsessed with saving money. Narrow and incorrect perceptions of each other – even if they are not openly acknowledged - might get in the way of effective collaboration.
So it’s helpful to have inter-team or inter-group conversations at various points to reflect on the quality of collaborative processes and to integrate people’s perceptions of each other. A senior management team might bring senior representatives from each team together to support the Executive Director to provide leadership and learn across the consortium. But other cross-consortium, or ‘working’ groups might be formed to facilitate thinking and learning on specific issues.
What might people learn about?
Which brings me to what might teams learn about? Drawing on work by the Overseas Development Institute and the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, teams might consider learning about the following:
Inputs: does the consortium have sufficient time, money and people to deliver on their purpose?
Strategy and direction: what is the consortium’s purpose? are people doing the right things? Do these respond to the needs of their key audiences?
Outputs and activities: are people doing things, such as research and communication, ‘right’? Are they of appropriate quality?
Governance and management: how appropriate is the consortium’s design, division of labour, levels of authority and reporting relationship. What is the nature of work tasks, roles, business processes and activities? How strong is the consortium’s collective identity? Is it strong enough to talk about difficulties and imperfections? To what extent are people included? What is the nature of leadership and followership? What is the nature of the consortium’s culture?
Uptake, outcomes and impact: how are specific audiences responding to the work that is being produced? What changes might these outputs have contributed to? Changes might be in stakeholder behaviour, attitudes and relationships. Or they might be in policy content and/or policy process.
Context: what in the project’s and consortium’s context or environment is changing and what are the implications on the project as well as the achievement of outcomes? Key features might include key actors and their interests, formal and informal institutions, aspects of the context such as demography, economics, the changing climate and technology etc, key networks and alliances, dominant ideas as well as the role of critical junctures, both planned and unplanned.
What might help members to learn?
Even if there are appropriate forums to facilitate collective learning, people often avoid having frank conversations about potentially difficult issues due to the fear of psychologically injuring others, being injured in turn, the shame of being seen as vulnerable or being seen to get things wrong. Moreover, given the primary task of the consortium is to provide expertise on e.g. a range of thematic issues, its members may not feel that are ‘good enough’ to engage given their lack of perceived expertise on e.g. strategy, governance, quality, etc. It thus becomes easier to simply ‘turn a blind eye’, or senior managers may conveniently contract learning to an outside expert to do on their behalf.
To address this, it helps for forums to be resilient and strong. This comes from having a fixed and regular time for meeting, using the same technology (assuming its online), investing resource to meet face to face on a periodic basis, agreeing on confidentiality issues and taking the time required to build up trust. Experienced managers can facilitate such meetings. However, bringing in an external consultant, especially one who is psychodynamically trained, to manage meetings, can help ensure that meetings do not become stuck and bogged down in conflict.
Whoever convenes such a forum marks beginnings and endings, checks in with ‘unauthorised’ absentees and maintains a memory for the group in terms of its history, its members and their interactions. One might be tempted to follow an agenda comprising a long list of questions. But a few items or questions tends to work best. These might include:
What works well in this team/consortium?
What doesn’t work so well?
What if anything might we do differently?
By holding and containing the anxiety that the prospect of learning generates, participants are better able to learn. Over time, they relax and can talk directly to their experiences - allowing those ‘hidden transcripts’ to be heard without judgement.
Information about what might be going on might reside in people’s bodies, through emotions such as pleasure, desire, pain, frustration, anxiety, fear, sadness and grief. While some people might conceal these emotions, they might also act them out in formal meetings, by e.g. being defensive, aggressive, rushing through things, being excessively positive, remaining silent or scapegoating individuals.
As such asking team members to spontaneously produce drawings, pictures and visual representations (such as stakeholder maps) of consortium dynamics can help to consider more tacit knowledge (that we are not aware that we possess) to surface feelings and make sense of them in a safer way. Through free association, such images allow a less self-censored and perhaps more illuminating description of a situation than what words can offer, providing a way into the un- or under-acknowledged dimensions of consortium activity.
There might be a temptation to rush to action and develop solutions quickly. But this is often at the expense of deepening one’s understanding of the situation in question and can lead to sub-optimal interventions. Instead it helps to stay with the trouble which in turn requires a degree of ‘negative capability’. This means being able to tolerate uncertainty for longer, to sit with your and other people’s frustrations, to take the time to think before the group moves to action. But equally, once teams have processed sufficiently, they will need to face real life, asking themselves the questions: what will we do? what will the challenges be and what resistances will arise?
In conclusion, learning together can help people to jointly explore, construct and think about the situation(s) they find themselves in, unlock knowledge that resides amongst them to find and put into practice appropriate solutions and reflect on the consequences of having done so – intended, unintended and unwanted. In a way this is asking the researchers in the consortium to do what they do best - to be curious, not only about e.g. agro-pastoralists in Kenya, or policy processes in Indonesia, but also about e.g. how consortium members relate to one another in pursuing their primary purpose.