NGOs: Managing Knowledge Better. Why Aren’t Recommendations Always Recommendable?
Meetings of NGO professionals, as in any other field, are an important part of the work. They diffuse knowledge and know-how and breathe life to a guild of folk who are making their career in the field.
This practice is threatening to become a self-contained mannerism which apart from (often) not effectively contributing to policy debate, depletes the nutritious substance of a forum, and is essentially bad management of knowledge. The roots of this are to be sought in a less than conscious contagion; by imitation of what others have done, combined with the ever present imperative of having tangible outputs for the reporting. As important as good recommendations are for policy and decision making, just about any type of a meeting is not likely to produce them. But insistence on producing recommendations, when they are less than an optimal option, hampers the other potential benefits from the convening. What usually happens is that after having gone through a plenary, people are exposed to a number of presentations (be it in the plenary itself or groups), after which they are impelled into a process of discussion, in a group for which they have opted, which is supposed to result with a list of recommendations .These recommendations are than further digested by a chair, note taker, or reporter, fed back to a plenary, and entering the proceedings of the event. The idea is that they should guide action, but they often remained merely a box in a report. What happens in reality is that a list of recommendations is a serious reduction of the content of the debate and the knowledge put in motion. They are rarely more than 10% of what was being said; are often formulated in a way which waters down the point; are subject to personal interpretation of the person-with- the –pen; and represent a poor and usually generalized summary of the discussion. What more, they affect the dynamic of the debate, given the pressure on discussants to come up with the laundry list. The discussion over an issue mobilizes the collective knowledge of the people in a forum; the issue is analyzed through comparisons of different experiences; cases are described and logical argumentation deployed, and many facets are explored, possible shortcomings noted, and so forth. All of this educational matter ends up as one generic phrase in the list of recommendations. The phrase is often nothing but a mere repetition of conventional wisdom. The entire richness of the debate is missing from the record. It did definitely benefit the participants, but the possible effect of recording in its entirety is lost. In this way a convening is deprived of an essential function, that of being a vehicle for diffusion (and documentation) of knowledge. A recommendation of the type “local authorities should allow for greater participation of youth”, or “greater social inclusion is needed by means of affirmative measures”, as much as being relevant or timely, needs the background argument which explains why is this so. Far too often unfortunately, this is lacking. Whether or not recommendations are produced, the process of convening needs to be recorded by virtue of comprehensive and thick notes. This is how knowledge is preserved. If these notes are further compiled into a substantive report, even better. Either way, the essence is that the combined experience and expertise of conveners is memorized. Recommendations alone do not even come close to doing that. Moreover, a convening should not insist on coming up with recommendations, unless this is its major and explicit objective, just because doing so is common practice. This affects the dynamic of the debate in the sense that it compels to summarization. In this sense, even a convening which has the purpose to feed policy, should reconsider how these recommendations are produced. It doesn’t always make sense to divide conveners into groups which are further subdivided into further groups and to expect the recommendations to “emerge” by means of active, democratic participation. As much as this gives the impression of having structure, or knowing what one is doing, the result is more often than not poor. Sometimes it is just the composition of the group, other times the course the debate took (over time which is always limited) , the dynamic and so forth. In conclusion, a convening, which is often a substantial commitment in terms of resources, should come down to more than a shopping list of generic items. This needs to be done through a better management of the process of knowledge. Recommendations alone are not enough; thick reporting is needed. Do not recommend. Take record. This is the recommendation. |
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