Today was the first day of Doing Development Differently (#differentdev). It was a full day with two DDD Exchange Sessions, a design thinking session and a wind tunnel meeting. View the videos, tweets and photos.
When we designed this workshop, we wanted to maximize the opportunity to hear from as many people as possible. Specifically, we wanted
- to show that it is possible to do development differently;
- the participants to discern key principles and cross-cutting modalities or tools;
- to explore whether we could promote a vibrant Community of Practice for those trying to do development differently.
To facilitate this, we asked our presenters to prepare a 7:30 minute talk —with no powerpoints or visual accompaniments. The talk had to address the following questions:
- What problem were you trying to solve?
- How had you/your organization/others addressed this problem in the past?
- What did you do?
- How did you manage the politics of your work?
- How did you ensure learning in the process?
We are delighted to share the first set of 7:30 presentations: Michael Woolcock, Zack Brisson, Tim Williamson, and Kay Winning. Here are some key principles that cut across all the presenters:
- Humility: We don’t know the answers
- Articulate principles that can scale
- Donors role: broker, convenor, facilitator, adviser
- Understand context: listening, relationships and personal networks are central
- Need feet on-the-ground to support the process
- Create space for local solutions and local ownership
- Embrace and navigate politics: work with what you have
- Building and sustaining broad coalitions: middle/low level bureaucrats, many stakeholders at all levels
- Iterative messy process: one that evolves over time, problems change, solutions change
- Built-in rapid cycles of learning
- Refine problem definition: focus on what really needs to be solved
- Take advantage of windows of opportunity (shocks, critical junctures, etc)
- Adaptability: thinking strategically but building on flexibility
Follow #differentdev for live coverage of Day 2.