In running a rehabilitative programme in a war-torn, economically depressed area of Indonesia, Ellynita realized that her own biases as a management consultant were preventing her from measuring progress accurately. She explains the steps she took to break down the complexities of social dynamics to truly understand the community’s needs and focus on the right metrics
5. Turning Point: Stepping Out; Stepping In
AssessorFacilitatorCommunityFacilitator Community
Community
Assessor
Distrust
Daily
Survival
Instinct
Social
Stigma
6. Engagement Value Shift
Scale
Revenue ($$$)
Reach
Beneficiary
Judging
(Opinion)
Indigenous
Resource
Sustainability
Social Value (Trust)
Time
Partner
Iterating
(Intention)
Indigenous
Asset
8. Experiment #1: Framework
Skill-Set
A
I 1.5 wk I
Skill-Set
B
I 1.5 wk I
Skill-Set
C
I 1.5 wk I
Skill-Set
D
I 1.5 wk I
Skill-Set
E…
I 1.5 wk I
Interest + Strength + Maintenance + Support = Income
Conversations = Repeat Purchases = Social Acceptance = Trust
10. Beaudoh Besaree Programme (MVP)
Rebuild
Trust &
Value
| Early Stage | | Middle Stage | | Growth Stage |
Immediate
Income
Solutions
Systematic
Reduction
of
Negative
Issues
11. Beudoh Besaree
Movement
IMPACT
| 2009 – 2012 |
| USD10,000 |
+5 Provinces
+USD 80 per
income per
household
per month
Governance &
Empowerment
International Aid
Supplement
Education
Regeneration
12. Lessons Learnt
Clearly Defined Mission as the Anchor
Using Indigenous Resources Increases Engagement
Bonus: Decreased Cost
Community centricity forces agility and adaptability
Bonus: Continuous Relevance, Ownership & Empowerment
Turn Community Intuition into Replicable Process
It’s OK to NOT follow formula/model
Shorter, Faster Trial Cycles
Test, Measure, Change/Continue, Repeat and Scale
13. Measure the Right Metrics
By Falling Out of Love with Your Assumptions
e11yne
Editor's Notes
Aceh is one of out the 34 provinces in Indonesia with 5mil population.
73,869 = 182,534.27acres
Epiphony: Friends (The One that Goes Behind the Scene)
Legacy Psyche: Growth Barrier
Formula-centric
Wrong success measures
Bloatedness
Fell victim to confirmation bias
Non-continuous engagement
Wrong Skill-Community Fit
When we understand the problems, we were able to test what specific metrics to use to measure progress or success (to ask ourselves what will be the measurable benefits of impact and how we can inculcate skills for the community to continuously be motivated to execute life long improvements?)
Weight: Solutions target clear social problems with transformative growth. Not just target the symptoms of the problems
Process & Cost driven – very embedded in the impact world that often look at the traditional process because it’s been proven to help with systematic change (one solution
Smallness is notable: Scale vs sustainability – miniscule growth. The economic activities, which functioned primarily in medium and big towns during the conflict period now need to small towns in sub-districts and village.
Had to inform the volunteer community managers that I needed to relook at the last few years because we had not stopped working but the impact ripple effect was reducing as time went on. That was a major breakdown for me but it helped me open up to many discoveries. One was which was Prof Anil Gupta’s TED talk on his works with harvesting grassroots innovation with the poor in India. He repeats many times over of how, “people who are economically poor are not poor here (heart) or here (mind)”. Then, it struck me. As much as I was immersed in the locals lives and Aceh had become home, I was not actually engaging them. I went in with a consultant’s opinion and focused on that, instead of an intention – the intention to have the poor better improve their quality of life. I forget that this doesn’t necessarily mean increase of revenue or reduction of cost.
So, with this in mind, I went back to Aceh and relook at the learnings and feedback of the last five years.
I was amazed at the insight I overlook because I had the traditional consultant’s measure filter ie time, financial, literacy, scale of success and health.
I was so caught up in listening to experts in aid, that I forgot that the best persons to know what they need are the locals themselves.
And them, because money is associated with knowledge and success, often do not speak against the financial aid that they desperately need. They align themselves to an “expert” vision. Over time, this conditioning makes them not know how to say out what they really need and/or want. They become beneficiaries, in every cents of the word.
IT’S VERY EASY TO LOOK FOR SYSTEMIC, SYSTEMATIC SOLUTIONS RATHER THAN TACKLING CONCRETE PROBLEMS ONE AT A TIME
The NGO or impact world traditionally automatically try to find “once and for all solutions” for these beneficiaries. Operational problems are almost always local and detailed and we’ll learn more by solving them concretely and specifically one by one rather than by looking for hyper-solutions to issues we don’t fully understand. But it’s easier to throw a huge chunk of cash at a new toy (new system, new plant, new program) than deal with the grittiness of real value-level problems. We become focused on the process and formula for aid that we forget to make it work!
And the only way to do so, is to have the locals participate with the solutions development. At this point, I was determined to change the lens through which I was looking at them by discarding my own belief system and have the locals relook at the collected feedback of the past five years together with me. Our findings were surprising to all parties – which was nice! Because it meant we were learning together and that no one party is more of an expert than another. And I began to remember that I was an entrepreneur. So what if each community was seen as a startup, instead of clusters of beneficiaries?
What do we do then? The moment all of us stop trying to fit the communities into an aid formula, we (including the locals) starting seeing them as startups with internal and external operational problems.
Lessons
Understanding the cultural dynamics to guide solutions development, we needed to throw away our assumptions on what social norm is -- if we envision communities as startups, any business model required would need to first understand the cultural dynamics of the communities
Understanding that the communities usually do not verbally express what the root of the problems is because their culture implicitly asks them to filter out how they express themselves to outsiders. By immersing ourselves in local context, we are able to shadow and live the problems to help observe the different needs/problems at different stage/cycle. Often communities are more readily open with sharing what their desires or wants are because they assume aid are often financial. They also often hope that by being able to realise the desires, they can pacify what the real problems may be
Lean process help guide growth of new thinking for my team and for the communities - how to map value streams
What Did:
Adapting skills-based training delivery for optimum individual community learning
Implementing relationship-based programme for wider reach
Don’t judge; iterate
Being in the field
What Didn’t:
Measured the wrong things
Different success values
Did not validate assumptions
Own emotional & professional bias
Bloated programme
Too heavy to stop
In love with own solution/formula
Fell victim to confirmation bias
Asking wrong questions
Wrongly directed empathy
Not knowing what to pivot
Focused instead on direction of pivot
So what were the majorlearning insights and what needs to change?
Customer Problem Pivot
Market Segment Pivot
Technology Pivot
Product Feature Pivot
Sales Channel Pivot
Product vs Service Pivot
Major Competitor Pivot
Revenue Model Pivot
What happens when we take money out of the picture?
Co-designing with communities.
Vanity metrics are not mainstream ones, we needed to redefine (how to qualify and quantify non-financial metrics) them at different stages of growth
Testing income channels
Testing business models
Early stage - rebuild trust e.g. talking to ostracised community members
Middle stage - practising immediate solutions e.g. using donated machines to farm instead of selling for money (long term thinking vs daily survival mode), etc
Later stage e.g. lower crime rates (less bombings etc), etc
Vanity Metrics changes
“better, faster or cheaper” isn’t always good
Don’t fetishise models
Experiments turn communities into living labs
Rapid prototyping allows communities to experience changes and empowers them to create the change they want and/or need
If you optimise purely for growth at the expense of achieving its founding mission, you can “lost your way” and g etcaught in “lost purposes”
For me, is all about telling stories. We tell stories to learn. We tell stories to connect, we tell stories to remember, we tell stories to explain why something needs to happen, and tell stories to get it there. We also make miracles happen on a shoestring or less, but it sometimes takes a bit longer because, well, we get caught up in the stories.
Summary
- Sustainability of impact is the more urgent need than scale of revenue at the early stages of developing underserved communities in volatile environments
Rapid experimentation helped communities to have a better understanding and appreciation of how solutions may or may not facilitate their growth and rebuild trust amongst the different groups within their communities (faster and shorter cycles of prototyping skills or ideas help to test them against social acceptance of the community).
Lean principles help to ease communities to accept and create change
Going through the above -- it makes me wonder, could lean principles systematically change culture faster?