Posted on June 17, 2010 by Eva Schiffer
Or the other way round.
picture by psp
There might be people out there, who find all the change they need within themselves. But when I look at how Net-Map moved from toys in a cookie tin to what it is now, I know that I met a significant guide at most of the important cross-roads. Someone who says: “This might be the best idea you’ll have in your life, stick with it for a while, don’t run away because you’re bored, don’t assume you’ll invent something more interesting tomorrow” (John Mason of NCRC, Ghana), “Give it a name, turn it into a toolbox, make it a recognizable product – and we’ll help you do it.” (Klaus von Grebmer and his communications team at IFPRI), “WRITE THESE RESEARCH PAPERS! This is how people learn about Net-Map and start taking it seriously.” (Regina Birner at IFPRI), “We’re all doing it and you can also be independent and thrive!” (Mark Steinlin, Nancy White and so many other colleagues at KM4Dev)
Today is my personal international “Thank the change agents day”. It’s amazing how that works, because change has to be outside and within at the same time, this brief moment that is like an opened door. Because we all know how often people encourage us to change this or that and we just feel like: “Leave me alone and mind your own business.” But every once in a while you meet people who hear the change that is brewing in you already and give you the one question, advice, criticism that you need to jump. It does make you wonder: Who or what opens this door?
Ok, in the end you have to do all the hard work to make it happen, and, let me tell you, change never comes for free… But, would you even have tried without this random or pointed remark?
My last change agent encounter was actually with more than one… more than one customer asking me for the same time slot, wanting me to be in different corners of the world at the same time. And then I sat down with my partner in crime Noora Aberman (IFPRI) and we asked ourselves: How can Net-Map grow beyond our own limited capacity? How much sharing and how much control is needed so that it can spread wide and still not be diluted too much? Can I let go? Of what? How does collaboration work if I don’t want to employ?
I don’t know. Yet. But I will find out. And I’m asking all my friends to tell me what they think… So if you have made an idea grow beyond your own limited size – or if you failed to do so and learned a lot along the way – tell me what you have learned and you might be on the golden list on my next “thank the change agents day”…
Filed under: exploring new ideas, open questions | Leave a Comment »
Posted on May 28, 2010 by Eva Schiffer
picture by Rachel Ray
Roberta Amaral de Andrade from Brazil used Net-Map to get a better understanding of ” conflicts and opportunities for developing Jequitiba’s Forest Settlement Project”. She took the time to write a reflection (323 KB) of her experience and allowed me to share it. Two of the struggles she describes are actually rather typical, they are things that often happen to us in our pre-tests so I’ve developed some ideas of how to deal with them so that they aren’t carried over into the actual research.
Let’s call the problem:
BORING SPAGHETTI
Your interviews are poring (for your interview partner and after the first three or so also for you) because the maps are all more or less the same. And they look like a bowl of spaghetti, because there are so many links between the actors. Drawing the links takes up a lot of time but doesn’t generate much new insight. So your data doesn’t tell you much beyond, well, everyone somehow interacts with everyone, but it is also a pain to collect, because it takes hours to draw and even more hours to enter the data.
What happened? I would guess you asked commonly known and agreed upon networks and / or low effort links. Low effort links are for example “exchange information” while a high effort link might be “gives money to” or “fights with”. Commonly agreed upon links are often those that are formal (such as “reports to”).
So why, if I know this can happen and I claim to have a remedy for it, do we commonly run into it in our pre-tests? That’s because you have to know the specific situation, to actually know which links are boring or common and how far you have to up the stakes to get to something more interesting. And to get a first overview over the situation, it makes a lot of sense to look at the formal hierarchy system, general information exchange and similar links that are boring and / or cumbersome if done too often. But if you see that it’s just boring spaghetti all over again, see how you can make it more difficult for your respondent do connect actors with links:
- ask for more specific links: instead of “information flow” this could be “research findings”, “information about farmer’s performance” or “information about corruption”.
- ask for less formalized links: that’s why you do interviews instead of reading a document, because the different interview partners can tell you about the kinds of friendships, family relations, work coalitions, enemies and information shortcuts that an outsider can’t see.
- ask for links that take more effort: we can greet a lot of people each day but won’t be close friends with all of them, we can give presentations (share information) to a big group of people but will only work closely with few… If the links you ask for require more effort, you will be less likely to link everyone to everyone.
- ask for very different links: I have spent a lot of time drawing funding links in one direction and reporting links between the same actors in the opposite direction… if you realize that two links appear together most of the time, just ask for one of them and substitute the second one for something completely different.
- ask for hot links: When pre-testing, observe which issues (links or aspects of the discussion) heat up the discussion and add some spice to the interview. Follow your intuition and look for things that stir up the interview, that confuse you or make you curious.
- ask for riskier links: this is a recommendation that you have to follow only very carefully, depending on the trust you can develop and the openness with which your interview partners can talk, but sometimes it has proven very interesting to ask for “who annoys whom” or “where are informal money flows”
One final recommendation: Pre-test and take your pre-test seriously. Be aware that you might not know which questions to ask before you actually asked them. It’s so much better to change your questions after a pre-test than to collect a set of boring spaghetti data.
Filed under: Other people's work, case studies, fine-tuning implementation | Leave a Comment »
Posted on May 25, 2010 by Eva Schiffer
Some weeks back I had a great discussion (or two…) with Siraj Sirajudin of Influence and he was excited about Net-Map. We drew a map about a change process that he facilitates at the moment and came up with a little powerful innovation in the corner of the map. The major driver or draw-back of change processes is the buy-in of those involved. So after adding actors and links to the map the obvious goals to add to the actors were whether their attitude towards change was supportive, neutral or negative. So far, so standard Net-Map. But then we wondered: “So how many people are for or against us, and how powerful are they?” And added a little calculation to the corner, adding up the numbers of individuals in each camp – and adding up their influence towers. So if you stacked all influence towers of the nay-sayers on top of each other, how high would the resulting super tower be? A little calculation that you can do right there at the table with your participants, and that can have an extremely eye-opening effect. And, as Siraj rightly remarked, sometimes the neutral ones can be a bigger problem than the outspoken opposition.
Filed under: exploring new ideas, facilitation | Leave a Comment »
Posted on May 12, 2010 by Eva Schiffer
I know there is even a name for it (but have forgotten what it is called): Sometimes research findings make so much sense, that everyone afterward says: “Well, that’s no surprise, I could have told you that… why did you have to waste so much time and money to find out something that is just common sense?” Well, maybe not everyone says it but you can see it on the faces of even your more polite listeners. And maybe they are right and you have come up with a finding of the innovative power of “Water is wet.” Or: “Wheels are round.”
But it might also be that you just found out something that makes so much sense that it feels to your audience like they should have known it before… even though they didn’t. There is one very easy way of finding out whether you learned something new or something old when drawing Net-Maps: Do a test run before going to the field. Draw a map of how you guess it would be. Sit down with the whole research team to draw a map. Or do it with your client, if you do this research for someone else. Maybe you can even convince the guy who always says “Well, we knew that before…” to sit with you and draw a map of what he actually does know before.
In most cases you will find out (and your audience will as well) that you/your client/your audience didn’t know beforehand what afterward they thought they did. And while it is great and lends a lot of TATAAA to your research, if you can come up with the unexpected, most of the things you will find out (in any field) are things that make sense and thus, somehow, feel familiar. And, honestly, isn’t it a good thing, if your findings make sense?
Filed under: musings | Leave a Comment »
Posted on May 8, 2010 by Eva Schiffer
On a quiet Saturday morning, my baby sleeps longer than I could hope for so I have a few minutes in which I could either finish a proposal, do the dishes or float around in the web, looking for one or two inspiring thoughts. By the fact that I am writing this post, you can guess, that the dishes are still dirty…
Viv McWaters is always a good person to turn to for something to think about. Today I stumbled over the following:
“We act our way into a new way of thinking rather than think our way into a new way of acting.” Which Viv got from the Melbourne Playback Theatre Company
Then she refers to the Cynefin framework, stating that
“in complex environments, what’s needed are ‘multiple small and diverse interventions to create options.’ Probe – Sense – Respond.”
And as the third thought in this series of posts that caught my eye was her pledge to “stop interpreting for others”, that’s what I will do, and not go into lengthy explanation of what I think these things mean or should mean to you.
Filed under: Other people's work, exploring new ideas, musings | Leave a Comment »
Posted on May 6, 2010 by Eva Schiffer
In our IFPRI project about “research into policy making” in Malawi we drew NetMaps with people who had very different levels of detail when describing the policy landscape. Some just talked about “the” Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security, while others divided the ministry in several divisions and even individual positions. If we want to compare the data between interviews and especially the influence assigned in influence towers, we have to find a rule how to merge these detailed descriptions into a common influence value for the whole organization. How do we best do that? How about adding up all the influence values we got for parts of the Ministry, so that the Ministry’s influence is the sum of it’s pieces? Let’s think about what that means: If someone mentioned every little department of the Ministry, separated the cleaners, the drivers and their grandmothers, gave all of them a medium or low influence tower, then summing all of them up, would give this Ministry a lot more power than in a comparable interview where the respondent just talked about the Ministry as a whole. Even if you disregard the grandmothers…
Now how about using an average influence value? Our definition of influence is that someone (or an organization) can achieve their goals in a social setting, even despite resistance. Let’s look at the complex respondent who includes a lot of irrelevant or lesser actors to the picture: Does the fact that the Ministry has a lot of drivers who have nothing to say decrease the ability of the Minister (or Permanent Secretary) to make things happen? That’s what you assume, if you take the average. There might be special cases where that is true.
But mostly it seems to be the most reasonable approach to assume that an organization is a powerful as it’s most powerful part. So use the influence value of the most influential department to describe the influence of the organization.
Can you think of cases where this is not the case?
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Posted on April 28, 2010 by Eva Schiffer
I just received an email asking: Can you use Net-Map for mapping out future networks or does it only work for existing ones?
My answer:
There are a number of ways how you can use Net-Map to develop a vision of your future network:
1. You could draw a Net-Map of the existing situation. That is a good thing to start with so that you have a fixed point to anchor the next step. Because whatever you do has to somehow start with a present situation. Then, after thinking about the current situation and how and why and where it could be improved, you draw (in different colors) the future links you would want to establish, add future actors you would like to add and set the influence towers up again (after noting the values of the present set-up).
2. You could set out just to draw an optimistic-realistic vision of the future network, for example: “This is the network we would like to achieve within the three years of our project.” This will be a very interesting document to revisit half way through and at the end of the project. You won’t necessarily achieve exactly the network you set out to achieve. But by comparing your vision with your achievements, you will learn a lot. Ask yourself how and why it went differently and what that means to you.
3. You could draw an optimistic and a pessimistic vision of the future network. This would be a really interesting exercise to do with a team (1. and 2. could also be done in a group), because it would help you clarify how different people in the team define success and failure in terms of network development, agree (maybe) on a common vision and discuss strategies to get there.
Filed under: fine-tuning implementation, technical details | Leave a Comment »
Posted on April 21, 2010 by Eva Schiffer
picture by Jim Hejl
When trying to push for (any kind of) change, I always thought it’s most important to figure out who the powerful actors are who play against you and do something about them.
Funny, the more I analyze situations like that with people who want to make a difference, the more I realize: It’s the big guys (and ladies) on the fence, that you should be most concerned about. While there might be some big antagonists in these games, it’s often startling to realize that most people are not even aware of the issue you are passionate about. And, most likely, that also holds true for the people who really could make change happen because of their position and power.
So when drawing a strategic NetMap and putting smileys, negative and neutral faces next to your actors according to whether or not they support your goals, have a very close look at the neutrals – by their lack of interest, they may well be the ones who slow down any of your activities. But even more importantly: They are not against your goal. So it’s much easier to win them over than to do anything about your antagonists. And together your converted neutrals and your old friends might be a big enough coalition, that you don’t even have to worry about the die-hard “anti-the-good-cause” guys any more.
Filed under: musings | 2 Comments »
Posted on April 1, 2010 by Eva Schiffer
Making a beautiful looking plan is one thing. Having actual impact on the ground is another. Sometimes the two are related…
When you think about projects that did or didn’t deliver, you see that very often the problem (or the reason for success) was in the details of the actual delivery process. This is why we (myself, Regina Birner at IFPRI, Jennifer Hauck at UFZ and other colleagues) felt that if you were able to map out these processes step-by-step you might understand something really powerful about success and failure of implementation.
We call the resulting method Process Net-Map and as you can see I’ve added a new page to this blog, dedicated to this approach. Read it, comment, ask questions, use it in your work and tell us what happened!
Filed under: exploring new ideas, training material | 1 Comment »
Posted on March 22, 2010 by Eva Schiffer
That’s what David Pelletier (the researcher, not the figure skater) said at an Alive and Thrive meeting some days ago. That’s what needs to happen in developing countries, above and beyond efficient and effective implementation of individual development projects. And I just thought: Wow, some people have such a way with words. That’s exactly what you can do by drawing Net-Maps with people with decision making capacity. You don’t just “extract” their knowledge like a rotten tooth. But you sit down together to increase each others’ network understanding and in the process learn how to deal more strategically with complexity.
Another term that I learned in the meeting was: “Optimal ambiguity”
Perceptual Ambiguity: Old woman or young girl? (by W. E. Hill, 1915)
In planning we always insist that you have to be clear about your goals, but in our discussion we realized that for getting a strong and united advocacy coalition for a cause (or for convincing donors, the general public etc.) it might make sense to keep things optimally ambiguous to invite a broad coalition to join you. The only question is: Once it gets to actually doing it (whatever “it” is), how do you deal with the disappointment of those partners who understood something different, when you defined your blurry cause?
Filed under: Other people's work, exploring new ideas, musings | Leave a Comment »
Net-Map is an interview-based mapping tool that helps people understand, visualize, discuss, and improve situations in which many different actors influence outcomes. 
