humanitarian.info

I promised in the last post that I would present some suggestions that have come out of reader comments as to how the humanitarian community might generate more successful innovation. Bear in mind that I’m not promising that any of these suggestions are guaranteed to work – they’re not – or that, if they do work, they’lll be spectacularly successful.

1. Overcome fear. “Many humanitarian organizations, especially larger NGOs and the UN, fail to embrace failure. Innovation requires a willingness to fail, perhaps repeatedly. For every successful innovation there are numerous failures… People who are afraid to fail don’t innovate. They follow the rules. They preserve the status quo. The bosses who brought the best out in me were the ones who let me take risks and even fail. They didn’t punish failures other than those that were due to negligence.” – Kevin Toomer
2. Create incentives. “So, how do we know what we know and judge it, use it, teach it, reward it? Paul (and the comments/replies) wrote a whole lot about that, but some of this comes down to simple professionalism/best practice (which sometimes goes AWOL on an institutional level particularly) and some of it is that we do need a cultural change. A recognition of innovation as necessary, worth sharing, celebrating. Spectacularly hard when it’s really the grinding day-to-day of just getting stuff done or just surviving that’s most aid work, let alone the brick-wall-headbutting of preparedness in and by local communities.” – Nigel Snoad
3. Look out! “Perhaps pursuing innovation within organizations from the start is the barrier. Innovation is happening outside traditional structures, where those creative types can act as individuals, collectively .. in open source projects, mailing lists, unconferences. The loose network of creative technological humanitarians is growing, and growing more exposed. We can concentrate our efforts there for now, to the point where they can’t be ignored.” – Mikel Maron. However bear in mind that “Folks that haven’t spent time in the field have a very hard time understanding the nuances so they develop solutions that will never hold up. They waste all of our time chasing ghosts and fixing things that they think need fixing. In the mean time all we can do is watch them run around in circles.” – Jon Thompson
4. Only Connect. “I agree that the answers lies in better connections between field offices and head offices, among organizations AND ALSO between different field offices. I think that head offices could play a better role in facilitating the transfer of solutions between field offices. Currently all the interaction I have with head office and field offices in different countries has been based on personal relationships with people I have met. I do think that INGOs could do a better job of connecting their staff around the globe.” -  Michael Howden
5. Technology > Network. “I’ve been involved with a number of projects that demonstrate innovation, all focused on introducing new technology to the sector, with varying degrees of success. None of these projects were technologically innovative themselves – their innovation was in using existing technology more effectively for the benefit of the sector – and all of them relied on network effects to create the value that make their innovation more or less successful. As soon as their focus on or their leverage from networks lapses, their success starts to disappear… What made it possible for each of them to create those networks in the first place was technology, creating the possibility of overcoming many of the organisational problems that plague the sector, from organisational silos to staff turnover to insecurity in the field. It is not that technology will solve these problems, but it does offer us the possibility of working together more effectively to solve them ourselves.” – Paul Currion

So there’s a starting point based on actual practitioner experience. All of these recommendations are realistic, and can already be found in various organisations, so the question then becomes – how do we implement them in our own organisations, and spread them across the sector? Approaches will vary from organisation to organisation, location to location – but in 2009 we’d better get the message out there, because otherwise the traditional humanitarian sector is going to be left behind.