On Saturday 24 January I’ll be revisiting my Scottish roots (albeit rather distant ones!) and attending a Burns supper. For those of you wondering, it’s a whisky and haggis fuelled celebration of the life and poetry of Robert Burns, author of many Scots poems.
So as to not appear culturally glaikit (look it up!) I thought I’d remind myself of some of his finest offerings in advance of the evening. I started with one of his most famous poems To a Mouse (John Steinbeck’s inspiration for Of Mice and Men didn’t you know?) and I didn’t get far beyond this. Rather I morphed into mulling and musing over a central tenet of the poem and its relevance to my day job:
But Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain;
The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!
To those less well versed in Old Scots language, he’s making the point that best laid plans often go awry, leaving nought but grief and pain.
History is littered with similar observations. As Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in WW2, put it “In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless but planning is indispensable”. Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, uncle to Helmuth von Moltke the Younger, the commander of the German army at the outbreak of WW1, highlighted why he too thought plans were useless: “no battle plan survives contact with the enemy”.
Timeless truths are expressed in a more modern reference by the warrior-turned-humanitarian Jack Reacher who reminds us “Everyone has a plan until they get smacked in the mouth”.
Such truths apply to my day job also. For ‘battle plan’ read ‘development plan’. For ‘enemy’ read ‘stakeholder’. The problem is twofold. Firstly, when I start doing something I start testing my many assumptions and presumptions. Unsurprisingly many of these turn out to be partially informed at best. Secondly, in doing something I’m already changing the status quo. A new dynamic emerges which creates a different context within which my plan is now being delivered (or not!).
Plans assume perfect knowledge. Plans assume immunity to dynamics. These assumptions don’t hold in a complex real world. Plans are useless. But planning indispensable. Is this true and why this distinction between plans and planning?
The answer for me lies in the development process, at the root of which lies the nature of the development problem we’re trying to address. Without getting carried away on a cloud of complexity kerfuffle, I’d like to distinguish between two types of development challenge:
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The Technical
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- (both simple and complicated in complexity speak): where problems are well defined. Their solutions are known and those with adequate expertise and organizational capacity can solve them. When an agency tackles a technical problem, it knows exactly who to fund, how much it will cost, and what the outcome will be.
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The Adaptive
- (complex in complexity speak): where problems are not so well defined, the answers are not known in advance. Many different stakeholders are involved, each with their own perspectives. Adaptive problems require innovation and learning among the interested parties and, even when a solution is discovered, no single entity has the authority to impose it on the others.
In my experience, most of the development problems I’m asked to help respond to have both technical and adaptive elements. Technical elements can be planned and delivered with reasonable assuredness. Adaptive elements remain subject to a process – analysis, diagnosis, innovation, assessment, response – seeking to bring a degree of order to observed spontaneity.
From their policy rhetoric, through to the programmes they are commissioning, development agencies are increasingly acknowledging the adaptive challenges we face. Yet paradoxically, just as their policy and programme narrative commits us more and more to countering complexity, operationally they are increasingly undermining our very attempts to achieve this in practice. Accountability and plans are trumping the flexibility and process required to deliver genuine development impact. To paraphrase one development commentator: “the pressure to fit the round peg of adaptive work into the square hole of technically oriented agency funding often causes distortions and unrealistic promises”.
Development agencies face a choice: they can continue to rely on the technically oriented approach they are used to, and settle for addressing narrower technical problems. Or they can depart from tradition, live up to their evidence-informed rhetoric, learn to put flexible planning process over fixed pre-prescribed plans and become more effective at meeting complex development challenges. For example, the technical fix of distributing free condoms might help reduce teenage pregnancies, though it is highly unlikely to solve the underlying problem. And even after an AIDS vaccine is discovered, the challenge of delivering it to entire populations in countries that lack robust healthcare infrastructure will be largely adaptive.
Practitioners also face a choice. In this age of complexity are we going to argue for abstract adventuring absent of any ex-ante articulation, or are we going to embrace a rigorous planning process as something indispensable? Are we going to embrace the uncertainty of our journey, whilst ensuring we remain clear-eyed about our destination?
Are we going to learn from history? Are we going to recognise the underlying nature of the different types of problems we face? Are we going to distinguish between plans and planning? Are we going to be mice or men in meeting the development challenges facing our world?
For me, having liberally drawn so much of the above argument from John Kania & Mark Kramer’s excellent 2013 paper Embracing Emergence: How Collective Impact Addresses Complexity it seems fitting that I also take up their challenge as my New Year’s resolution: I will continue to be intentional in my efforts, whilst curious in my convictions. Mouse or man? You decide.
Right then, having got that off my chest, I’ll now look forward to saluting the piper and toasting the haggis with a fine single malt. Cheers…!