Facilitation training session

This year the Capacity initiative set out to train at least 80 staff and partners in principles, tools and methods that relate to knowledge management. While at headquarters, we are offering rather short training sessions in half-day or one day formats (i.e. on blogging, Search Engine Optimization, Social Network Analysis, Facilitation), we had obviously to make the most out of our trip to CIAT-Africa offices in Kampala, Uganda. For three days we are working with some 21 staff and partners of the Pan African Bean Alliance (PABRA) who joined us from Uganda, Malawi, Cameroon, among others. We also had two staff from CIAT’s Tropical Soil Fertility Institute (TSBF) joining. From a list of possible topics PABRA selected 3 prior to the event: One related to the improvement of meetings, a second related to online collaboration and a third around monitoring and evaluation and impact pathways.

The topics were converted in 5 areas of work:

1. Finding common ground on KM: What is KM? What can it do for PABRA and partners? What are our challenges? Where do we want to go with KM? 
2. Improve face-to-face interaction through facilitation: How can we make most out of the many meetings we have with our teams, partner organizations, and with farmer groups?
3. Collaborating online: How can we make our network more efficient through the use of collaborative tools?
4. Working towards people centered outcomes: Looking at our Network objectives, how can we produce results that are people centered from the outset and what are the different products that we can develop for our different user groups?
5. Making AR4D knowledge travel: How can we extend our network to people that might want to follow us and become promoters of our work and lessons learnt? 

Here are some of the things that were said or happened that surprised me positively:

When we asked participants to brainstorm at the very beginning on what knowledge management is, we got some really interesting replies, like: “It’s about generating impact from insights”; “With KM we harness ideas and put them into use”; or: “KM helps to take out the noise from the masses of information” and finally: “KM is about transparency: it provides information about the knowledge creation process”. I found those replies amazing and was wondering if our colleagues really needed a KM training. They seemed to totally understand the dimensions of KM!

A Samoan circle (a highly appreciated dynamic by the participants) helped us to draw people out a bit more on the KM challenges that they perceive for their network. Sophie blogged about it, not only for the sake of sharing this session widely, but also to show our participants new forms of (live) reporting.

Tools, tools, tools

The facilitation training was lively. We did a shorter version than the one-day training session at CIAT. This time several participants were intrigued by Sam Kaner’s scale of agreement which allows to measure in a decision making process to what extent participants support the solution being proposed?’ An excellent resource on this, is brief from the Institutional Learning and Change Initiative (ILAC) on participatory decision making, co-written with Sam Kaner.

On day 2, and in order to start the session on online collaboration, we asked participants to fill out a live digital habits survey. It’s the third time I try it out. It’s a survey I draw on flipchart paper where I ask participants about their and their partners’ use of internet, tools, and work habits. This was the first time that interestingly the differences between PABRA digital habits and partner habits were stated to be different in terms of connectivity and time spend online. In the same exercise in Central America and Colombia, participants felt it to be similar for them and their partners.

Today starts day 3, our last day. We will look at social media and discuss the results of a short social network analysis that Sophie undertook on day 1. We will include a short world café to discuss potential KM strategies for the network and we will hopefully have time for an Open Space session in the afternoon to address remaining issues.