A systems-change approach that built itself? Learning from the ground up in eastern DRC

Who actually needs to understand a programme’s approach to systems change? And where does an ‘approach’ come from anyway?

Adapting broad guidance on conflict-sensitivity, systemic resilience and facilitation into practice is no small task. A new case study - Working with the private sector for resilience in the Eastern Congo - shows how my former colleagues and I tried to do just that in Congo’s Ituri Province. My own humbling experience contending with the unknown ­- and the unknowable - made me re-think how MSD leaders can create space for their team to use different ways of knowing to approach the market system.

When we talk about an ‘approach’, we usually mean how a programme combines general principles (like facilitation) and common tools (like the who-does-who-pays matrix) with programme goals to define a practical way of working. While programme designs and funding proposals may start this process, implementation teams always finish it - adapting general guidance to specific market contexts and team members.

A former boss and I had an ongoing debate about who really needed to understand our approach on the FTF Inova MSD programme in Mozambique. We agreed that our leadership team definitely did. The Mozambican farming families benefitting from changes in the market system did not (ideally, they didn’t even know our programme existed). And it was convenient if our market-actor partners shared our vision and understood how we worked, but that wasn’t essential.

But what about our programme staff who identified new partners, co-created innovative business strategies with them, and managed the relationship during pilot initiatives? What our staff thought and said – and the way they said it – could mean the difference between superficial programme activities and genuine changes in business behaviour rippling across the system. How deeply did they need to understand our approach?

A best-in-class way to tailor an MSD approach to a thin market system?

In Mozambique, we couldn’t have been better resourced for the task of adapting MSD principles and general tools to our programme. The proposal writers from headquarters and the MSD experts from two top-notch subcontractors helped us grapple with Mozambique’s thin market system, trained our team and delivered ongoing coaching. Our MSD-savvy manager at USAID constructively weighed in on everything from sense-making frameworks to private-sector grant design considerations. One of my first tasks on the programme was to formalise our partnership facility, complete with a legacy grant-management IT architecture adapted to manage approvals and documentation (what could go wrong?). Our monitoring and evaluation plan even formally applied the Cynefin framework to USAID project management!

It was a lot for any group of professionals, especially those Mozambican colleagues who had never worked on an MSD programme before. And my boss and I never really resolved our debate: pragmatism forced us to accept that each person on the team brought their unique skills and perspective and learned our approach as quickly as they could.

‘Inductive approach to approach development’… or incomprehensible pidgin mess?

My next job, on the SLR resilience programme in eastern DR Congo, borrowed many ideas from MSD – especially facilitation tactics adapted for thin markets. We were also charged with adapting guidance on conflict-sensitivity and systemic resilience to our situation. But this time, building a shared approach looked very different. With no subcontractors or corporate staff able or willing to travel to Ituri Province in the face of a global pandemic and resurgent militias, we were on our own.

So, by necessity more than by design, our team developed an approach in a more collective, bottom-up way. In the car during long road trips, or over supper, we told each other stories about what abstract ideas such as ‘systemic resilience’ meant to us. During co-creation we tried out different versions of those stories with private-sector partners and community members, and we listened to the stories they told back.

Eventually we arrived at a shared vocabulary we understood well enough to be able to work together… even if we each still meant something different when we said ‘resilience’. The new case study reflects on how we did the same thing with conflict-sensitive facilitation tactics. And the process maps and document templates followed.

Standard guidance never recommends developing an $18M programme’s approach this way, yet - like a coherent pidgin emerging from a crucible of mutually unintelligible languages - it kind of… worked.

Is that good enough? A basic pidgin can evolve into a proper creole language in a single generation, after all. Perhaps there are clues here about bringing abstract principles down to earth in an intuitive, inclusive way.

How I learned to stop worrying and love never properly understanding anything

This descriptivist analogy from linguistics turns our Mozambique debate on its head: could the white, Anglo-American part of the DRC programme leadership team truly understand an approach that emerged inductively out of input from Congolese community members, businesspeople and staff? If we understood it, we certainly didn’t own it.

Maybe that’s not a bad thing. Our programme surrendered some ownership and control in other ways, after all. The whole team – not just the wazungu – was occasionally flummoxed by communities we couldn’t find a way to work with, or by partners who wouldn’t do what we wanted. Sometimes my Iturian or Kivutian colleagues could decipher system feedback and reconstruct stories like this one, but Ituri’s murky market system often left them with only a foggy idea of what was happening. And yet, community co-creation and other facilitation tactics helped us successfully navigate what I playfully call the ‘penumbra of fragility’.

Can the same be said for an entire programme approach? Team leaders must make an “artful choice between 'proscriptive orthodoxy' and 'anything goes'”, as Marshall Bear and Harald Bekkers put it, your approach can’t be ‘everyone gropes around in the dark’. However, perhaps the contraction in donor resources for international experts and traditional data-collection efforts gives us an opportunity to creatively reconsider how we arrive at an ‘approach’ in the first place.

If good facilitation and sense-making principles can efficiently guide people to make the right choices, does it matter if no one fully understands those decisions – if no one is the sole custodian of the programme’s approach?

Does the conclusion to the case study recall your own experience on a team that developed its approach in an idiosyncratic way? Should we do participatory approach-building and shared sense-making on purpose, and if so, how?