Playing the ‘happy strategies’ game
In late 2011, all projects in the Nile Basin Development Challenge prepared ‘most significant change’ stories from the first phase of operations. One of the stories looked at our communication experiences to document some of the changes we introduced and how we progressed.
NBDC Brief 8 is a summary of the story.
As in the other basins, the Nile Basin Development Challenge comprises several linked projects – each with different leads, participants, partners and outcome logics. Getting good communication among the various actors and partners is essential for the whole program to operate, and to have impact.
To serve these needs, we started our communication activities ‘inside’ the Challenge. In the past year, we have started to change the ways that our research knowledge is captured, shared and communicated. We are also changing the knowledge sharing behavior of project staff – by encouraging and supporting them to adopt a wider, richer – and ultimately more effective and ‘impactful’ – set of tools and approaches to project interaction, documentation, reflection, and learning.
The first priority – and our most significant progress – has been ‘inside’ the Challenge. We are also using knowledge products, face to face meetings and extended communication approaches to communicate ongoing activities to wider audiences, nationally and beyond. The idea is to create the audience and demand for the science that we will ultimately produce. An important spillover to the ‘outside’ is in the area of communication where several changes in approach (or decisions) are directly linked to our activities.
In the story we identify five ‘promising’ changes:
- Project and event planning and reporting
- Documenting discussions and events
- Using different meeting formats
- Publishing open products
- Spillovers to other organizations
How significant the changes?
So far, this is difficult to judge and assess. Several individuals have become keen adopters. We are able to generate more ‘raw material’ on the various project activities that we can use to build communication products and stories. Photos, presentations and reports have all become accessible to project staff without barriers; smaller activities that would normally remain invisible are reported and shared. Project coordination and event preparation is more transparent and participatory, with minimum email traffic, and outputs shared in accessible ways.
The main challenge is to make ‘open sharing’ the default ‘setting’ for all project staff – many people are not used to documenting and sharing what they do and learn on a regular basis on open spaces.
See the communication ‘toolkit’ we use
Read a related news item on communicating agri-water research
Nile Basin Development Challenge 
February 18, 2012 at 11:38 am
Thanks for this very thought provoking article. I have always like the NBDC approach of starting with internal communication and sharing and creating the culture first. Getting researchers used to the process of opening sharing.
That said, I wonder what you mean by: “The idea is to create the audience and demand for the science that we will ultimately produce.” This seems like a very ‘push’ driven approach rather than demand driven. Is this akin to ‘build it and they will come”. The reason i say this is that i think when it comes to external communication another type of process might be needed one which is more strategic and focused on changes that need to be achieved. We have created a manual on this which can be found here:
Click to access Think-before-you-print-14.pdf
Interested to discuss more next week
February 18, 2012 at 12:39 pm
Hello Michael.
Thanks for the feedback. On your query about “the idea is to create the audience and demand for the science that we will ultimately produce.” :
The main point here – that has been written up – is that we document and share a lot of the project’s activities (rather than the ‘science’, which at this point is still in scientists’ heads and laptops) from the start of the project. So people interested in the project and the issues it is addressing can track – and engage in – conversations and developments over time. We want to make sure that some of the people we want to influence (locally to nationally) are aware of what we are doing, even though we may not yet know what it is we want them to do differently or what to take up. I see this as just as ‘strategic’ as any other communication. It may hit ‘intermediate’ outcomes rather than the ‘ultimate’ ones.
At the same time, the project as a whole engages in parallel activities and processes by which we engage in and with, for instance, local innovation platforms, national platforms, and ongoing development dialogues where emerging results and ideas are shared, validated, improved, discarded and ultimately perhaps taken up with a wide variety of external actors. This is also strategic, to forge relationships with key people we may want to influence and engage with later. We hope they will also shape the research we are doing! This is also happening, but was not included in the story we wrote up.
What we don’t want to do is to have our scientists ‘announce’ results and then the communication people run around placing press releases in suitable places and hiring media consultants to ‘target’ the right people. Through a longer process of interaction and engagement, we hope that many of the people we want to reach will have ‘targeted’ us as someone they can’t wait to hear from.
The underlying assumption of course is that the research itself is designed to address real problems, real demands, real needs; hence the results are likely to be ‘demand-related.’ If not .. then all communication is useless.
Focusing on ‘changes that need to be achieved’ is the task of the whole project, to which communication contributes. We are not trying to have special communication goals but to have communication embedded and part of what the project, and all project staff, work on. Hence we need all our project staff to be knowledge-able about the project and for their activities to have sufficient communication embedded that we have a greater chance to influence change.
On demands, there are so many that the real challenge is not just to be ‘demand driven’ – but to work out which – and whose – demands are most important to respond to or to influence or to help articulate or to dampen down. Just because something is a ‘demand’ does not make it actionable for us!
Indeed it’s good to discuss all of this. I was very glad to see the recent blog post on CPWF talk about ‘impact’ instead of ‘reach’ …. I was getting disheartened by the talk of twitter reach as a metric of our work!
February 18, 2012 at 3:08 pm
Thanks Peter, this is excellent and i agree with you completely. I think the key word i take away is ‘engagement’ as the main form of communication in many different ways – engaging researchers, engaging stakeholders
Looking forward to next week!