When the locusts descend or a deadly contagious disease like Ebola or the Coronavirus hit a country, everyone and everything is somehow affected. The impact on the farmers or those infected is immediate and obvious, but, like a tidal wave, the shock ripples far beyond where the problem is most visible.
Development organizations that focus on developing sustainable and self-reliant communities, often have a long term vision: Don’t give someone a fish but teach them how to fish. Which is a great philosophy to hold on to in stable(ish) times, but when these shocks hit that are bigger than one person, much bigger than one community, an insistence on remaining slow and steady would be an insistence on looking away while people die.
But how, in the bureaucratic realities that characterize international development, do you shift your approach, or add a humanitarian dimension at the speed necessary and while remaining accountable and strategic?
I recently talked with a colleague at USAID about using Process Net-Map to better understand the process from early warning to decision making around a crisis modifier to getting the needed help to people on the ground. How does information flow from the field staff of implementing partners, to their decision makers, to the donor agency? Who carries the decision making process through the agency an how? And finally, once the decision is made, who needs to work hand in hand to get commodities to the people who need them?
Process Net-Map allows participants to map a process like this not as a simple flow chart, but in the messy complexity it really takes, where a whole network of actors is involved, often more than once, the formal bureaucratic process is supported (or not?) by more informal connections of trust, information flow or conflict and there may be systematic bottlenecks in the system that can only be identified and remedied once you see it all laid out in front of you. And in a process that has a number of distinct parts to it, you can clearly identify the influencers for each one:
- Who influences that the warning signs about the crisis reach the relevant decision makers?
- Who influences that the decision to modify the support is made?
- Who influences that humanitarian support reaches those in need swiftly?
If all those involved in the process sit at the table, one thing this mapping can do, is open up the black box. So when I hand over my information to another actor or organization, and all I know is “and then we wait” – I can understand what happens as I wait for a decision, and how I may support those making the decision through the information I give them. Because it is one common characteristic of these complex, multi-actor processes that everyone knows a lot about the things that happen close to them, and has a fuzzy knowledge at best, about those that happen further away.
