Who is best placed to ‘do development differently’?
If you haven’t been following the emerging discussion around “Doing Development Differently (DDD),” you should. DDD is a unique set of conversations convened by some of the international development community’s brightest minds on how to completely reimagine the “work” of development: how to design and implement with politics and power in mind, how to take small bets and explore first before making multi-year, multi-million dollar commitments, and how to bring user-centric design methods to bear on some of the toughest development challenges. It’s a big, audacious agenda that deserves support. A second gathering of DDD thinkers/proponents took place recently in Manila (the first was at Harvard last year). Two excellent read-outs worth reviewing are from Dave Algoso at Reboot and Andrew Wells-Dang at Oxfam-Vietnam (published on Duncan Green’s “From Poverty to Power” blog).
In recently reading Andrew’s summary, I began wondering: for all of the wonderfully hard and correct questions DDD asks of international development, are we asking the brutally frank question of whether traditional development practitioners—people like us that have gathered at Harvard and Manila—are indeed the right folks to be implementing DDD at all? Put another way: DDD places an appropriate and heavy emphasis on the need to build genuine coalitions for reform across a range of non-traditional actors. But it is often silent on (or at least glosses over) whether traditional, external development practitioners can play a useful role in supporting the DDD vision locally. I think this merits some unpacking and honest conversation.
What got me going on all of this was the following passage from Andrew’s post (emphasis mine):
By about the third presentation, it was clear to everyone that many of the same lessons, challenges and experiences arise from multiple cases in varying contexts. If I could summarize a single outcome, it’s that PDIA [Problem-Driven Iterative Adaption], or DDD principles, or whatever we call them apply in both of these types of programs—and probably in many (if not all) others, since the basic context of complex operating environments, multiple partners/stakeholders, and uncertainty of outcomes applies widely. But once we recognize this, then what?
Beyond the general DDD principles—local leadership, stepwise planning, ‘small bets’ and others—perhaps there is a need for more specific guidelines for groups of programs under the DDD umbrella?
Beyond “Then what,” “And who” is an equally huge question for DDD to address moving forward. Are they the right ones to implement DDD-inspired solutions—these development analysts and practitioners who’ve put so much effort into correctly framing the problems that DDD needs to tackle? The yearning for “guidelines” suggests a possible red flag to me.
Despite its polemical history, Bill Easterly made a valuable contribution to the development discourse in The White Man’s Burden by offering us two prototypical development actors: “planners” and “searchers.” Planners, self-evidently, were Easterly’s pejorative caricature for top-down master planners, often working in large NGOs or development agencies, who viewed money and rock concerts as the necessary ingredients to alleviate poverty. Searchers, on the other hand, were romanticized as lone rangers that embraced trial-by-error and learning-by-doing to muddle through until they found something that actually worked (sounds awfully familiar to the DDD ethos, no?). In business school parlance, searchers might be called entrepreneurs.
Using Easterly’s framing, here’s a question we might ask ourselves in the DDD context: are development professionals (those often sitting in the “usual suspect” NGOs or aid agencies) the right kinds of entrepreneurs to take on the DDD agenda at a practical level? Do we actually have the stomach to embrace the kinds of risks and failures that DDD calls for from its “searchers?” Are we willing to try something despite a lack of “guidelines” or “toolkits” or “best practice” catalogues? That’s the kind of person that will be required to make DDD real…and we need to have a frank conversation about the role (or not) of external actors that haven’t been down those entrepreneurial paths before. It’s one thing to say you want to take risks and “fail fast;” it’s quite another to have done it before and had your nose bloodied. To my mind, DDD will work only if it’s led and championed by those with hard-earned experience.
This might sound bizarre, but a wonderful illustration of these tensions—of whether the ideal planners of DDD are the same as the ideal do-ers of DDD—comes from Hollywood. As someone who’s embarked on a few entrepreneurial ventures before (most have failed), I always found the hospital scene in The Dark Knight between The Joker and Harvey Dent remarkably resonant for articulating the difference between planners and do-ers (despite the scene’s obviously fantastical context). The dialogue is incredible; for fun, try replacing “plans” in the transcript below with “log frames” or “guidelines” or “strategies” or “best practices.”
JOKER: You know what I am? I’m a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it! I just do things. The mob has plans. The cops have plans. [Commissioner] Gordon’s got plans. Y’know they’re schemers. Schemers trying to control their little worlds. I try to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are…It’s the schemers that put you where you are. You were a schemer, you had plans, and, uh, look where that got you. I just did what I do best. I took your little plan, and I turned it on itself. Look what I did to this city with a few drums of gas and a couple of bullets, hmm?
If we want to see doing development differently succeed in transforming international development, it’s time to start channeling our inner Joker and taking some risks, even when we don’t have a roadmap to guide us.
