COVID-19: Perfect Storm or the Moment to Shine?
Photo by Simone Viani
COVID-19: Perfect Storm or the Moment to Shine? by Stacey Young and Piers Bocock
At every level of society, in every country in the world, declarations about the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic cannot be overstated. Millions have been infected around the world, and hundreds of thousands have already died. Nobody can ignore the devastating impact reflected in the waves of evidence, anecdotes and data. But as with most aspects of life on this planet, the impacts of this global crisis are most acute, and the responses least resourced, in developing countries.
The Multi-Donor Learning Partnership (MDLP), a self-organized group of knowledge management and organizational learning leaders from nine of the world’s most influential international development funders, met recently (virtually, of course) to engage in their second “COVID-19 Conversation.” The group, which formed nearly two years ago, gathered to share observations, challenges and some initial progress regarding their respective organizations’ responses to the COVID-19 global pandemic, in an effort to learn from each other and provide peer support around two main topics:
How COVID-19 is impacting development programming and interventions, and
How they are supporting their workforce to pivot to new ways of working.
During the conversation, it became evident that for those who are responsible for helping development organizations maximize the ways in which they capture, share, synthesize and use data, information and knowledge, this dramatic shift in our operating context could be viewed from two very different perspectives: “a perfect storm,” or “the moment to shine.”
A Perfect Storm?
Listening to our colleagues working to fund programs to help the world’s most vulnerable people discuss the challenges their teams are facing, you could be forgiven for feeling disheartened and deeply concerned. Many of our MDLP members are facing three concurrent challenges that add up to a stark view of our capacity to help our organizations (and our ultimate beneficiaries) to continue to do good work.
These challenges are:
Disease burden, pressure on health systems, and secondary impacts on poverty, governance, education, safety and security, and so forth continue to increase globally, and donors everywhere are scrambling to reassess current programs against emergent trends to inform adaptations—all in complex contexts that continue to be highly fluid.
Those adaptations are constrained not only by the magnitude of the evolving crisis, but also by the cuts being made to development organization budgets, including budgets for knowledge management and organizational learning.
We are almost all working remotely—making it harder in some respects to collaborate with each other and to support our ultimate stakeholders. But, this poses some unique opportunities as well.
The moment to shine?
On the other hand, those of us who work in knowledge management and organizational learning have been called on to provide vital contributions to our organizations during this time in ways that have demonstrated the value proposition we’ve been trying to communicate for as long as we’ve been doing this work. Knowledge management and organizational learning are vital—and now essential—to the ability of organizations to assess emergent trends, monitor as they evolve, adapt, coordinate, scale, and apply learning. The MDLP has been comparing notes about ways we are supporting our virtually based staff adapt to working online; to share processes our organizations are using to conduct scenario planning and adapt programs and operations accordingly; and to demonstrate the value of intentional, systematic and resourced knowledge management and organizational learning, particularly under conditions that force us grapple with the deep uncertainties that are the hallmark of development even in the best of times, and that are central to the challenges we currently face.
Maybe a bit of both
As with most things, the current situation we knowledge management and organizational learning Champions find ourselves in is a world in which both scenarios are true, in parallel. We work to support our globally dispersed but mostly isolated—teams to continue their dedicated work in more efficient, collaborative, and strategic ways, learning as we go so we can adapt as swiftly as possible to however this uncertainty unfolds — ideally together. This *is* a perfect storm for international development; and given that reality, it very well could be the moment to shine — to bring to bear all of the ways that knowledge management and organizational learning help organizations function more effectively, and deliver deeper, more durable results to meet this global challenge.
About the authors: Stacey Young is the Agency Knowledge Management and Organizational Learning Officer at the US Agency for International Development (USAID) Piers Bocock is a Principal, and International Development Practice Lead at Acute Incite LLC.