Connecting Us with the CGIAR Change Management Process
The Institutional KS project has started to reflect with the ongoing Change Management Process coordinators on ways for effective engagement with all kinds of stakeholders.
The current opportunities to feed back to the process in general via a blog and the working groups outcomes (currently the Visioning group paper) through a discussion forum seem for the moment not generating lots of interest.
Many reasons can be found. Some are included in the following post on the Change Management blog post here.
But there are a number of things that we could do to encourage participation. Here are some ideas:
- The Center directors could send an encouraging message to their staff and role model by participating in the blog and / or forum.
- The working group members could forward the invitation to their networks and colleagues.
- The Centers could organize short seminars followed by group discussions and feed back the results via the blog or forum.
- The visioning paper could have an executive summary (if possible in Spanish and French to support all staff and stakeholders) in order to facilitate the scanning of the main messages and ideas.
- The Steering Committee and working groups could choose among them a blogger who updates the wider audience regularly
Those are just a few… I am curious to know if there are other ideas…
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Hi there,
I think this situation brings up some key problems which we face in our institutional as well as research work when it comes to trying to engage with people. One key problem is that people are not engaged or involved from the start of processes–even in terms of keeping them aware, ensuring them that they will have a chance to participate or getting buy-in from them. The at a certain point we want them to collaborate. This usually WHEN WE want it and HOW WE want it.
And so it does not always work.
So how can we redress this?
I think it is important now to show people how there contributions to the blog and discussion forums will and can be a real part of this process.
So when we engage people, do we also think about ‘What’s in it for them”?
I think that a good idea would be to have some Focus Group discussion type meetings arranged in the Centres so that people are given the time and space to comment–and have someone to record it all and make contributions to the blog on behalf of the group.
The blog could introduce some key facts or questions and send these posts around to people in the CGIAR. Perhaps people may be more likely to react than to write their ideas from fresh.
Looking at this process gives us good lessons on how we can engage better within our system and with other stakeholders–something I hope the change management process will also adopt as lessons to strengthen the CGIAR.