059 – Inception Meetings: IDEMS’ Pathways to Supporting Project Beginnings

[00:00:00] Lucie: Hi and welcome to the IDEMS podcast. My name’s Lucie Hazelgrove Planel. I’m a social impact scientist and anthropologist and I’m here today with David Stern, co founding director of IDEMS.

Hi David.

[00:00:21] David: Hi Lucie. We’ve just come back from some interesting trips and I guess today’s a reflection, is that right?

[00:00:27] Lucie: Yeah, I think it’d be nice to take the time to discuss one sort of aspect of some of our trips, especially. The trips were working with projects that we support in the Collaboration for Resilient Food Systems working with them at the beginning of a phase of research, or the beginning of a phase of a research project on agroecology always, and looking at how they’re planning those three years: what they’re planning on doing, how they’re planning on doing it, seeing if all the partners are on the same page. We call them Inception meetings.

[00:01:04] David: Yeah.

[00:01:04] Lucie: And we often discuss theories of change in those. It’s usually it’s a three day meeting and there’s several projects which come together to do the work at the same time.

[00:01:16] David: Well, this is something which has evolved, we’ve done many different types of inception meetings over the years as part of this support, and these joint inception meetings, they’ve been more intensely facilitated in the past. Now they’ve become relatively less intensely facilitated. But really the idea is that by bringing the projects together they’re able to discuss amongst themselves, they’re able to get input from us, we’re able to provide better support across them.

And as you say, one of the key components of this is the theory of change approach and how we support them to think about this as a way of helping them to reflect on what they’re doing and why. And in particular, in some cases, to change what they’re doing based on why.

[00:02:05] Lucie: Exactly. So our role is, again, it’s this research method support role. And so in these meetings, we’re very much both facilitators, as you’ve said. Do we guide them also? I don’t know if guide, guiding them in the process of collaborating perhaps, or of thinking through what they’re planning on doing. Guiding is a strange word.

[00:02:25] David: In some cases there is an element of guidance and that often relates to our role with the regional representatives of the Global Collaboration for Resilient Food Systems. And we try to help them to align with the program as a whole. So that’s where the guidance really comes in. And that involves very much listening to farmers voices. So one of the bits of guidance we provide on occasion is that when the research topics become removed from the farmer’s situation, then some of our guidance is to try and bring those two together to make the research more relevant, more impactful to the farmers, because that’s part of the principles of the program, if you want, is this involvement in research.

And we had some instances of that, we were in Niger, Burkina, Mali, and we did have some instances where our role was to help projects to rethink maybe some of the research they were doing, which was maybe academically relevant, but not the right questions for the needs of the farmers who were part of it. And so part of our guidance is to say, well, okay, how could your research evolve to be more relevant to the farmer’s needs?

[00:03:42] Lucie: This is an interesting example. So, the Collaboration for Resilient Food Systems, at these inception meetings, they encourage projects to bring, or to invite all types of members, representatives from all of their different groups, whether it’s research institutions or farmer organizations, as you were saying.

And so, some of our help is also even just you know, helping all of the members who have been invited and who are present actually contribute. There’s an example from this that I want to bring up, um, of just last week when we were in Mali, there’s a new project, well, a new phase of a project that was starting and it was great to see that they had involved a female farmer, a woman, but they weren’t really listening to her and they weren’t really engaging her in the meeting. So I had tried a tiny bit, but you’re much more vocal than me. You sat down and you asked direct questions to her, which needed to be translated or were best done translated. And that, you know, just really engaging like that, it showed a big gap in the research project as it had been developed.

[00:04:49] David: It wasn’t so much a gap, there were assumptions which they were building from, which weren’t actually the reality for… Let’s get down to detail on some of this, this was related to a specific crop, which is a marginalised crop, and there was a question and assumptions about why people don’t grow more of that crop. So what it got to at the end was that the assumption beforehand was that this was not profitable, but actually for various reasons, this crop has become in demand. And so actually this crop was more profitable than the other crops. And so why wasn’t she increasing the use in her farms and in their community?

And it was very interesting that what came out at the end was a limitation of manpower at a particular part of the season. And that potentially leads to questions about, well, maybe it’s a form of mechanization which is needed to help with that, or something which wasn’t a central part of what they were thinking about at that point, they were thinking about increasing yield. But, you know, the yield wasn’t the limiting factor. Increasing the yield wouldn’t stop the fact that the limiting factor was manpower, labour at this specific moment in time.

And that was so interesting to see how that came out. And what was interesting is there were representatives from other regions, and their situation was different. And this really comes back to the principles which have come out of this work on options by context, recognizing what’s needed in different places. Each situation has its own peculiarities, and recognizing where the research to be really affecting needs to be localized.

This element of really getting elements of research which can help the farming communities in their different context, you’ve got to understand what is the limiting factor in that context. I was amazed by the responses and I think it was so interesting because the people in the project are so knowledgeable.

[00:06:55] Lucie: This is what’s really interesting actually to me is that they actually all knew that that was one of the limiting factors.

[00:07:01] David: Yes.

[00:07:02] Lucie: They knew it, but they hadn’t incorporated it into their plans.

[00:07:07] David: Exactly. There’s so many things they know, there’s so many different problems in different places. So our role, part of what our role was able to do, and part of what these inception meetings do so well, is there was a plan which had been conceived, many funders expect you to tick off and follow the plan. We’re very lucky that in this particular context, our role is to help projects to recognize that actually they need to follow what’s impactful.

And so they can change. And this is part of the reason that we’re there and if you want the regional leadership of the program is there as well, to enable them to sort of dig in, to try to understand how they can be most effective. And the plan that was made by the people who wrote the proposal, it’s not that it’s a bad plan, it’s that it was made by a few people.

Once you’ve got the funding, the inception meetings allows you to bring more voices to the table. Can you listen to those voices and adapt based on the needs of the various partners?

[00:08:14] Lucie: And if I can just add that we’re sort of fortunate in a way, we can leave our role as being outside of the project to bring out other people’s voices who perhaps aren’t being heard enough, or also bring out things which people know but haven’t actually thought of in terms of their project. For example, this manpower issue being the limiting factor rather than the fertility of the soil or something.

[00:08:38] David: Well, but think about this really seriously. Now, normally in a research project, if you’re a breeder, you get funding to do breeding. The whole amazing element about how this works in this context is that actually we’re challenging breeders to think beyond breeding, you know, to think about the research as a whole, which is needed to support the different elements. It’s a very different way of thinking about research and doing research.

I’m afraid the word I have is enamoured. I love this way of working. It’s so different to anything I’ve experienced elsewhere. It can be so powerful, but it’s very challenging for the researchers.

[00:09:21] Lucie: Well it’s challenging for us too, or for me.

[00:09:26] David: Everybody is challenged by it, but it really has paid dividends in many different cases. And this is where the long term nature of some of these projects and these processes has shown that it can pay real dividends. We have one of the favourite examples which wasn’t one of the inception meetings we had at this point, it’s a project which started in entomology, went through so many different phases, and then started working much more on sort of social aspects of how you actually institutionalize these things, and then came back to now actually looking at pests and disease from a whole different angle and looking at biological control. And so the project itself went way beyond the disciplines of the experts who were leading it. And that’s been so powerful to then see how that evolution has made the research so much more impactful.

[00:10:26] Lucie: Exactly, it’s about impact. Yep.

[00:10:28] David: It’s about following what the needs are at this point in time, rather than using the methods where you have expertise. And this is our role. This is what our role is so exciting about. We’re there because, of course, if you have somebody who only knows how to do a breeding trial, if you tell them they need to do an anthropological study as part of what they’re doing, they don’t know what to do. But the idea of having observational studies as part of this is something which has come out in a number of different cases. Whether they’ve done them because of their background, this isn’t been natural. This hasn’t led to quite what I would have hoped, necessarily. But it’s been really interesting to have that evolution coming in, and to bring different people with the different skill sets into these projects, which have evolved the nature of them.

[00:11:18] Lucie: Yes. So let’s talk more about these Inception meetings. Theories of change is a big part of them, how it’s done in West Africa. And we’ve sort of discussed theories of change before, but within the CRFS, the Collaboration for Resilient Food Systems, there’s a specific way of doing them, which is quite interesting.

[00:11:36] David: It’s within our West Africa community, it’s something which has evolved. Myself with the colleagues there have created this approach based on our experiences. And this is really the approach that we then followed in our own theory of change.

And this comes back to the fact that theories of change are a really complicated beast. They’ve been used in all sorts of different ways. There’s no single way to do them. There’s that sort of actually in the literature, that there is no single way to do them. And there’s often this description about the fact that there’s almost a distinction between highly conceptual theories of change and very practical theories of change, which help with the monitoring and evaluation of a project.

[00:12:20] Lucie: Well, exactly. What I tend to find useful is, or what I’m interested in, what I have been interested in thinking about recently is how theories of change can be useful. When we did it for our research method support project, I found it really useful in terms of communicating within the team about what the aims are and sort of making sure that everyone understands it and so is on the same page.

We also saw how it can be useful in terms of, as you’ve just mentioned, the monitoring and evaluation, because you start thinking about what objectives and what outputs?

[00:12:53] David: Outcomes?

[00:12:54] Lucie: Outcomes, yes.

[00:12:55] David: There’s outputs and there’s outcomes as well. Direct and indirect outcomes.

[00:13:01] Lucie: All of those. And how are you going to sort of monitor your progress against those.

[00:13:07] David: And that’s much more like a log frame than it is a theory of change in a sense. This is where it’s also very interesting, there’s many different frameworks around this. Our approach has been really very interesting to try and take some of the conceptual best elements of the theory of change, to get people thinking hard about what it is they’re doing and why, and to get at the same time, some of the real practical elements of, well, these are your activities. Based on your activities, what do you hope will happen? What changes do you hope they will lead to? And so, I would argue it’s a top down approach. Why are we doing what we’re doing? And a bottom up approach. What are we going to do? What changes will it lead to? And actually, that combination, I found, not all, but many projects respond very well to that.

We ourselves forgot about the top bit and just focused on the practical bottom up. What are the activities we’re doing and why are we doing the activities that we’re doing and how do we hope they’ll lead to change? That’s what we focused on in our particular process of theory of change.

And there was a good reason for that. The big picture for us at this point in time isn’t coherent because we have different pieces to our work, some which are very related to the support focus and some which are really rather different, like the mathematical modelling component we have, where putting them together into a coherent whole isn’t the aim of our project.

And so our project has these different components, each of which are valuable, which makes sense in their own right. They all are part of the bigger picture, but the bigger picture isn’t us.

[00:14:56] Lucie: No, exactly. That’s the challenge.

[00:14:59] David: Yes. And this is something which is really interesting. I’m not saying we shouldn’t put effort into that bigger picture at some point, but I’m quite happy with our prioritisation of what are we doing and why, and can we justify why we’re doing what we’re doing.

[00:15:15] Lucie: Yeah, and that aspect of justification, you’re very tough on that. You’re very strict on it. So any project that’s working on it and you come around and you will absolutely ask people do they believe it’s going to happen? Is it the logical outcome? Is it the only necessary thing as well?

[00:15:34] David: Yes, anything else needed to achieve that outcome? Is it a direct outcome or is it an indirect outcome? We had some wonderful discussions about that. My favourite, and I think this happened in Burkina, you’ll have to remind me, but we had one of the projects where they had an outcome and they said this is definitely a direct outcome, we want this to come out in our project. And then I pushed a bit harder and I said, yes, but are those activities enough to achieve it? And they said, no, we need our other activities as well. I said, okay, so in this particular component, consider it as an indirect outcome and then put things together to think about how you now get to it as a direct outcome.

And they ended up with two different pathways, one which took them part of the way there and another one which then built from that and took them further. And that helped them to bring out how their different activities related to one another, what they were actually trying to achieve and where they were trying to get to. And it was so powerful.

I find, when that clarity comes of what people feel yes, I can take responsibility for this. Or, that’s a bit big, that won’t happen with these activities, other things will have to happen to make that happen. And which is so powerful because then sometimes it changes the activities that people do, which is what is so powerful about the approach, because they say, no, actually I don’t believe that’s going to happen in this, because if you don’t do, you know, a training session or whatever it might be, then it won’t happen by magic.

[00:17:07] Lucie: Exactly.

[00:17:10] David: I find that so powerful when projects really get into the spirit of it, question each other, you know, testing each other on what they actually believe.

[00:17:21] Lucie: There was one project, as you mentioned in Burkina Faso, there was one project that was very vocal in doing that, which was, it was great to see how everybody, you know, it’s several projects, several NGOs, and I think some research institutes who work together, and they had very rich discussions, let’s say.

[00:17:40] David: Yes, it was great. And I loved the way the PI of that project took a step back and was actually, you know, here’s the person who ostensibly has the power, with the softest voice. And it was so powerful in those discussions, to bring all the partners together to allow them to really test out their thinking, to say, yeah, no, this is what I believe. No, I believe this. And for the PI who actually has quite a lot of power in that context to be the softest voice in the room.

And that’s a project which has gone through a number of phases, but I think I told them this was the best inception meeting I’ve ever had with them. I love the discussions, I love the richness, I love the depth of their thought. And that’s what it’s all about, it’s encouraging and enabling that real depth of thought to come out, people to sort of be critical of themselves and each other in a positive way.

[00:18:38] Lucie: Yeah, really important. And the inception meetings we had in Burkina Faso, they differed quite a lot to the recent ones in Mali, I found, because they were much more specific and detailed. It was one of your feedback points from the inception meetings in Mali, was that a couple of projects had been… they were very sort of fluffy, let’s say high level ideas, and they weren’t very practical looking at actually what are the activities. So no one was able to really engage in what their project was, like this is all of the other participants in the inception meetings, because it was all too high level and not grounded.

[00:19:21] David: Well, and this is the thing, it’s all about that balance between detail and complexity. One of the things that was happening and sometimes happens is that projects get lost a bit in the complexity and they have to strip that away. This is this bottom up top down approach. They were really trying to go from the top down. And they were lost in the complexity. Whereas actually if you can make that break, and some of the other projects did that, even in Mali, where they went to the bottom, they started with the concrete activities, and they started to try and build it up. That’s where you can then get really precise, and really practical.

And don’t get me wrong, you know as well as anyone, I love complexity, I live in complexity, it’s what I really enjoy. But it is something where to actually get some of these discussions to be really fruitful, sometimes you need to ground it, really practical details, and start stripping back the complexity down to the simplest components.

And it’s one of those things where there’s some maths behind this as well. There’s a bit of, the rule of three.

[00:20:36] Lucie: Okay.

[00:20:38] David: You know, in some sense, three is the smallest number with which you can represent complexity in interesting ways and really draw out complexity.

[00:20:52] Lucie: The reason you’re saying this is because it’s recommended that if you’re creating a pathway of change, the bottom up aspect, where you start with your activities, you recommend that there’s no more than three activities in a given pathway.

[00:21:08] David: Exactly.

[00:21:09] Lucie: Because then that should encapsulate all of the complexity for that one, for those objectives on the pathway?

[00:21:16] David: Well, no, the objectives could have more complexity around and so on, that’s the whole point. But if you look at two activities, if you only had two activities, then you couldn’t represent complexity. By having three activities, you can represent complexity mathematically speaking. And if you have four activities, then of course you can have more complexity, but actually you could probably break that up by separating it out and actually communicating it as two different things. And this is the sort of thing mathematically, you should be able to represent that complexity separately and actually draw it out to make it clear. So your smallest complex unit often has three things, more or less.

[00:22:04] Lucie: And we should say here too that, or coming back to what we said at the beginning, that a lot of the projects in the CRFS, this Collaboration for Resilient Food Systems, they are working transdisciplinary and they’re working actually in very complex ways. So limiting themselves to three activities and identifying those for a given pathway is actually a useful activity.

[00:22:29] David: Well, it hasn’t been useful for all projects, not all projects have chosen to do this, and it’s not our job to force people to use a methodology or not. But I am amazed how many projects have benefited. I’d put it, I think, if you think about the number of projects we’ve now seen, over 50% used it and used it effectively in a way which was useful for them, where it led to these deeper discussions.

I want to really hone in on something you were sort of saying, it’s not just that they’re transdisciplinary and they’re working in complex, it is the nature of the agroecology work itself to sort of be recognizing multidimensionality, to be recognizing the complexity of the structures and the systems so that’s somehow inherent to what the program, if you want, as a whole is looking for in its grantees. This element of enabling them to work on this really tough domain in an effective way. And this is sort of where I love the approach that we have; we’re there to support them, to enable them in this.

Why don’t more research programs, more, you know, groups funding projects which live in complexity take this approach of having support partners, giving deep long term support, enabling people to go on the journey, because that’s what it’s been for many of these projects. I talked earlier about this project where I sort of said, this is the best inception meeting I’ve had with them, where they were discussing the most deeply, but that’s part of the fact they’ve been on this journey, this long journey, that when they started the journey, all the partners were a bit, you know…

[00:24:21] Lucie: It was very new to them.

[00:24:24] David: It was very new to them and they were hesitant about the incentives of the others, but now they’ve worked together for a long time and there’s an element of trust, and an element of mutual respect, and an element of difference. They still recognize that they are not fully aligned with one another, they come from different perspectives, they come from different viewpoints, they have differences of opinion, and that’s a good thing, not a bad thing. And that really helped to sort of have and to bring out the richness of some of these discussions.

Any other reflections you have from this process? And you’d been to one inception meeting before this, but this is your first time to go through and do so many inception meetings in such a short period of time.

[00:25:15] Lucie: Yeah, so, they’re great fun, in fact, it’s an opportunity to really dig in and test ideas, I guess. It’s the testing ideas which is fun, and challenging people potentially, to think differently, finding a good way to do that.

[00:25:30] David: What I love in this is that our role, as you say, is to challenge people to think differently. We are often pushing people outside their comfort zone. There’s not always well received, but it tends to be, for the majority, it has been well received. And one of the elements that comes with that is that actually, again, with this long term approach, those different voices that come to the fore, enabling them to sort of come out and to be listened and to be heard. We’ve seen instances where that’s changed the power dynamics within projects over time and led to fantastic sort of evolutions which have come into fruition in ways that we could never have hoped for. So it sort of gives a reinforcement and a sort of confidence that this support is not only appreciated but it is valuable.

Now, I can’t say we always get it right. But that role of supporting, it is such a privilege to be in that role. Our colleague, Batamaka, who really drew this out and sort of says this, this is, this difference between aid and, you know, helping someone and supporting them.

[00:26:51] Lucie: Yeah.

[00:26:51] David: This idea is that these aren’t our projects, at the end of the day, they have the power on the project. Our role is to help them to dig deeper, to think harder, to show that they can do better. We’re simply supporting a process which they’re involved in and they’re going through. And that’s a, you know, it’s a really powerful position. Which at the same time, we don’t actually have power. We have influence, maybe, but not power.

[00:27:30] Lucie: Well, this is the other thing that’s really interesting, I think, is, to think about how to communicate in a way, you know, which will be heard or understood by the projects.

[00:27:38] David: This is where I’m really enjoying the fact that you’re involved because I have a, as you say, quite a forceful approach at times. And I have a feeling that once you really nail it, you’ll have a much better approach.

[00:27:51] Lucie: I don’t know. I don’t know.

[00:27:53] David: My approach has been very effective with some of the projects and not effective with others. And that’s very clear. It’s something where I’m not going to easily be able to navigate that further than that. I support where I can. The projects that have benefited, you know, some of them have really benefited over the years from this, and they can see that, and they appreciate that, and that’s why I continue to play such a role.

[00:28:16] Lucie: Yeah.

[00:28:16] David: But that dynamic hasn’t worked for everyone, and that’s normal, this is options by context. And I think you have a skill set, which you’re bringing to the table, where my guess is you’ll be able to play maybe a range of ways or maybe reach projects that I can’t reach in different ways.

[00:28:35] Lucie: I think this is a nice place to stop. There’s so much that we could say about these inception meetings and theories of change. No doubt we will discuss it further at other times.

[00:28:46] David: Absolutely. Maybe the thing to finish on, though, is that theories of change were extremely prevalent in many, many contexts. And in most cases, they revolved around the document that came out, which was supposed to communicate something.

In my experience from these inception meetings, there is almost never a good document which comes to the end. But the process of going through and thinking more deeply, and coming together as a project to do this, is extremely powerful. And, as I say, the hit rate on projects who actually get good value out of this is surprisingly high to me.

[00:29:32] Lucie: Yeah.

[00:29:33] David: Thinking of a theory of change as a process to bring a group of people together, to challenge them to think about something deeply, can be an extremely effective process. But it’s also been something where, on occasion, it’s totally fallen flat. And I would argue that the differentiating factor for me is it works when the people you bring together really know what they’re talking about. You know, they have knowledge, they have things to share, they have experience. That’s when the discussions can be really rich and you can bring that experience out in a way that others can understand and build from.

[00:30:16] Lucie: And we’ve seen that within our own team, but also with these other teams within the CRFS.

[00:30:20] David: Yes.

[00:30:22] Lucie: So it depends not only on who you bring to the meeting, but how you enable them to engage as well, perhaps.

[00:30:28] David: Exactly. To come to another example from Niger and to finish with that, because I’m conscious we should finish. There was a discussion within a, it was a new project actually, and it was a discussion which I loved, where essentially it was simply about whether on this diagram they were producing there should be an arrow or not.

[00:30:52] Lucie: And just to explain, the arrow means it connects things.

[00:30:56] David: The arrow in this case means that it was actually, I believe, between a direct outcome and an indirect outcome. So it’s almost meaningless, but it wasn’t meaningless because the point that was discussed in such depth, really related to the role of research in actually, on the ground implementation and take up.

And there was a wonderful discussion between a researcher and somebody who’s much more on implementation side, about, well, do people even care about the research evidence for take up? Or do they care about other things? And it was a fantastic discussion, and at the end of the discussion, I left the room saying, I don’t mind whether there’s the arrow or not, I just enjoyed the discussion.

I don’t even know whether they put the arrow or not. It doesn’t matter, that’s just the arrow on the diagram. But what was so valuable that those two people, it wasn’t just two people, but it was mainly two people, had that rich discussion about this, and they valued it, and challenged each other’s perspectives in very constructive ways.

[00:32:04] Lucie: Yeah, great. Well, thank you so much, David. It’s been great to talk about this.

[00:32:08] David: It’s been really good. Thank you.