Why capacity development is relevant in an increasingly complex world; the core competencies of a capacity development practitioner
Capacity development is one of the most frequently used terms in the organizational world today. Nearly every major consulting firm has departments, services, or operations dedicated exclusively to organizational capacity development or capacity building. Evidently, they have enough clients requesting these services to justify this.
Meanwhile, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) considers capacity development to be a cornerstone concept in its activities; they have a Capacity Development Office and over 200 publications related to the subject. The UNDP isn’t alone here in the global development community. The OECD calculates that 25% of all of global aid is dedicated to capacity building; at last count this amounts to over US$15bn (nearly CAD$20bn) per year.
Unfortunately, as a concept increases in popularity, there seems to be an inverse relationship to its usefulness. As researchers publish white papers espousing the merits of developing capacity through increasing training protocols, new infrastructure, and reworking stakeholder relationships, practitioners talk about doing more with less, the value of intuition, and respecting local culture. At best this can expand the scope of what capacity development means, at worst it blurs lines and causes confusion.
I’m not looking to wade into this debate. Instead, let’s briefly explore the foundations of a capacity development practitioner skill set, and send you off with a pile of resources in hand.
The University of Guelph is proud to be one of only two schools in the world that offers a graduate level degree in capacity development. Most of the examples in this article will be drawn from the experiences and knowledge base of graduates in this program.
A simple definition
Capacity development, in its simplest form, is as it sounds. While we risk breaking the cardinal rule of every English dictionary by self-defining via the use of the words themselves, capacity development is quite literally about developing the capacity of an individual, organization, society, or a system. There’s really very little special meaning embedded in each of these terms.
By capacity we mean ability or means, roughly speaking. By development we mean growth, expansion, or evolution. It’s true though, that certain circumstances might lend themselves to a modified use of the term. For instance, a project focused on adopting a new process or technology within a group may by necessity also involve a change in attitude, belief, or perspective.
While this might already seem to be getting a bit tenuous, it’s worth recalling the importance of the culture of any project or organization you’ve been involved with. It seems likely that most practitioners would agree that culture is a key piece of any successful endeavour.
There’s a deep relationship between attitudes, beliefs, perspectives, and culture; while they might not be synonymous, they are certainly interrelated and almost certainly co-existent. So when a practitioner of capacity development speaks of engaging with stakeholders or empowering a group, what they likely mean is starting from a place of respecting the individuals involved, and their culture. The connotation here is one of listening and understanding. This is nothing new; listening to -even collaborating with- clients has become a mainstay of business dynamics, and government programs have become increasingly focused on being responsive to the needs of their constituents through dialogue and feedback mechanisms. Still, it can be difficult to measure culture, and this has caused a few problems.
Culture Change is Hard, Right?
Considering this definition, you might be lead to the thought that it’s pretty difficult to effectively execute on any project that needs to include some aspect of cultural change. You’d be something close to right about this. If you’re involved in management at all, you’ve probably come across an expert who will state that 70% of change efforts fail. This statistic comes from a 1993 book titled reengineering the corporation, by Michael Hammer and James Champy, which explicitly states:
“our unscientific estimate is that as many as 50 to 70 percent of the organizations that undertake a reengineering effort do not achieve the dramatic results they intended.”
This statistic has taken on something of a life of its own and has been repeated as a flat 70% across many peer-reviewed journals, right up to today. But two years after publication (in 1995), the authors published The Reengineering Revolution, where they attempt a clarification:
“In Reengineering the Corporation, we estimated that between 50 and 70 percent of reengineering efforts were not successful in achieving the desired breakthrough performance. Unfortunately, this simple descriptive observation has been widely misrepresented and transmogrified and distorted into a normative statement…”
The truth, it seems, is a little more complicated than that. In a Harvard Business Review article on exactly this topic, Nick Tasler cites a McKinsey survey of some 1,500 executives, noting that 38% responded that their cultural change initiatives were ‘completely’ or ‘mostly’ successful. While not exactly an optimistic headline, it’s worth noting that only about 10% of respondents replied that they were ‘completely’ or ‘mostly’ unsuccessful. What this means is that it’s likely that very nearly 50% of respondent felt somewhere in the middle between these extremes. Tasler remarks that this is analogous to a baseball player not hitting a home-run and being labeled a failure, whereas in reality only 1 in 10 are absolute strikeouts. In other words yes, changing a culture requires effort -and it’s messy- but in many cases, it’s also necessary, and we likely aren’t doing ourselves any favors by calling it impossible. Instead, a best-practice here might be to bring along some individuals who have trained in this subject. Ideally, they’ve got some mix of theory and practice. They should probably also have an idea of how to model a scenario, or provide a few possible frameworks to operate from. This is nearly by definition what capacity development practitioners do. What we’ll next consider is how this messiness of change interacts with the core competencies of capacity development practitioners.
So we’ve got here two concepts: 1) capacity development as a growth/change process, and 2) a deep relationship to culture and mindset. Let’s explore the core concepts of capacity development, and see how they interact with these concepts.
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