CAST Weeknotes (08–12 March) — Beginnings, middles and endings — and everything in between
With a few weeks still to go until the wrap up for our current Development Programme cohort, we may still be in ‘the middle’ of it, however we’re certainly looking ahead. And with many of the other Catalyst programmes wrapping up in the next three months, we’ve been increasingly thinking about endings — what does a good ending look like?
You may have heard of the Ancient Greek king Pyrrhus of Epirus, and how he triumphed over the Romans in several battles, but lost the war. This has led to the expression pyrrhic victory, a term for a tactical victory that inflicts losses the victor cannot afford in the long term, costing him the war. In other words, however brilliant the stuff in ‘the middle’, it’s not worth (as) much in the long term without having the ultimate goal in sight.
What’s the connection to our work? Well, some of us are part of a working group exploring how we can improve learning, evaluation and research practices across Catalyst and CAST. We held our first workshop this week, led by our Network Learning Partner inFocus. The term pyrrhic victory was helpful in thinking about the different levels at which learning, evaluation and research activities and practices take place, and whether they relate to tactical (programmatic) aspects or strategic ones.
Together we reflected on ‘what would ‘perfect’ look like in 2 years time if there was a focus on improving monitoring, evaluation, research and learning activities across Catalyst and CAST.’ This of course relates to multiple stakeholders: the organisation, those running initiatives, those making decisions, as well as individuals and organisations in our wider network. We talked about triple loop learning; how to embed behaviours that support learning and sharing; how to democratise the process and not just the outputs; and how to balance between maintaining an agile, iterative process, and needing some structure and foundational assumptions (or ‘stable insights’ as my colleague Suraj calls them).
The theme of endings also came up strongly in our second peer learning session with our Development Programme cohort. In these sessions, the agenda is developed collectively at the start — you can find out more about how we’ve been running those sessions. The top three topics shared and discussed during the session were very much forward-looking.
The first was around the relationship between the grantee and their digital partner, and what that might look like after the programme. It was great to hear that many of those relationships have been positive, and have the potential to live beyond the current projects. This of course is strongly dependent on future resources and funding opportunities. Unsurprisingly, next steps and sustainability was the other major topic. How do organisations avoid the cliff edge when projects end? Thanks to the collaborative work of many, the resources to support social sector organisations along their digital maturity journey keep getting better (we hope!). Check out NCVO’s new brilliant and rather comprehensive site.
Something else that is part of the sustainability equation is around reuse. As Catalyst we have been placing reuse at the core of the programmes, through nudges and requirements for grantees to work in the open and consider open licensing where possible. So it’s been great to see participants seeing the value in this idea and embracing it. Of course there are concerns around funding being competitive, meaning organisations may be protective of their ideas and expertise. Nevertheless, it’s worth considering that funders might see reuse as a more sustainable and effective way of supporting the social sector, creating more value for money. But really, it’s also a more empowering, generous and rewarding way of doing things, whether it’s sharing challenges, learnings, ways of working or outputs with others in your immediate network or beyond. Our grantees said it first!
So what do good endings look like? We’ll be thinking more and harder about that in the coming weeks and months, so watch this space. In the meantime, why not take a look at how Storythings, one of our Development programme digital partners have been thinking about designing endings and applying it in their work.
