How to prepare your team for when you leave
What happens to your office in a crisis if you’re not around? Lots of people will say they’ve got an amazing team. But often, they don’t really mean it. What they mean is they’ve got some good people who work hard and have some skills. But that’s very different from being ready to step up […]
How humanitarian agencies should measure online training (compared to in-person courses)
Summary It is hard to measure learning, and even harder to measure what its impact is. For both face-to-face and online learning, what aid agencies currently measure doesn’t tell us much. A lot of the confidence that face-to-face learning is superior depends on the gut feeling of the facilitators. Sometimes this is right, sometimes […]
Ten big problems a humanitarian learning specialist helps you solve
If you don’t know how to use a tool, it can’t help you. This is about how you can make the best use of learning specialists.
What do we do on a free call?
Your time is important. And so is solving your training and capacity headaches. I can help you with them – but it might not be the right time, or we might not be a good fit. That’s the main thing a free call is to find out – can I help you, and […]
Ten training tips for INGO capacity building that sparkles
One of the most surprising struggles I have had as a parent has been explaining to my kids why they can’t have ice cream for breakfast. I naively assumed that they would accept that first we eat savoury stuff, and then later we can have sweet stuff. This got a bit of traction. Then […]
What capacity building metrics should INGO CDs look at?
Lots of senior managers look for attendance data (the number of people trained) – but this is a big mistake. Attending and learning are not the same thing. Lots of people assume that exposure to information creates knowledge, and that knowledge creates new behaviours. If you say it as bluntly as this, you […]
Six things your humanitarian learning advisor would tell you – if you had one
You can’t have everything in life – especially when you’re playing with other people’s money, like humanitarian agencies are. And that includes all the different kinds of experts you might want. Due to some terrible career planning, I’ve ended up in a very specific niche – humanitarian learning & training. That has the side effect […]
Five reasons why “Capacity Development” is a helpful way to think about improving performance
When you get outside the aid sector, people don’t really talk about “capacity building” or “capacity development” much. People talk about training, or sometimes learning. There are times when I get fed up with hearing “capacity building”. Perhaps I’ve been involved in too many projects where it didn’t work! And it can be self-aggrandizing. Is […]
Six Reasons why “Capacity Development” is NOT a helpful way to think about improving performance
There are good reasons to talk about “capacity development” or “capacity building”. Most of the time, that’s not the way I think about my work. Some of that is just a reaction because it seems like jargon to me. I don’t like jargon, though I’m as guilty of using it as everyone else is. […]
