Everything I Wish I Had Known About CLA Before Going to the Field: Tales from a cautiously optimistic Foreign Service Officer who often feels overworked, under-appreciated, and stressed

Disclaimer: I’m a Foreign Service Officer working for USAID. So when I say “going to the field”, what I really mean is sitting in an Embassy for a couple years and heading out occasionally to remote villages in an air conditioned armored Suburban. Also, this article reflects my personal opinion and does not necessarily reflect USAID’s policies or approach.

I’ve served in a few countries so far in my career and done shorter work-related trips to many others, and seen everything from active war zones to the most extreme poverty on the planet. My experience isn’t enough to stereotype every Mission’s culture and approach, but I have seen some remarkable similarities that may make my recommendations relevant for those few overworked field people that actually had time to read this blog. Thanks by the way, and please let the rest of us know how you managed to find the time. But I digress; back to the topic at hand.

If you had asked me a few years ago about CLA (the acronym for “Collaborating, Learning and Adapting), I would have said this:

• What the heck is this CLA thing?  It sounds like yet another fuzzy-USAID buzzword?  Can I just wait for it to die like “integrated development”, the “population bomb”, and most of those other development fads that didn’t last very long?
• I’m serving in a Critical Priority Country/warzone and we are too busy for CLA. By the way watch out for that mortar round!
• We spent a year on our mission’s strategy and two years on project appraisal documents and now nothing is relevant because the context changed, so why should I care about CLA?
• CLA, isn’t that the M&E guys’ responsibility?
• My Mission Director told me to shut up and implement so you tell me where CLA fits in.

Now, after much trial and error, I would say this:

• CLA is a cultural and behavioral shift, not a new bright shiny initiative that we have to implement and report on constantly.
• CLA saves me time, it doesn’t add to my workload. It actually helps me prioritize what is essential and de-prioritize what isn’t adding value.
• The A in CLA is essential, especially in conflict or complex environments where things are constantly changing. You have to plan in advance to adapt and talk to your Contracting Officer about how to make changes to existing activities. Sometimes it may seem difficult, but it can be done! Check out this great webinar on adaptable mechanisms.
• CLA can actually help reduce strategy and project development times by highlighting the unknown as something to be explored during implementation and not figured out in advance and creating a rigid, inflexible design.
• Everyone can and should be doing CLA. Most of us do some of it already, but it isn’t systematic, intentional and resourced. That means planning for opportunities to collaborate, learn, and adapt so that it becomes part of the routine of implementation; proactively creating time for staff and partners to learn and reflect; and ensuring that all projects have resources and deliverables included in their scope--if we don’t pay, they don’t play! Development professionals exist so that projects aren’t on autopilot. That means we need to have an approach where we continuously question our original assumptions when we designed the project, learn from our successes and failures, and make evidence-based decisions to adapt as we go along. Not decisions based on our relationship with the implementing partner or what we read in the quarterly report.
• CLA and implementation go hand in hand. It can actually provide an activity manager the tools for improved implementation and a better relationship with the implementing partner.
• Monitoring, monitoring and monitoring. It’s a core function of any activity manager’s responsibility. No excuses!

For more on CLA and to better understand all the components, check out this great blog by Jessica Ziegler called “Exploring the CLA Framework."

I’m a monitoring fanatic, and I have worked hard to develop my monitoring and CLA approach over time. If I could live with the implementing partner in the field I would probably do so and report back occasionally to let my Mission know I was still alive. The only reason I don’t is because I don’t want my wife to divorce me. I like site visits that put implementation front and center. VIP site visits to go out and cut a ribbon are sometimes a necessity, but they don’t really lead to any sort of improved collaboration, learning, or informed decision making. Monitoring is a learning tool and helps staff adaptively manage their activities, projects, and strategies. I always recommend that an activity manager develop a set of questions--like a mini learning agenda--that he/she can ask every time they go into the field, meet with the implementing partner, and during reviews of quarterly reports. It keeps the focus more consistent, and the answers to the questions actually provide real monitoring data over time!

My personal monitoring approach has evolved over time--through a lot of trial and error I might add. Is it perfect now? Absolutely not. There’s always something I can learn from others that will help me adapt the next time I go out. I will say this … I’ve managed activities where I’ve spent a lot of time in the field with a partner, and others that I’ve had to monitor remotely. Collaboration is always better when you can spend more time in the field together. It builds trust and the relationship, which leads to honest dialogue and forces you to work together to develop a solution. Learning also becomes a joint process, and when the learning process is collaborative, evidence-based decision making becomes more frequent and leads to better development results.

Monitoring and CLA go hand in hand. I don’t believe you can have one without the other. Often, activity managers leave the Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning Plan to the office’s M&E person. This is a mistake. The activity manager should always be intricately involved in indicator development from the beginning. Too often I’ve seen MEL plans that only specify required indicators as opposed to indicators that will actually be helpful for learning whether the activity is successful or not. I remember a cash for work activity that I worked on that only monitored number of people trained and number of people paid. Being a stabilization activity, the indicators didn’t tell us whether the cash for work was actually reducing instability. This led us to develop a key set of stabilization indicators that let us measure whether stability was increasing or decreasing, as well as context indicators that could help us understand how and when the operating environment was changing. The key lesson is that if we just stick with what is required, we’ll miss the real implementation learning that is so valuable in helping us make informed decisions to get better development results.

So that’s really the key message that I want to share--incorporating CLA helps leads to development results (although not alone--you do actually need well designed projects!). It may not seem obvious from the get-go. It may be difficult to change your individual routine or team dynamic. It’s not easy. It takes an intentional, systematic and resourced approach that is not always intuitive. But, when you start making the transition it can be a beautiful thing. Fewer unproductive meetings, more effective portfolio reviews, reducing the endless paperwork, better use of institutional knowledge, developing more effective relationships with co-workers and partners--the list goes on and on! Most importantly, learning leads to better decisions which leads to better results.

But don’t just take it from me, and certainly don’t just take it from Washington. There are others like me out there, in missions around the world who are taking up the mantle of strategic collaboration, continuous learning, and adaptive management, who you can talk to as well about what works for them in the CLA approach.  Some of them even talk to each other via the CLA Community of Practice on ProgramNet.

We know the road isn’t easy. If you’re ready to start the journey and need help please let us know. David Ratliff, [email protected]

Or, check out some of the great resources on Learning Lab! And ProgramNet (open to USAID staff only)!

Photo credit: European Commission DG ECHO