What did you do during CLA Challenge Week?

In early January, we invited USAID staff and partners to kick off the new year with a new CLA practice during CLA Challenge Week, January 22-26, 2018. We called it a CLA Sprint!

In response, 70 individuals and teams logged their CLA commitments in a public spreadsheet.

To provide a visual snapshot of the kinds of practices that these CLA sprinters committed to, we connected each to 1-3 CLA subcomponents.

Here’s the spread:

And here’s what we observed:

Pause & Reflect was the most common CLA practice, and this happened on both an individual and team level. For example:

• Alex Barrett, Monitoring and Evaluation Lead with the Asian Disaster Preparedness Centre/SERVIR-Mekong committed to “Schedule 10 minutes to pause and reflect on what I’ve learned at the end of every day. I will record my reflections and share relevant lessons with my team.”
• Rebecca Askin, Collaboration and Learning Manager with Counterpart International reported that the “Program Quality and Learning team at Counterpart will facilitate Pause and Reflect dialogues about a new USAID Quarterly Report Template we tested with three programs.”

10 CLA commitments involve Knowledge Management processes. For example:

• Agnes Watsemba, Monitoring, Evaluation & Research Specialist with USAID/Uganda’s HIV/Health Initiatives in Workplaces Activity committed to “start documenting programmatic adaptations through a change log, capturing evidence for changes made and their impact.”
• Joe Lowther, President of Cardno International Development, reported that he is “developing a paper to capture the methodology for incorporating thinking and working politically in CLA.” He gets a gold star for using a CLA approach on CLA!

8 CLA commitments did not fall under a particular CLA subcomponent because they related to CLA capacity building and integration more generally. For example:

• Lorine Ghabranious, Senior Consultant with Deloitte, committed to “Give a brown bag presentation on CLA and how we can use CLA principles to support our work. I am also hoping to draw out examples of where folks have seen it being used/ want to use CLA in the future and come up with a CLA board within the office.”
• Erica Spell, Program Manager on USAID’s Transformation Task Team committed to “Incorporate CLA principles and practices into the USAID Redesign efforts, specifically for the Culture of Accountability and Learning project.”
• David Ratliff, Program Office Director for USAID/Azerbaijan, reported that “11 staff will work on 18 different experiments during the week. We will also host a reflection session and document outcomes.”

16 CLA commitments relate to the enabling conditions side of the CLA Framework (Openness, Continuous Learning & Improvement, Relationships & Networks). For example:

• Laura Ahearn, Senior MERL Specialist on the USAID LEARN Contract says “I will have at least one conversation each day with a colleague I do not work with regularly. I'll share with my MERL team members what I learn about what these colleagues are working on.”
• Sherry Khan, Director of Economic Growth at Cardno International Development reports that: “USAID's AVANSA Agrikultura Project created a Whatsapp group to allow field staff to quickly communicate information about farmers’ problems (including pests and disease), as well as to find buyers for surplus products. Field staff will spend the “sprint” week testing the Whatsapp group and providing feedback on it usage, the types of information it is best used for, and potential improvements to the system.”

While most CLA commitments related to just one CLA subcomponent, a few were very holistic. For example:

• Miquel Bono, Program Officer for “Innovation in Districts” with the Sant Feliu de Llobregat City Council (Barcelona Metropolitan Area) reports “I am currently designing an active labor policies monitoring and evaluation framework at the municipality level. I’ll be reviewing some M&E essentials (learning) and exchanging ideas with new colleagues (culture) to adapt the M&E framework I am designing as good as I can (adapting).”

We look forward to hearing about the results of these new CLA practices and will report back on behalf of our CLA sprinters in the coming weeks!