Capacity building through the Cynefin lens

Peace Canal emerged as an experiment through the first phase of the Peacebuilding Opportunities Fund. There’s nothing new about the concept of a national NGO, but the advent of Peace Canal has led down a path that aims to push the envelope on structural barriers for national entities in South Sudan: strengthening core funding, ensuring competitive remuneration, freeing internal bandwidth to think about delivery strategy, and promoting advocacy for genuinely community-driven agendas.

As an external consultant with a role in supporting Peace Canal to achieve these objectives, the road is scattered with potholes. Too little speed becomes an uncomfortable, tortuously slow journey. Over-exuberance explodes the engine and the work becomes another wreckage along South Sudan’s development ‘highway’.

There are many ways to characterise an approach to external engagement with peacebuilding in South Sudan. One could be framed around the navigation between the domains of the Cynefin framework.

In particular (thanks to biases of western industrial mentalities), we need to recognise the ontological distinctions between the complex and complicated domains. The complicated domain is the realm of work where linear cause and effect processes (that we can predict in advance) may operate. The complex domain is a realm of continual iterative and adaptive sensemaking. We may see coherence retrospectively in some of the cause and effect.

The tendency historically has been to treat the entire landscape of South Sudan’s journey in the realm of the complicated. This would entail a peacebuilding approach that believes resolutions or peace agreements, once made, are simply a matter of technical implementation. It would entail a legal system that can be constructed by scientifically adapting clear architectures to the context, bypassing the human systems dynamics that led to the creation of those architectures where they emerged organically. And it would entail economic pathways that are identified through an elaborate calculus of assets and market analysis that determine the formula for development.

Whilst the widespread persistence with this approach would suggest some merit to it, it is flawed. Nonetheless, we need to be equally cautious with treating every aspect of strategy as emergent possibility; there are some realms that lend themselves to more technocratic or scientific treatment. The challenge then becomes the iterative delineation of these areas. Financial management needs processes and systems, logistics and procurement likewise. But the design that supports the relational unfolding of possibilities between communities needs to remain as a complex exercise.

And even in complicated realms, the fact that some ‘complicated’ approach is needed does not answer the question of which complicated approach is needed. Is an attendance sheet (easily forged anyway) the only way of establishing that an event was attended by the relevant people. In the 21st century, is a hardcopy document with multiple physical signatures the only way of confirming approvals in a line of accountability (technological solutions may be beyond the grasp of some of our tired international bureaucracies, but does that mean it’s beyond the grasp of entrepreneurial South Sudanese institutions?).

So when it comes back to supporting national NGOs, how do we urge each other to navigate from a complexity-based ontology, where relevant? How do we support unlearning of neo-colonial indoctrination into the industrial complex? And how do we this in a way that is not attempting to exert power or authority in a neo-neo-colonial manner? And how to navigate the line between emergent evolution of systems, on the one hand, but wary to avoid a condescending attitude that local ngos simply aren’t capable of a systematic discipline (easily refuted by a short conversation with someone who can recount the discipline that was required during the armed struggle)?

At root, there is a philosophical choice. Either we have no business being here as externals, in which case the solution is simple. Or we have some constructive role to play in a global ecosystem where ignorance and wisdom is interwoven throughout and across societies. Then the task is to navigate all that with some very undefined mix of determination, perseverance, humility and inquiry…