Remote partnership brokering in the Digital Age

During the Remote Partnering Brokering Project Design Lab held at Trigonos in North Wales from January 23 to 26, 2017, Reda Sadki of The Geneva Learning Foundation presented a session titled “Technology for learning and changing”.

Catherine Russ and Ros Tennyson of the Partnership Brokers Association (PBA) invited Sadki as part of their effort to make sense of how to transition their in-person face-to-face training approach to digital spaces.

The session addressed partners from a diverse group of organizations that included Action Against Hunger, the British Red Cross, PAX, the Partnership Brokers Association, the Partnerships Resource Centre, and the Humanitarian Leadership Academy.

The following article is an edited version of his remarks, integrating visual concepts from his presentation to outline a vision for the digital transformation of partnerships

Partnership brokering meets digital transformation

Partnership work has traditionally relied on physical presence. It used to be that we would get together physically with people we know, spend time with them, and grow trust and relationships. That was how we grew partnerships. However, the landscape has shifted rapidly. We have now come to a situation in which we are working with people we have never met physically, learning to trust them, and figuring out how to use tools to work with them effectively. We call this the digital transformation of partnerships.

This transformation is not merely about using new tools but represents a fundamental shift in how we connect. Insights from the Remote Partnerships workshops and the Scholar Partnership—a collaboration between the University of Illinois College of Education, the Geneva Learning Foundation, and Learning Strategies International—have helped develop a vision for a new learning system. In this system, learners create together, give each other feedback, and share what inspires them.

This is not about a nicer, kinder, or gentler kind of learning. It is about identifying the core competencies that humanitarian workers need and determining if we can make the way we learn and work relate to those needs to deliver results better and faster.

Partnership brokering beyond digital dualism

A major barrier to this transformation is “digital dualism.” This concept, discussed by Nathan Jurgenson of Snapchat, challenges the idea that “real life” is inherently superior to what we do online. Viewing the digital world as less real is a myopic view that prevents us from managing the fact that we are living in an augmented reality. This reality exists at the intersection between what is material and what is information.

Basically, what happens in a Skype call is just as real as what happens in a face-to-face workshop. There is a constant penetration of the digital and the offline. Once we start thinking about it that way, it is no longer about remote partnerships. It is about how partnerships are being digitally transformed and what that actually means. Just as the record industry shifted from physical media to digital files, changing business models forever, the same dynamic is occurring in learning, education, and training.

Five drivers of change for remote partnership brokering

Beyond digital dualism, five key factors are driving this transformation.

1. Performance: The holy grail in humanitarian development and global health work is perfect coordination where all partners operate at a high level. We must ask how technology enables this level of performance.
2. Scale and access: In the past, we built elaborate pyramids of organizations. We must now ask if we can scale up to include every person working in every community, moving away from hierarchical models to empower local players.
3. Expertise: If we empower local communities, we must redefine what it means to be an expert. The model of the expatriate delegate bringing international expertise may no longer be valid. We need to understand what expertise looks like when collaborating from a distance.
4. Applicability: In traditional training, you might spend fifty thousand dollars on a workshop, but participants may only apply ten percent of what they learned to their work. We must make the partnering and learning process directly relevant to delivering results.
5. Diversity: We need to deal with differences across geography and between groups positioned differently within the system.

Additionally, we face the challenge of complexity. An aircraft carrier is so complex that there is no single operating manual, yet it operates as a high-reliability organization. This shows us it is possible to move away from command and control models to connect people in ways that continuously improve their work.

What the changing nature of knowledge means for partnership brokering

Underlying these changes is a shift in the nature of knowledge itself. Knowledge flows are changing faster than we can process, interpret, or put into a database. Knowledge is now a process, not a product.

We must move away from the schema in which we think we can capture all knowledge and box it in. Research by Robert Kelly on knowledge workers illustrates this shift. In 1986, seventy-five percent of what you needed to know to do your job was stored in your brain. By 2006, that number dropped to ten percent. Today, ninety percent of what you need to know requires accessing knowledge in other people and machines. Consequently, the quality of the connections in your network is key to your ability to deliver results.

The Scholar approach to New Learning

To address these challenges, we utilize a pedagogical model that emphasizes recursive feedback. Just as a good teacher provides feedback while students work rather than waiting for a final test, a good partnership requires recursive feedback between members. We want partners to collaborate with intelligence and actively make knowledge.

This approach is formalized in the Scholar Approach, which involves three steps: write, review, and revise.

1. Write: You take ownership of a project, case study, or problem that is meaningful to your work.
2. Review: You engage in peer review, giving and receiving feedback.
3. Revise: You use the feedback to improve your initial work.

This process creates a learning ecology where participants can work anytime and from anywhere, ensuring that diversity is recognized and leveraged.

Case study 1. The Digital Facilitator

The Digital Facilitator initiative we have proposed to War Child, a Dutch NGO, illustrates this model. The problem was that while facilitation is increasingly done remotely, the skills to do so are tacit and rarely taught. Instead of offering a standard course, we built facilitation competencies by relying on the experiences of those doing the work.

In a four-week process, participants such as village volunteers in South Sudan developed their own context-specific guides for facilitation. They did this through peer review with others in the system. The result was dozens of context-specific guides that the organization could use to understand what a global curriculum should look like. This process also allowed top performers and leaders to emerge from unexpected places, helping to resolve the challenges of access and scale.

Case study 2. The #Ambulance! Course

Another initiative involved the Norwegian Red Cross, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. We developed a course for ambulance and pre-hospital emergency workers. Over four weeks, more than 800 participants joined and developed over 70 case studies documenting situations of violence and risk.

They did this by talking to each other. A bush doctor in Burundi whose ambulance is a Cessna 206 plane worked with a Filipino nurse in Baghdad whose ambulance is a Medivac helicopter. They connected with a peer in the Philippines preparing for a typhoon and a colleague in Toronto working on mass casualty preparedness.

This built a community of action across a distributed global network. The peer review process allowed us to scale without an upper limit on participants and required very little time from established experts. Instead of experts delivering content, we used their expertise to develop rubrics that enforced standards while leveraging the experience of the participants.

Four rules for the digital transformation of partnership brokering

Based on these experiences, we can identify rules for the digital transformation of partnerships.

1. Physical space is not a condition. Sharing physical space is no longer a condition to partner. While meeting in person has cultural and social value, it is not a prerequisite for effective collaboration.
2. Embrace the pace of change. The pace of change for what we can do when connected is accelerating. We must embrace this change to improve the quality of our connections and partnerships.
3. Value depends on perception. What we actually do depends on what we perceive as valuable, which is often rooted in cultural and social relations.
4. Re-evaluate the need for meetings. Understanding these rules may lead you to realize when there is a true benefit to meeting in a shared physical space and when digital collaboration is more effective.

These rules are not prescriptive but are intended as heuristics to help you think through how your partnership work is being affected by the digital transformation.