All posts in Failure

Failing with Integrity: An Ngo’s lessons with Failure.

EWB Australia is a member led organisation that engineers a better world through humanitarian engineering.

Failing with Integrity: Our lessons for 2014-15. 

As facilitators of social change, EWB Australia is no stranger to complexity.  We have learnt that to deal with complexity we must trust our knowledge, be resilient and foster a culture of innovation and learning. We have also discovered that with complexity comes failure, an integral part of our growth. We are learning that to encourage real change and shift values in our sector we must promote transparency and publicly discuss such failures.

Failure 1: Learning that to create change, we must change ourselves.

How we failed? Starting 2015, EWB Australia enjoyed a broad sense of possibility – we had the credibility, ideas, and knowledge to scale our impact for the coming decade. We’d invested in our programs and people with a long term view. We failed however, to establish and communicate a sense of urgency around our need to undertake a bold organisational refresh. We were embarking on a period of significant organisational growth, but the internal implications of embracing this growth were not effectively communicated by the leadership team to staff.  This failure lowered the sense of clarity and unified purpose that has existed culturally. It also resulted in a loss of trust and burnout in the leadership team as staff struggled to understand why change was needed and the method by which that change was to occur.

What we learnt? We learnt that communicating change requires inclusion and clarity throughout the early stages of the process. While there will always be significant amounts of ambiguity in change, we will now encourage ownership, participation and articulate our long term vision to staff more clearly. We will communicate the broad steps involved in making change and create effective consultation points to allow staff the space to input their ideas and concerns. We will articulate the pathway that we will use to achieve our organisational goal and continue to foster a culture in which programs are seen as a part of the whole, all contributing individually to a collective success. This way the successful running of individual programs will be complemented by an understanding of how those programs together help us fulfill our mission.

Failure 2: Learning that speaking to everyone can mean speaking to no one.

How we failed? As we grew, the EWB Australia message and brand became diluted by attempts to engage numerous and often undefined audiences.  By placing our focus on multiple audiences – engineers, community leaders, corporate executives and academics – we failed to create a consistent organisational language that reflected our wider values, purpose and mission. This meant that our communications were broad and did not target the specific audiences they were meant for. This minimized the effectiveness of our engagement. This resulted in mixed communications that did not appeal directly to important stakeholders, a result that led to lost opportunity and erosion of our brand.

What we learnt? We learnt that continually evaluating and rating organisational stakeholders and audience is increasingly important to our ability to engage in a globalised environment.  The articulation of strong, clear messages to defined audiences will create a unified internal and external presence that our brand will benefit from. Our unique position across sectors means there is considerable value in being able to connect and attract different stakeholders. Thus it is important for us to identify and articulate our value to those different audiences and target them with our engagement. Without this we continue to risk an ‘all but nothing’ dilution of our communications.  Over the next 12 months, we will refocus our brand by developing key messages and engagement strategies for each audience that builds to create a unified organisational language that appeals all stakeholders.

Failure 3: Collaboration is key – missing opportunities in a busy organisation.

Where we failed? Our reputation as a leader in the field of humanitarian engineering has meant that we often have opportunities to collaborate with industry, partner organisations and influential individuals.  However, the legacy of traditional organisational structures and siloed programs meant that we have not always positioned or resourced ourselves to respond to opportunities in a timely and efficient manner.

What we learnt? We learnt that facilitating peer to peer education to increase staff awareness of all EWB Australia programs will help our staff recognise opportunities for programs other than their own.  This in turn will strengthen and deepen the long term impact our programs have on beneficiaries as we leverage more opportunities that where previously missed through lack of cross-organisational knowledge. This education will also allow us to identify program and knowledge overlap and increase our ability to use our resources efficiently.   Our current shift towards the use of a collaborative organisational structure (Holocracy) and the development of a staff capability framework will provide transparency and understanding of the individual and team capabilities that exist in the organisation.

Failure 4: Tied and untied funding – reducing financial inefficiencies at ewb.

Where we failed? Following the Global Financial Crisis in 2008, our revenue mix was altered by a downturn in the Australian engineering sector. Between 2003 and 2013, we were in the fortunate position of attracting relatively high proportions of untied revenue from our donors. Between 2013 and 2015, although our overall revenue increased, the proportion of untied revenue decreased. This resulted in some key areas within the organisation being unfunded.

What we learnt? That an intimate understanding of direct and indirect expenses, rather than just fixed and variable expenses, can help us be more agile and responsive to changes in the sector. As a result, we are implementing and educating our staff to use a new multi-year rolling budget with each program contributing to indirect expenses. To complement this, we have recruited a Chief Financial Officer into the leadership team. The CFO is now responsible for increasing our capacity to make strategic financial decisions and help us develop a deep understanding of the fully loaded costs of the organisation.

weakness

Failure

I attended medical school 3 years ago and ever since I feel trapped , I can’t function or cope with other students although they seem to know what they’re doing and I just can’t bear to look at the books so I failed last year and this year I have the same problem . I am not brave enough to drop out the school and choose another career because it’s my mom’s dream and she is the one who made me choose medicine at the first place , but at the same time I can’t succeed or study either and I know it’s my fault but I don’t know what to do because I tried my best to succeed in it but I just couldn’t , Sometimes I think about running from everything but I just ..I am just scared …I think I am a weak person.

 

Learning

I did’t learn any lesson because I am still in this trap but the main thing I learned that I should do what makes me happy no matter will people think just follow my heart and great things will happen .. I just wish I am strong enough to do it .

The Trouble with Sustainable Products

Failure

A Global Friendship’s goal is to alleviate poverty in developing regions by focusing on empowering women. Through our main program “Project Home”, we have empowered under-served communities by helping local artisans grow their micro/small businesses in Thailand, Indonesia, Peru, and India. However, this time around we wanted to bring it back home to the United States, specifically to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.

Pine Ridge Reservation is home to over 30,000 Native Americans with an almost 80% unemployment rate. It is a community rich in culture and history, and a burning desire to improve their lives. Women at Pine Ridge are working with our designers to develop bands and necklaces that are the perfect mix of contemporary design and tradition. This new design is fresh, innovative, delicate and importantly, on-trend. Not only are the women involved in conceptual design, they are taught to grow their small business to sustain opportunity in the community. Our main product was the Sage Braid.

This past summer has been extremely trying on the ladies on the Pine Ridge Reservation. After a workshop early this summer for the production of The Sage Braid, we thought we were off to an excellent start: ready to fill online and boutique orders as long as the Braids kept coming in from the ladies out on Pine Ridge.

The main issue we ran into was the fact that sage is not malleable as we were expecting it to be. It dries out very quickly and is almost unusable after just a day of delicate handling. This means every morning, early morning, sage needs to be picked before the training session. However the sage wouldn’t last the week’s training session.

 

Learning

Given our desire to use a sustainable, natural product, one that grows abundantly on the reservation, we thought sage was a good choice. However when we realized the issues of choosing a seasonal plant for a product we want to sell year-round, we brainstormed and found sweet-grass to be a viable alternative. Unlike sage, sweet-grass can be re-wetted and therefore does not limit us to strict time parameters.

Going forward it is ideal to consider all the limitations of raw materials. Despite the many great qualities, often the set backs need to be realized in order to save time, and money.

https://dpqe0zkrjo0ak.cloudfront.net/pfil/9892/sage2.jpeg

https://dpqe0zkrjo0ak.cloudfront.net/pfil/9892/tam.jpeg

 

The Importance of an MOU

Failure

Context. Hands Across the Nations (HATN) is a Canadian registered charity that has been working in the village of Mana, in Mali, West Africa for over 10 years to improve access to health and nutrition, education and water. HATN initially partnered with a group of missionaries to begin working in this village. Some initial projects evolved around education and the construction of dorms for a girls school. Then, it was decided that a community health center would best serve this community.

Actions. HATN eventually took over the construction and development of this medical center, in partnership with the leaders of this community. Once HATN and the locals had secured trained, local staff and access to necessary medical supplies and equipment, the health center was opened following a “grand opening” ceremony.

What took place. Following the opening of the center, the requirements of the resident doctor became increasingly demanding and the management of funds was not being handled consistently. HATN approached the community leaders to help identify a solution to this problem.  HATN suggested to the partners that a governing board needed to be in place and  made up of community leaders, HATN, and church representatives. It became obvious that the community did not feel that the center was their responsibility, but rather the  local church community had an interest in owning and operating the center as they saw fit. This church community originally had a relationship with the missionaries and was referred to HATN during the building process to source supplies and managing the center while the organization representatives were out of town. HATN was involved with the health centre always with the understanding that it was to be operated by the community with help and guidance from HATN and the local church.

Eventually, HATN was able to work with the leaders of the community to determine that a memorandum of understanding (MOU) was not in place at the commencement of this project and that having one would have prevented this struggle for power from existing in the first place.

This oversight by HATN lead to many misconceptions in the community and caused some division amongst those who supported the church’s possession of the center and those that did not.

Learning

Lessons Learned. In situations where a temporary or permanent partnership is being formed between an NGO and local community leaders, an MOU is an invaluable document that can help to outline all parties involved, current and future responsibilities, and that as the community leaders change the MOU stays constant. Additionally, it is important that the importance of an MOU to the relationships be understood by all parties involved. HATN learned a tough lesson and we would not like to see the same mistake repeated for anyone else.

Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.  ~Henry Ford

Scholarship Program Gone Terribly Wrong

Failure

Some years ago, a wealthy donor approached GlobalGiving through his private banker. After having launched a series of businesses from Miami to Kinshasa and having amassed a significant fortune, the donor wanted to honor his late wife by supporting university education for women and girls in the poorest of poor communities. From long years of doing business in just such places, this donor had very specific criteria and reporting requirements, meant to hold students and organizations running these scholarship programs accountable.

The subsidy per student had to be no more than $1,000. Students had to be women. Students had to be at the beginning of their university studies and enrolled in business or hard science. Enrollment certificates and report cards were required each semester. Students failing for a semester were no longer eligible. There was as much as $10,000,000 to support such students.

GlobalGiving, with its network of partners around the globe, was in a good position to make a match between this donor and local efforts to educate university women, so we launched programs in Guatemala, Rwanda, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, India, Mexico, South Africa, Tajikistan, and Russia.

For a time, the program worked well, and we were able to fund scholarships for hundreds of students who otherwise would not have been able to attend university. Unfortunately, the donor never agreed to sign commitment letters or any other documentation, and funding began to stop as the donor increased reporting expectations, now requiring students to pose for pictures with copies of his memoir, and interrupting funding when reports came in late.

Finally, we were not able to meet these new expectations for a variety of logistical and sometimes cultural and security reasons, and the donor broke off relations with GlobalGiving. An elderly man, the donor then passed away, and the program is now defunct, leaving hundreds of students who had begun studies with the promise of a scholarship without the money needed to continue.  Local partners that had made commitments to students were left in various levels of difficulty that we have only recently been able to sort out.

Learning

Here is what we learned from this experience.
– Know your donor and make sure expectations are clear and documented.
– Don’t launch a major new initiative with uncertain funding unless you have resources to ensure its continuation with other resources.
– Trust your gut about mercurial personalities.
– Don’t be afraid to say no to big opportunities if they stretch your organization outside your core strengths.
– Take care of your local partners.

Hardware Seed Support Distorts Market for Slab

Original story available in the Malawi Country Program 2011 Annual Report.

Failure

The failure that has been glaring on the many successes in 2011 has been the Mason Model in our Chikhwawa program, specifically the hardware seed support offered to masons as start-up capital.

The Hardware Seed Support, usually referred to as smart subsidy, was in the form of bags of cement and reinforcement that were given to masons for slab construction. The idea behind this subsidy was to provide the masons with a one-time, input-based startup for their businesses as an initial step to creating sustainable businesses that would re-invest the revenue into purchasing more cement on their own, without reverting to Water For People– Malawi for additional subsidy.

However, this has had the opposite effect. A recent Rapid Market Assessment in December 2011 uncovered that, instead of generating vibrant sanitation businesses, the subsidy created market dependency on Water For People–Malawi rather than self-reliance. Instead creating demand, the subsidy created community resistance towards the slabs as “People knew that masons had received free cements for the slab construction… this made it difficult to sell as it was perceived to be free slabs” – thus making the slab a tough sale.

Learning

The result: despite positive results on slabs uptake of 84%, most of the slabs installed were not fully paid for (96%) which threatens the viability of the rural sanitation business model. Moving into 2012, Water For People will engage TEECs to support a re-imagining exercise where the rural business (Mason) model will be reviewed for feasibility and explore options for how best to make the model profitable and, therefore, sustainable.

Finding Room for Error

Failure

The power of learning is not just a slogan for many of us working in the non-profit sector. It’s the value that undergirds the programs that we help deliver—programs designed to support people in discovering their own talents and skills to better their well-being, their environment, and their society. It’s a value that supports our own growth as professionals.

Internally, many organizations take learning seriously as well. Few dispute that learning from our failures, even more than our successes, helps us determine how we can be more effective. But often those valuable lessons stay sealed within the organization, rather than being shared with donors where they could make a much greater impact. No one wants to jeopardize their funding by giving donors the impression their projects are not achieving the anticipated results.

We struggled with this on various occasions when I worked on the ground in Ecuador with Amazon Partnerships Foundation (APF). Our local foundation developed a methodology through which communities propose projects to us, rather than us “bringing” projects to communities. In the project solicitation phase, we facilitate workshops for interested communities in how to craft a simple proposal for presentation to our board. For winning projects, we provide a small grant and a year of intensive project management training so community members learn to implement their ideas and own their efforts.

In one particular community that proposed installing household rainwater catchment systems, we saw warning signs from the beginning. During the solicitation phase, some families didn’t show up to the planning meeting to which they were invited, and then accused the rest of excluding them from the project. Later, the project was beset by low attendance at meetings, requests that we purchase t-shirts to help “promote APF” with community members, and a lack of simple maintenance for the rainwater systems.

Having learned from previous failures, we’d developed tools to alleviate these problems, but they didn’t work this time. As we suspected when our board approved their proposal, the community wasn’t sufficiently organized or committed to the project.

So why did we accept their proposal? Under normal circumstances, we would have explained why we couldn’t accept it and invited the community to apply in the future. But we had received money from a funder who was primarily interested in us reporting that 57 rainwater catchment systems be installed within a twelve-month period. The proposals we received during that solicitation phase weren’t as strong as in previous or subsequent years, but unfortunately we didn’t have the luxury of time to extend our search for other communities.

While we did eventually hit the goal of 57 water systems installed, we failed to achieve our real goal—that the community learn enough about project design and implementation so they could prioritize and carry out other projects in the future.

Learning

Everyone missed an opportunity because of a false assumption that results only count if they meet or exceed our expectations. But what if we could change that paradigm? Imagine if we could have open conversations with donors—from college students that give $25 online through a campus challenge to the Gates Foundation—about failure and lessons learned. What could we do?

For starters we could make investments go further. Beyond providing immediate program support, donations would actually help organizations improve their approach and experiment with new ideas, which would create greater long-term and cumulative impact. Based on my experience, I’m convinced that the critical mass that donors look for (and that a lot of organizations dream of achieving) is only going to happen with a strengthened, coordinated grassroots sector.

We could also create more honest relationships, which will foster more meaningful partnerships. The better the partnership, the more real information all parties have about what works and what doesn’t, and the greater possibility to improve results.

Most importantly, we could help donors learn to think outside their own box. They would discover andunderstand the nuanced challenges and opportunities that no Excel spreadsheet is ever going to reveal about human behavior and attitude changes.

These are golden opportunities that we have to embrace together, as NGOs, funders, government institutions, communities, and beneficiaries. Some intrepid souls, like those at Admitting Failure are already blazing the trail.

As frightening as change can be, once we decide that we should make room to fail, we create much more room to learn.

Why a small business that started so well, ended so quickly

Failure

Being a Peace Corps Volunteer is a unique opportunity as we are in the rural villages that most NGOs, Government agencies, etc visit for a project and then leave. My favorite story is when some org built a water purification system on sacred ground. They would only talk to the ‘power players’ in the village who said just about anything to benefit from the ‘preferred status’ bestowed upon them by the organization. No one ever used it.

My personal story begins with a group of 4 women. They knew that I was there to realize projects so we would often talk about things we could accomplish together. As a PCV, I was very wary of anyone who wanted to work with me because they were often just looking for handouts and freebies. Then one day the women and I had a conversation about making bread. The only bread available in my village was brought in on a motocycle from a bigger city about 25k away. The bread was terrible and it tasted like gasoline fumes yet people always bought it because it was the only bread they could find. The women said, we know how to make bread. We could do it and sell it in our village.

I thought it was a genius idea with huge market potential. To gauge their desire and because I had little access to funding, I asked the women to raise their own money at a weekly mandatory meeting at my house. They agreed. At this same time I asked them to do some market research. I did the same and we all discovered that people really wanted bread, specifically a sweet bread over a salty one and they wanted the smallest size because it would be the cheapest.

After the market research, myself with two other PCVs taught them a system of accounting for illiterates. We wrote bylaws, established reporting practices, and even made a work schedule. These things we always decided upon by the women. I only posed questions such as, “I think (A) might be a good idea because __________. What do you think?” Once this was decided upon, we set about building the clay oven and covering. I was able to find about $100 from a fund open to PCVs in Benin and the women raised about $20. This was enough to get the basic stuff done but they depended upon and agreed to reinvest all profits for a period of time to buy more supplies.

We built the clay oven and started baking bread. I had been controlling the money box this whole time because I was asked to do so by the women. I kept a strict record that was always copied in another notebook held by the women. We also instituted rules ensuring that money was always counted publicly and two separate records were kept. The bread was a massive success! They started making money hand over fist (for a rural village) and everything was going great. Little by little, I ceded responsibilities to women in the group. I thought they were prepared to take on the lockbox of cash so I turned it over to them to oversee. A few weeks went by. I would help make sure the reporting was still being done and they would continue to meet at my house.

Then one day they didn’t make bread on the agreed upon schedule. I inquired and discovered that the night before the women got together and liquidated all of the cash and split it evenly among them. Now they were dead in the water with no money to buy the next round of supplies. The project was over; it had failed.

Learning

The biggest reason that this failed might shock some of you: I didn’t make them raise enough of the own capital. The second problem is that we didn’t have enough money to begin with.

Many people believe that because these people are so poor (less than $2/day if they were the rich ones in my village) that they could never contribute but there is truth in that old adage of ‘if there is a will, there is a way’. I should have been more patient and made the women raise upwards of 75% of the project’s costs and we should have raised at least $300 as opposed to $120. They could have, over time, kept saving and saving.

I didn’t understand my purpose until afterward. I was essentially their bank or their savings account in a culture where saving money is not done, let alone a priority. Yes, I could help with the planning and ideas but they had no where to safely store their money where their husbands and kids couldn’t ask for it. If we would have saved enough and purchased everything we needed, the majority of the businesses capital would be in non-liquid assets such as the bread pans, the flour, other tools, etc. This would have given them a greater sense of ownership and pride since they would have raised the majority of money leading to greater protection. More importantly, they would have purchased all necessary supplies so they could have started paying each other immediately, instead of seeing the money pile up for the purchase of supplies.

Thankfully, I learned this in my first 6-months of service and applied some of these lessons to the rest of my service.

I do have one piece of advice for International Aid workers: use Peace Corps Volunteers if you can for advice or projects. PCVs will generally know who are the best people to talk to or work with and they can provide you with a clear situation assessment from the ground. If you are deciding upon a project site, look to coordinate work with PCVs. Or just simply support their projects on the peacecorps.gov website. We often see what happens to your project after you leave and we could have given you good advice from the beginning.

Short on Funding

Failure

For the year 2010, Grand River Chapter of Engineers Without Borders Canada committed to sponsoring a Junior Fellow (JF) for a four-month placement, as the chapter often has in the past.  At the time the commitment was made, the chapter had about half the necessary funds available; however, based on previous experience, we were confident that we could easily raise the remaining funds, along with the additional funds needed to maintain a smoothly functioning chapter.  However, as a chapter we failed to recognize a difference between this year and previous years: six chapter members, including some who had been highly active executive members for several years, were leaving to go overseas for EWB placements or for school.  This decrease in available members resulted in an unanticipated loss of fundraising power from which we are still trying to recover. We still have not met our JF funding commitment.

In June, our chapter met for a one-day retreat where we developed a short- and medium- term fundraising plan.  We decided on three activities to be run early in the summer and a longer-term campaign to begin in the summer and continue throughout the year.  The longer-term campaign was a fundraising challenge involving local companies.  The groundwork for that campaign had been laid out over the previous year.  Chapter members volunteered to run each of the activities set out during the retreat.  We left the retreat confident we could meet our fundraising target.  However, we failed to recognize some impediments to implementing the fundraising plan.

We did not fully recognize the time constraints of the members going overseas, some of whom volunteered to run some of the short-term events.  During the summer, only one of the short-term activities was run.  The activity run, a fundraising concert, was quite successful; however, it raised only half of what we anticipated, due to lower than expected ticket sales.

The company fundraising challenge was a major component of the plan; however, it did not generate income as quickly as expected.  We failed to recognize the amount of knowledge about the fundraising challenge that would be lost as members went overseas.  Additionally, we did not recognize the amount of work still needed before the campaign would produce donations. We encountered difficultly developing the website and preparing presentations to be given at participating companies.  While work continues on the campaign, and we remain optimistic that it will provide long-term, stable income, it has yet to generate any income.

On a positive note, two other activities outside the original plan, the run to end poverty and a wine and cheese, brought in substantial funds.

Learning

We have learned that before committing to supporting an overseas placement, it is ideal to have all or most of the money available.  If we do not have the money immediately available, we need to have a concrete, specific fundraising plan that recognizes personal time constraints.  We need firm commitments from those who volunteer to run fundraising activities.  We should work on increasing committed membership, allowing a wider distribution of responsibility, making activity organization easier and increasing our fundraising capacity.  Finally, we need better processes for handing over of portfolios and information as members leave the chapter or go overseas.

Change Management: Failing to Assess Organisational Readiness

Failure

Situation

The ERA team decided to partner with a federation due to its initial openness to change and its widespread network of affiliated unions throughout the country. African Program Staff (APS) were to be partnered with provincial unions in order to assist in the implantation and scale up of the “Conseil à l’exploitation Familiale” (CEF) approach for which the federation had received funding from a donor.

The process to select partner unions started with a pre-selection by federation officials of seven unions touted as being the most dynamic within the federation. The ERA team leader conducted its own evaluation of the unions via a questionnaire and an onsite visit. Insights and recommendations where then discussed. Although the final selection of unions was left entirely to the federation’s board of directors, they were in line with recommendations made by the ERA team leader.

What Transpired

An APS was placed in a very small, village based union. It was well known that this union was weak, however it did have a president known to be quite dynamic and who also served as the vice president of the federation. The hope was that with the APS’s assistance, the president would be able to drastically improve the union’s performance. Early into the placement, the union’s weaknesses were painfully apparent. There was very little engagement by the executive board, low motivation of field staff and a high dependence on the president who was often away. In the process of trying to dynamize certain union members, the APS made the mistake of taking initiative without respecting hierarchy within the union. Frustrated by the lack of progress, the APS expressed doubts regarding the success of the partnership.

At this point, APS and team lead re-evaluated the strategic approach to behavioral change of the president and organizational change within the union. Specific actions were defined to address the difficulties encountered. Difficulties were also brought to the attention of federation officials who provided some insights and recommendations.

Despite the adapted strategy, there was little advancement of the union. Resistance from the president was met when APS tried promoting increased initiative and dynamism of union members. She viewed these activities as a threat to her control and power over the union.

These difficulties were again brought to the attention of federation officials. An internal discussion took place with the president regarding her leadership style and the management of her union but failed to inspire any change in her behavior. As a result, it was unanimously agreed upon to reduce the APS’ involvement with the union to a part time partnership.

The main challenge during this placement re-evaluation process was to minimize the negative impact it may have had on other placements within the federation. In the end, the team lost a lot of trust with the union president which impacted its relationship with the federation.

The Failure

The failure in this case was threefold.

Initial failure

The decision of co-team leaders to scale-up ERA’s partnership with the federation was made without having fully gauged how many unions within the federation were genuinely open and motivated to change.

Second failure

The president was considered the major factor for success. The president had a reputation of being a strong willed and dynamic woman. This coupled with her enthusiasms to be partnere­­­­d with EWB led to a false assessment of the potential for organizational change within her union.

Third Failure

The team leader took two months to react which was frustrating for the APS.

Learning

Recommendations and learning upon reflection:

  1. Partner diagnostics:
    1. Set eliminatory criteria for partnership selection. Communicate, clearly and explicitly the expectations of both the partner and APS and the consequences for not meeting these criteria.
    2. Shift perspectives and reflect on what motivations may be at play for a partnership. Take into account the internal and external political environment and hierarchal relationships.
    3. Diversify sources of information regarding a potential partner. Aim to find independent sources that interact with the partner to verify information from different perspectives.
  2. Placement design:
    1. Placement design should include built in flexibility with respect to objectives, partnership duration and time investment (full/part time). This flexibility would be based on performance criteria communicated to both the partner and APS at the start of a placement.
    2. Set an exploration phase aimed at evaluating explicit “Go/No go” criteria. Activities carried out during this period should asses the partner’s motivation and potential for change and evaluate their level of corporation and interaction with the APS.
    3. A placement of one year should not be assumed for a new partnership or for one where major challenges are anticipated. After a positive exploration phase, minimum objectives and expectations of both APS and partner should be outlined as “Go/No go” re-evaluation milestones for each subsequent period of 1-3 months.
    4. Except the reality that a placement can be terminated prematurely once supporting arguments are justified by concrete transparent information. Take into account the political environment and follow the necessary steps to try and ensure good relations with the partner.