After two years in the field, an international economic development program was shut down and considered a failure with costs overruns and benefits not realized. What followed was months attempting to diagnose what had happened and what lessons learned could be salvaged from the project. The “blame game”, fear of future funding, of losing jobs, and not hearing each other played havoc on trying to determine what had happened.
Together, we facilitated a Reflection Loop engagement with 75 stakeholders including external development partners, beneficiary communities, and numerous internal departments. Toxic behaviours were minimized and everyone’s voices were heard. The stakeholders had the opportunity to fully discuss and debate the project with lots of good slow think time.
With just a couple group interactions the project stakeholders had identified that most of the problems stemmed from the Train the Trainer program. There was also little reinforcement of the training program during delivery. The group was also able to highlight numerous elements of the program that had actually gone really well.
Reflection Loop Results!
Three key benefits were experienced including …
the engagement speed of execution and how quickly the insight themes highlighted the major problems.
the respectful way in which project stakeholders were engaged was highlighted as the reason everyone had shared so authentically.
the engagement was perceived as a positive exercise and many of the successful elements were to be integrated into future projects.