DAY 1 : AUGUST 4th

Intro to State Capability by Michael Woolcock

  • Presentation on acting with Purpose, and other themes of state capability
  • Groups discuss characteristics of capable organizations and states

Technical vs. Adaptive Challenges, Michael Woolcock & Sampath Kumar

  • Presentation on acting with Purpose, with cases (e.g. building community ownership of MGNREGA in Meghalaya)
  • Groups discuss 1-2 major state schemes, identify purpose, identify ways purpose can be side-tracked

PDIA and State Capability, Michael Woolcock & Sampath Kumar

  • A significant focus on Day 1 will be on creating a space for dialogue on how different Districts and Departments can adapt PDIA, importance of learning for effective adaptation, adaptive vs. technical fixes, and what holds us back from being purpose-driven.
  • Understanding Technical vs. Adaptive problems, and the danger of technical fixes to adaptive problems.
  • What is PDIA and how it helps address local problems

Intro to Authorizing Environment, Michael Woolcock

  • Overview of next sessions on overcoming barriers to being purpose-driven
  • Individual reflection exercise

Alternative Accountability & Managing for Motivation as Performance Improvement Strategy: Dan Honig

  • Accounts-based vs. accounting-based accountability
  • Management Practice Changes Motivation of Current Employees, & Entry/Exit
  • Potential Pathways to More Supportive Management
  • Group Discussion

Adaptive challenge: Managing your authorizing environment: Michael Woolcock and Sampath Kumar

  • Group Discussion on authorization experiences
  • Types of authorization needed for complex adaptive challenges
  • Case 4: Building support for the ECD Mission > Leaders must proactively manage their authorizing environment.
  • Summarizing Remarks

Counting “what” and “how” matters the most: Ashish Desai

  • Whiteboarding exercise
  • Working session on identifying indices / parameters to monitor  and evaluate projects / schemes .
  • Exploring a combination of big data , administrative data , transaction data and survey data to understand project / scheme performance.
  • How to do quick assessment
  • Understanding  “Why” not just “How” in Monitoring & Evaluation
  • Discussant: Sandra Albert

Evaluation as Navigation: Finding our Way in a Non-linear World

Bobby Milstein and Jane Erickson
Navigating Systems to their Desired Outcomes

  • North star expectation: All people and places thriving together–no exceptions
  • Rise of shared stewardship, with a simple dynamic hypothesis
  • Insights from action learning synthesis

Sanjeev Sridharan and Mel Mark
Why an ecology of evidence matters for navigating towards desired outcomes: Leadership, purpose and evidence

  •  Types of evidence that matter in decision-making
  • Why even well conceived complex interventions fail
  • Dimensions of evidence: Towards an ecology of evidence
  • The challenge function of evaluation
  • Leadership, purpose and evidence

DAY 2 : AUGUST 5th

Thinking Explicitly about Sustainability Up Front: Jindra Cekan

  • Up Front Planning for Sustainability
  • Metrics of Sustainability
  • Adaptations for Sustainability

Types of Knowledge that Evaluations can Generate for Implementation and Decision Making: Sanjeev Sridharan

  • (linear and non-linear) Theories of Change
  • Testing theories of change
  • What does it mean to say that a set of solutions “work”.
  • Evaluation criteria—thinking about inequities, sustainability and contexts
  • Types of evaluation
  • System-level evaluations
  • Returning back to an ecology of evidence/decision-making

Performance measurement systems: Aroon Manoharan  

  •  Models of evaluation and performance measurement that incorporate heterogenous local context
  • How can these ideas be adapted to Meghalaya

Lessons from South Africa in the Role of M&E in Transforming Systems: Ian Goldman

  • Implications of Lessons from South Africa for Planning M&E Systems in Meghalaya
  • How South Africa integrated M&E Systems
  • Connections to the OECD Development Assistance Criteria

Additional thoughts on PDIA: Michael Woolcock

Setting up Learning Systems and Learning Processes:  An Open Think Tank Discussion

Part 1: Brief opening statements from: Ram Kumar, Shweta Sharma, Sandra Albert, Michael Woolcock, Sampath Kumar

  • Planning for Intentional Learning
  • What Needs to be Learned and When and By Whom
  • Structures of Learning
  • Incorporating Sustainability

Part 2: Feedback from participants around their learning needs