This .jpeg has been circulating around the internet and provides a great decision framework on when to check your email.

Here at Synexe a few of us have been trialling only checking our email twice a day.  The protocol we’ve been following is:

• Check email at 10am and 4pm.
• Clear your inbox completely at these times – if you can’t complete your response then (eg as you may be waiting for more information from another party) then make a note for yourself, let the person who wrote the e-mail what’s happening and file the email away.

The biggest issue we’ve had, once you get away from the initial anxiety of not constantly checking your email, is educating our colleagues and clients that we’re only responding to our email twice a day. Once you get past that initial hurdle (ie why haven’t you got back to my email yet? I sent it 10 minutes ago!) we’ve actually found we’ve had much greater space to actually focus on the other aspects of our work. That’s a really nice feeling!

We actually take the process one step further and turn off our email program after we’ve cleared our emails. This helps further remove the distraction of seeing emails turn up in your inbox on your screen as you work. As we’ve found – it’s best to remove as many triggers of our email addiction as possible. After all the curse of 24-hour connectivity via email can be a hard monkey to get off your back!! But, it’s well worth it in terms of productivity as we’re finding out. And, if it’s really important and can’t wait till when you’re scheduled to check your email, then people can always call you.

What a great idea. It’s something we all ought to try and strive towards – as both organizations and individuals!

The conference brought together thought leaders on indigenous governance and development from Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the USA. The overall goal of the conference was to begin a dialogue between individuals and groups in these four countries in order to share what has worked in terms of successful structures, processes and projects by indigenous groups and so promote international collaboration.

Collaboration across countries like this is the future for both indigenous and non-indigenous groups alike. It is our shared strengths and our ability to work on one another’s experiences – both successful and not – that will allow us to move forward as effectively as possible. In this respect the traditional Maori whakatauki (proverbial saying) is particularly appropriate:

Ehara taku toa i te toa takitahi, engari, he toa takitini

My strength lies not in working alone, but in working together

The three days of the conference provided a great space for an open and strengths based dialogue to occur.

As a result of this conference a website has been set up to continue this dialogue. The International Indigenous Governance Alliance (IIGA) is an informal network of individuals and institutions that participated in the Common Roots, Common Futures conference. The website has been created to support the ongoing conversation about Indigenous self-determination, governance, and development. Synexe looks forward to supporting this initiative as it moves forward.

Recent events in the Pacific hold a number of lessons for thinking about issues of peace and development and, in particular, for rethinking the role of the state in addressing problems of social cohesion, economic growth and even law and order. Outside powers have asserted that many of the smaller developing states of the Southwest Pacific face potential failure, and, for a number of reasons, argue that this would be disastrous for both those within the Pacific and those without. As a result of this fear of state failure, outside powers have invested much in the popular practice of state or nation-building in the region – as witnessed most clearly by the multi-national mission to restore law and order to the Solomon Islands: RAMSI (Regional Assistance Mission – Solomon Islands).

Honiara Market

One of the tensions that emerges from these types of state and/or nation building initiatives is a tension between the concepts of human security and human development. Both concepts are key issues in discussions of post-conflict and fragile state environments around the world. Synexe has been involved in the recent reporting on the partnership between Solomon Islands’ Government and RAMSI. Solomon Islands, with the transition underway for the phasing out of the regional stabilization mission and towards long-term development work provides a fertile area for exploring the issue of the tension between human security and human development.

How do we reconcile these ideals of human security and human development in practice? In peace support operations there is a tendency to use a ‘two- phase’ approach as in the RAMSI case. RAMSI is a multi-country operation to restore law and order in the Solomon Islands. RAMSI was a response to a request made by the Solomon Islands Prime Minister Allan Kemakeza in early 2003. Public wages were in arrears, members of Parliament feared physical attack, Cabinet had been subject to intimidation and extortion, and the Royal Solomon Islands Police Force (RSIPF) was becoming increasingly corrupt, and Kemakeza sought outside help to restore law and order in the country.

Solomon Islands' Parliament

In RAMSI it was decided that a two-pronged approach would be most suitable in tackling the problems of governance, law and order, and police corruption facing the Solomon Islands government of the day. RAMSI intended to first of all force a ‘security pause’. Law and order would be restored. Secondly, RAMSI would restore the economy and the structures of the state – so that people had something to do when the fighting stopped/slowed and gave them an added incentive to stop fighting (snowball effect). Yet this second stage had to contend with the emergence of a war economy in Solomon Islands whereby some had a vested interest in the maintenance of conflict, and with the development of an aid economy too – where overseas aid provided the majority of income for the troubled country and its people. Now a number of successes have played out in RAMSI. Law and order has been restored and everyday life has improved for the majority of the country’s inhabitants. Indeed, official statistics show that economic recovery has well and truly begun. Last year actually saw record government revenue – with overall revenue exceeding SBD 1.3 Billion. Yet this economic recovery is not necessarily sustainable. Logging has reached an all-time high and the national accounts do not take into account the subsistence loss. Despite being almost 10 years since the cessation of conflict, with pockets of reconciliation having begun, it is by no means a comprehensive reconciliation process. Most importantly, though, is the possibility that certain opportunities were lost. Could this have been prevented if the RAMSI mission had approached the problems in the Solomons in a much more holistic manner – with development being pushed as soon as ‘enough’ security was achieved?

Downtown Honiara

The issue is one of timing and balance and of long-term planning. In terms of timing – the Security First Approach that emerged out of peace-building efforts in West Africa asserts that security is required for economic and social life to progress. Yet in order for any security efforts to have lasting effects such efforts must be more than matched by developmental efforts. Yet it seems as if this kind of approach, one that emphasises how a climate of security requires some feeling of progress in the developmental sphere, has not as yet become the dominant discourse in international affairs. This needs to change. Further, a greater understanding about the balance of the roles of individuals and the roles of institutions is also necessary for achieving sustainable peace and development. Focusing on human development over human security entails that we grapple with what is being developed over time and why. Institutions may be developed in such a way as to serve the needs of all individuals, thus human development emerges as the more encompassing paradigm as its necessarily grapples with institutional/individual relationships.

Guadalcanal Reconciliation Ceremony

The achievement of sustainable peace and development must be the primary focus of the international community. One way in which this goal may be reached more easily is through the rebalancing of development with security – bringing security back under the rubric of development as a distinct sub-set within the human development paradigm. Human security, despite its aims, is at best only ever risk management that provides a ‘safe’ environment for human flourishing to occur. But it isn’t an end in and of itself. Security remains merely a means to an end. Human security and human development need to work together, and human security theorists and practitioners need to realise the subordinate role that security plays to development. Thus, while human security served a very important purpose – which was to break away from the old Cold War era state-military-security paradigm (where security had almost become an end in and of itself) – and to refocus on people, the true ends of security, it is now time to refocus once more.

The discussions at World Water Week in Stockholm focuses on formal and informal settlements, where “informal” has become the industry jargon for slums. The reality is that cities are growing like mad, without the necessary planning and infrastructure to support this explosion. In many parts of the world, especially in the Middle East, revolutions add an additional level of complexity.

I appreciate that global leaders (researchers, policy-makers, and advocates) have gathered to discuss new information and to dialogue on solutions. Each city / region / country has its own specific contextual factors – in water terms this means hydrology, institutional and political arrangements, culture, and resource requirements. I recognize that there are opportunities to look at how problems are being successfully solved and to share knowledge and to network to better support one another in our work.

Stockholm World Water Week 2011: Water in an Urbanizing World

There is growing discussion and dialog around how Business As Usual (BAU) is no longer an acceptable way to move forward. Global inequity, gender inequity, and greed in general has been identified as some of the main issues that will need to be addressed to deviate from the BAU scenario. However, I do not see an overarching vision of urban water management emerging to guide us beyond BAU. We have 10 years of Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM), and evidence supporting it’s emergence in national policies, and increasingly in practice. We have the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and targets that have been identified towards achieving each of the goals.

I argue that we need a more aggressive vision to work towards, or maybe even multiple visions depending on each particular context. What, really, would this look like? How would it smell, how would it sound? What are the values driving it all?

Our whole culture is experiencing a chronic illness, and I am in no way excluded from the sickness. This malady exists at three levels – the personal, the communal, and the global. I’d like to explore the metaphor through the lens of World Water Week, starting here with the personal.

The personal level has to do with ego and the need to feed the ego. I’ve traveled a few thousand kilometers to be at this conference, and I want to feel like I am able to make a contribution so that I can feel worthwhile. My ego wants to be perceived as being important, through feedback on who I am, the work I do, the people I know, and how I present myself. For this purpose I wear a business suit, have smart business cards, speak in acronyms, and ask intelligent and articulate questions during workshop and lecture sessions. How does this help with solving global problems and addressing root causes? Dialog and relationships, building knowledge and understanding is at the root of problem-solving (backed by good data and analysis of course….) Do I need to do a cost-benefit analysis of my participation? Are the ecological footprint, financial, and costs associated with not being with my family worth the benefit of my contribution to this conference and the problems that we are all here working to solve?

Although there are small successes within the water and sanitation sector that are being achieved, the whole picture is not a pretty one. How can we celebrate the small successes without being bowled over by the massive challenges ahead? How can we manage complexity, and where does ego fit in when dealing with complexity, and how do we manage that?

As a community of 2678 people gathering to address global water and sanitation challenges, how do we articulate the value of the gathering. In the language of the water community, how do we put into place and measure outcomes in terms of our monitoring and evaluation. Do the outcomes warrant the economic, carbon and overall resource impacts of our participation? The World Water Week secretariat has organized a robust system of rapporteuring to capture the knowledge generated throughout the sessions. They have been directed to identify two key points / recommendations / learnings coming out of each of the sessions. These points have been consolidated, analyzed and boiled down. Within the framework of the cost benefit analysis, is this a success?

World Water Week 2011 closing plenary

The acknowledgement how our global system is moving towards greater lack of sustainability throughout World Water Week has demonstrated a shift in thinking. We need to deal with virtual water, agricultural land grabs, and the water-energy-climate nexus. We, as a global water community, need to focus on context-specific indicators, incentives, and regulatory frameworks and processes. Does this approach allow us to move away from band-aid solutions towards addressing systemic root causes? Alternatively, should we celebrate the local successes, realizing that baby steps are the only way we can make progress in dealing with complex, ‘wicked’ problems?

Here are the findings (based on my further refinement through my lens):
- Integration needs to be expanded – we need to build partnerships beyond the water sector (into planning, food / agriculture, climate / energy, etc) in a collaborative way that builds benefit-sharing.
- We need to communicate across disciplines and across society as a whole to foster improved engagement and empowerment; we need to articulate knowledge in the water sector (technical, scientific, legal, governance, social, etc) in a way that resonates with common sense. This will help to foster increased hydro-solidarity (is this more jargon?)
- We need to better manage contextual complexities, and somehow at the same time upscale successful efforts.
- Management and leadership needs to focus on the realization of water sensitive cities in a way that addresses the poorest-of-the-poor through recognition of the informal / unplanned / slum areas, where the private sector can see these communities as low-income consumers and develop markets.

One additional priority I would like to bring up is to emphasize is the mechanisms / process for generating and sharing knowledge, communication, empowerment and measuring change, creating feedback mechanisms. This speaks to linking academic research and the academic community with the NGO and UN practitioner community; how do these communities integrate?

Learning and knowledge cycles for improved effectiveness in Integrated Water Management

On a global level, we need a shift of power and priority from economic growth towards serving human needs. This is articulated by the July 2010 UN Declaration of water and sanitation as a human right. The realization of this right needs to be implemented first through legal codification at the international and then national levels in order to give more legal ‘teeth’ to the declaration. Then, resources will need to follow to implement projects on the ground to achieve there rights where they are most needed. Will this paradigm shift happen in time to address the global water and sanitation crisis? Or will the globalization Business As Usual scenario win the race, bringing with it the catastrophic consequences of climate change, nuclear contamination, air and water pollution, social inequity, the list goes on.

How can we as individuals making up a group or community acknowledge and address the systemic challenges in a way that is supportive on personal as well as professional levels? What is the dynamic at play that allows us to step beyond the ego in order to recognize the potentially paralyzing reality of the global water and sanitation crisis? Do we use our egos as a crutch to be able to navigate this arena (or distract ourselves?)

We worked with a local Maori clan (hapu) on the East Coast of New Zealand who were concerned about the state of their river. We worked with them to create a management plan – which they called Operation Patiki (Patiki is the Maori word for flounder – a key food species in their river) – which enable them to proactively engage with other stakeholders in the management of the river as well as begin to allow their traditional Maori values to be included with scientific monitoring practices in these management practices – such as the concept of cultural flows.

Since then the clan have gone from strength to strength and the original project has been extended to include three other marae (communities). It’s great to say!!  Congratulations guys.

There aren’t too many capital cities in the world where you can see local wildlife (beyond birds and cats etc) just hopping around…literally!!

This shift is not only occurring in OECD countries. Countries such as India and China are taking full advantage of the global demand for knowledge-based industries. Multi-lateral and bi-lateral aid organizations are cognizant of the advantages for economic development that a shift towards a knowledge economy may have and have thus begun to invest heavily in programs, like the World Bank’s Knowledge for Development (K4D) Program, that can help developing countries achieve this transformation.

One of the key difficulties when dealing with the often intangible resources that are at the base of a knowledge economy is that these resources can be extremely difficult to protect. Intellectual Property is the most obvious example. A robust regulatory environment with appropriate safeguards and regulations is thus an important aspect for the development of an environment conducive to the creation of a knowledge economy. How we do this in terms of a changing international strategic environment – because politics and business are never truly separated – is one of the challenges that firms are having to deal with.

I don’t want to claim that we’re going to answer these issues once and for all but I do want to use this blog as a space to begin to discuss them in an open manner. One if the big issues that the shift to Knowledge Societies might bring about is new forms of ownership and ways to extract value – possibly in a more sustainable manner. We already have options like this available to us – such as limited licensing approaches as opposed to complete ownership of IP. But, interestingly, the rise of open-source software – and the push to monetarize sites like Twitter and others – might mean we’re actually witness to changes in the very way we extract value…

So…this is my first post on our new blog on our new website…

What I’d like to do on this blog is to explore the work that we’re doing here at Synexe. But in doing this we see ourselves as part of a much broader network  of individuals and organizations beginning to increasingly work in the space of this thing we call a Knowledge Society.

What I want to do is use this as a forum to interrogate what it is we mean when we talk about living in a Knowledge Society or being part of the Knowledge Economy.

In doing this I’ll definitely draw on the work that we’re doing in different countries but I’ll be drawing a lot from others as well. What I’m trying to do is create a space to explore both what we’re doing as an organization but also how we fit into broader global shifts around the use of Knowledge.

Often when we talk to people about working in the Knowledge Economy they assume that we’re just talking about IT organizations or new computer applications or, at a stretch, that we’re working in the bio-tech sector. This is a real problem as it automatically limits what it is that people see as constituting the Knowledge Economy. We see ourselves as an organization for which the Knowledge Economy (and the related concept of the Knowledge Society) is our raison d’être.

In the development community academics ‘discovered’ about thirty years ago that institutions mattered in the effective operation of organizations. Then, about five years ago (I don’t think this is exaggerating) people started talking about how people mattered too – that is without good people the best institutions in the world wouldn’t do much. This is the genesis of all the talk you see nowadays about leadership! The piece missing from all of this though is knowledge. Knowledge flows through and around organizations and is used by people to make their organizations work – ideally as effectively as they can. This is where we see ourselves working – helping promote this flow of knowledge and thereby helping people and the organizations within which they work operate more effectively. While not a radical idea it is still an area which many people seem to miss. However, it’s an important part of any organization’s work and something which is keeping us increasingly busy (more on this later!).

Knowledge helps us understand what is working, what’s not working, why things are working or not working and so on… While there tends to be a general agreement that knowledge is important there isn’t as much agreement of how we deal with this issue in a concrete way. I’m not saying that we have the answer – indeed I’d be loath to claim that there is one answer. Instead, I think by working through concrete examples on this blog we’ll begin to come up with firmer ideas of what it is that we’re doing in our Knowledge Societies and how they’re leading to better lives for people.

In doing this though, I don’t plan on just engaging on these high level discussions as the effective use of knowledge crosses through all aspects of our lives. Given that, I hope to explore some lighter issues as well as issues people don’t generally associate with the Knowledge Society. I’ll also talk a bit about who we are, the type of work we do and importantly why we’re doing this kind of work.

I’ll be back soon with more…