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Ep 39 - Stacey Young, USAID Chief Knowledge Officer: Knowledge Management, AI, & the new KMOL Policy
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SHOW NOTES Stacy Young, Chief Knowledge Officer at USAID and Melissa Patsalides, Senior Advisor for Knowledge Management and Organizational Learning, join Mike Shanley to discuss Knowledge Management, AI, and the new Knowledge Management and...
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Welcome to the Aid Market Podcast where.
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Foreign aid partners connect to learn about key funding trends and market insight. The podcast is co hosted by Aid Connect Data, the pipeline and Market intel software for USAID Partnering and Connected International, the leading USAID partnering support consulting firm. Now here's your host, Mike Shanley.
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Welcome to the Aid Market Podcast. Today we have Stacy Young, the Chief Knowledge Officer at usaid, and Melissa Petsalides, Senior Advisor for Knowledge Management and Organizational Learning at usaid. Stacy and Melissa, thank you both for joining us today to share the important work you and your colleagues do at USAID every day in knowledge management. Really appreciate you being on the show. Stacy, love to start with you. Could you talk about the role of the Chief Knowledge Officer and what all falls under your purview at usaid?
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Sure, yeah. Thank you and thanks Mike for having us on the podcast. We are always looking for opportunities to connect with partners, so this is really great. We're excited to have this conversation and we look forward to engaging with partners more because we have a lot to share and we're really excited. So the role of the Chief Knowledge Officer at USAID is basically to lead a number of efforts that are designed to embed knowledge management and organizational learning in agency structures and processes. And so what that looks like in practice is really a range of things. Leading an effort to create USAID's first ever policy on knowledge management and organizational learning, which we released in May. Leading and supporting a small but mighty team of knowledge management experts in developing guidance and tools to support implementation of that policy. Championing KMOL with USAID leadership across the Agency in Washington and in missions and leveraging my long experience in this area of work to inform decisions that leaders make at USAID about knowledge and learning and to support the range of staff who are involved in knowledge management, organizational learning, collaborating, learning and adapting just a range of efforts to make the Agency a stronger learning organization. Great.
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Thanks Stacy. Love to hear more about that. Can we get into knowledge management at usaid, how that's funded internally, how you all think about it? Obviously there's content and knowledge coming out of the D.C. bureaus as well as the missions overseas, as well as the partners globally. Would love to hear a bit more on how you conceptualize and just frame that very large task of managing this important knowledge, but in a very decentralized, across a very decentralized implementation portfolio.
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Sure, yeah. Thanks Mike. That's a great question. And I think it's important to note the decentralization, as you've noted, and also the fact that you know, it's 2024. My position was established in 2019. We just released the policy this year. But we've been doing knowledge management and organizational learning for decades. So one of the things that KMOL means at USAID is supporting and facilitating the work that's already being done and has been done for a long time in missions in Washington through the technical sectors, in program cycle processes such as collaborating, learning and adapting, evaluation and monitoring the range of technical analyses, all of the ways that the agency generates, captures, manages, shares and uses knowledge and learning. So that work has been ongoing for decades, for long. Before I joined the agency as a senior knowledge management advisor in 2003, which that's been a long time now. And I came into a context where there were already some communities of practice, there were some sector based knowledge and learning efforts. So all of that work continues. The work that we're doing is meant to link those things, provide a connective tissue and in the form of policy guidance, so that there's greater cohesion across those efforts to support certain standards around knowledge management and organizational learning and to, as an early step now with the policy requirements to address some inefficiencies that have been hanging us up agency wide and really reduce the burdens associated with those inefficiencies. So I can get to those in a minute, but I wanted to address the question that you asked about how it's funded, because I know that'll be of interest to your, to your audience. So it's funded every way you can imagine, just like most things at usaid. So a lot of missions have knowledge and learning efforts. Many of those are embedded in technical activities. So you see this a lot. For instance, in global health, there's really strong knowledge management that's been happening in global health, driven from Washington, but also in missions, we see a lot of technical activities that have a CAM component and that can look like, hey, we're doing this work in economic growth or in market systems development, or in natural resources management or climate or whatever it is. There are some, some key questions that we need to answer in order to do this work better. And so, so we're going to add a knowledge and learning component or we have a consortium of partners and we want to speed learning across that consortium. And so we have a knowledge management component that convenes partners to share emergent learning, to share lessons learned, or we're investing in certain analyses or whatever it is. So it can, it can look like a knowledge and learning aspect that's embedded in a technical Activity. It can look like a support contract or support function to a mission that often is led from the program office and often is combined with cla with monitoring, with evaluation and is designed to support work across the mission. Obviously there are the MEL platforms and there are KM components to the MEL platforms. MEL monitoring, evaluation and learning. And then in Washington, of course, we have for instance the Lynx family websites that are vehicles to share technical knowledge that has been generated from within sectors as well as other knowledge and learning support contracts. So sometimes it's standalone, sometimes it's a broad support contract, sometimes it's embedded in technical activity, sometimes it's part of a MAL platform. It looks a lot of different ways and it does a lot of different things. And that's part of what I think is really exciting.
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C
Great, thank you Stacy. And for those of you attending live, we're just sharing some of those links for you to reference. With that, let's get right into the new policy your team launched this year. Could you talk a bit about what went into it? I think it's always interesting, Stacy, as well for our listeners to hear how USA decides to do a new policy, how even some of that internal development go is is handled. And then course let's talk about what the results were and what's in the policy that you've shared with really the entire aid industry.
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Sure, yeah. Thank you. One thing that I want to make really clear is that the policy addresses a long standing need at USAID and this is something that staff have been asking for since I've been at the agency and something that comes up regularly at mission director conferences. It is an acknowledged need and we see in other organizations that a lot of development donors and other development organizations have already tackled the organization wide policy issues. So actually we get a lot of learning from those other efforts. And I want to give a shout out to Melissa because she led the evidence review that included looking at what other development organizations are doing and the policies and strategies that they've put out, looking at the evidence base for knowledge management out in the development sector, and then conducting focus group interviews and discussions with USAID staff to understand exactly what the opportunities and challenges are. So I want to highlight that as an annex in the policy that will be interesting to people who are looking for what is the evidence around knowledge and learning and where did the demand come from and so on. The demand has been there forever. This was a process of getting leadership support to say, okay, finally USAID is going to sink our teeth into meeting this demand. We are going to develop a policy, and that leadership support was absolutely critical. And then doing the evidence review that I just described that Melissa led, and that involved a lot of people, not only in usaid, but also outside of usaid. And then we convened a core team and a broader team and we started figuring out what are the themes and what are the practices and how do we want to chunk this out. And we drafted a rather long, comprehensive document with a bunch of people. And then the guidance about policy development changed, I think for the better. So we were sent back to the drawing board and told make this a lot more streamlined, which we did. And I'm really excited about where we came out. So we came out with a concise document that I know your listeners will be able to tolerate because it's really not that long. And I think my feeling is it lays out a really compelling vision. And so the vision is articulated as improving USAID's ability to harness its cumulative knowledge, learn from it, and apply these lessons to its work to achieve better results. The goals are pretty interesting. We're looking at three goals. The first is to steward knowledge as an agency asset. So thinking about how much energy we put into stewarding our funding and then applying that same energy to how we steward our knowledge, really understanding that knowledge is a development resource that how we create positive change in the world and has as much to do with the knowledge that we're sharing and the knowledge that we're gaining and bringing to bear on our programs as it has to do with our funding. So really getting intentional about how are we managing this? How are we making sure that we're not hemorrhaging knowledge when staff leave? How are we making sure that staff know where to find what they need in order to make the decisions that they're making all the time about our programs and about our internal operations. The policy spans both programs and operations. So that's the first goal. And I think I walked into the second goal, which is leveraging knowledge to enhance our impact. So really connecting what we know to what we do in a way that makes all of our work more effective. And then the third goal has to do with supporting those same processes in the countries and communities where we work. So investing in locally led knowledge systems to support locally led development. So this looks a little bit different from how some of our other efforts look, where we do a lot of capacity strengthening, for example, of local evaluators so that they can do business with usaid, they can evaluate USAID programs. This is a little bit broader than that and really Aims at how do we strengthen local knowledge and learning ecosystems so that whatever the development effort is, whoever it's led by, whoever it's funded by, it is supported by strong networks of knowledge sharing, well, capacitated knowledge generators and knowledge holders and so on. So really looking at that as a development objective that we can include in the work that we design and fund. So I think the other things to say about the policy are there's a broad vision, the actual requirements are very specific and narrow, and this is what they are. One requirement is that all of our missions and operating units need to have at least one. In some cases it will be multiple, depending on how big the units are. Plan for knowledge management and organizational learning and that that plan can be as broad or narrow as they like and it should shift and change as their work shifts and change changes. But at, at its heart, it needs to address two things to reduce burdens. One is to have an established process for retaining and transferring knowledge as staff move into and out of positions. You know, your, your listeners know where we are a geographically dispersed organization, we have, we have staff moving all the time. And without an effective knowledge retention and transfer process, we just, we lose knowledge and then we lose traction in implementing our programs. So that knowledge retention and transfer piece is essential. And we have a toolkit on the Learning Lab website that we've developed in collaboration with missions to support that. And then the other requirement in the KMOL plan is that all units should have standard processes for organizing our work products. We currently use the Google workspace, and so we're aiming at good practices around Google workspace use and organization. That said, the work that shows up in the plans should be as broad as missions and operating units need it to be. The one other requirement in the KMOL policy is that we're establishing a governance body to address KMOL issues that rise above the level of any individual operating unit. So issues around budgeting, staffing, system interoperability, those are some of the things that we're anticipating to address.
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C
Thank you, Stacy. Melissa, anything you'd want to add or add to that?
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Yeah. Thanks, Mike. So just to augment maybe a bit what Stacy mentioned in terms of the focus of the policy, you know, looking at how other organizations have addressed their organization level, KM strategies or policies. One of the clear findings was you really, you could take on the world, you could try to boil the ocean with your KM work, but if you do that, you're probably not going to be successful at any of it. So you really need to focus in on your core business processes. And you'll see that in USAID's KM policy we honed in on what are the processes that the majority of our staff engage in every day because those are likely to yield the most value for our organization in terms of productivity, in terms of efficiency, in terms of better leveraging resources for our programs. So I, that's just one highlight from the evidence review that made it into the policy is that those three core business processes are really where we wanted to try to focus our investment of time and resources in our KM and OL efforts.
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C
Thank you. And Melissa, I want to come back to you in a second to get more into the AI conversation. But Stacy, there's one thing I wanted to hear a bit more from you on. During our prep call for this, we talked about knowledge management and what that looks like with, you know, immediately I always think USAID Knowledge Management quarterly reports, annual reports, on the deck, that's the Development Experience Clearinghouse. But you all went deeper than that and really thought maybe more more broadly about knowledge. Could you share a bit about. Yeah, the thought process, how you thought about defining knowledge and integrating more than just written reports into USAID's knowledge management policy?
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A
Sure, yeah. Thank you. So part of what, where that came from is the work that, that we see within collaborating, learning and adapting as part of the program cycle and the work that happens under that rubric around being more sort of. So this, this goes back to some of the principles that show up in the KMOL policy. Being more human centered about how we think about knowledge. You know, we're kidding ourselves if we think that Everybody's reading those 80 page reports that we have produced with abandon through our, our funded activities. And so one of the things that CLA has really focused on has been to innovate and to support others in innovating how we think about reporting and changing up that format. So that included among USAID deliverables in our funding agreements are knowledge and learning activities that actually focus on how do we bring people together with knowledge that's been generated to make sense of it, to understand the implications for their programs, to plan for the adaptations that are implied by that knowledge. So that's one piece. It also looks like supporting the communities of practice that have been growing in the Agency over the last 20 years and are so important now to how we share and spread and diffuse innovation and new insights. And our partners are also part of that. Knowledge management looks like a lot of things at usaid and it gets broader and broader. And I'm really Excited about the way that the Lincs family of sites have expanded over the years, because I think that those are a really essential resource for technical staff looking for quality evidence and learning and experience in the work that they're doing. Obviously, there are a lot of other knowledge and learning efforts. The agency learning agenda has been really wonderful addition to how USAID takes on that process of evidence generation and then connecting staff with evidence that tracks to USAID policy priorities. So it's very broad and diverse how we approach knowledge management in developing the policy. As you mentioned, Mike, we wanted to think about what is knowledge and how are we engaging knowledge and knowledge holders, and what does that have to do with the agency's broadened approach to localization, such that in the past when we've talked about localizing aid, it really has been focused almost exclusively on funding funding questions around who are we funding? How do we do a better job of funding local organizations? But we know, and developing countries have been reminding us that people in the communities that we work with are in their own right, important knowledge holders. And that a key part of localization and a key part of equity and the shifting power piece that is new in the current approach to localization, a key part of that is engaging people as knowledge holders and understanding the ways that they think about development challenges and development opportunities, the ways that they think about the context in which we work. There are a couple of implications here. One is that whereas I think that we have tended to think within a single knowledge system that emerges from a combination of the natural sciences and the social sciences as they're advanced academically, actually there are multiple knowledge systems. And the people who we work with and on whose behalf we ostensibly work, they often have different knowledge systems. And we need to do a better job of understanding and valuing those knowledge systems and engaging the knowledge holders who bring different perspectives, because that's how we make our programs more effective and more equitable. So that's been a really important element in this policy establishing a commitment at USAID that we're going to broaden the ways that we think about knowledge and evidence and we're going to engage people more equitably in their roles as knowledge holders. There was a second point that I just forgot, but I'm sure I'll remember it and we'll come back to it. But we're figuring out now what does this actually look like in practice. And that's the fun part.
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C
Thank you, Stacy. And yeah, just jump in when it comes to you. Melissa, love to hear from you. A bit more now on AI and in our. As we were chatting before this year at a knowledge management conference where a lot of the content is around AI. Yeah, we would love to hear a lot of your thoughts on how you frame that conversation. And it is changing so fast. Obviously, when you all started designing this program, when you were doing the prep work, the technology has evolved since then. It will continue to evolve. So we'd love to hear a bit about how you all frame that conversation and then develop the policy so that it can continue to evolve as the technology continues to change in the coming months and years.
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Thanks so much, Mike. Yes, I am here at this knowledge management conference and it's kind of a running joke among presenters that if they don't reference generative AI somewhere in their presentations, they really aren't hitting the mark at all. So that's just kind of a.
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A.
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Sidebar during this week. And so it's, you know, clearly a lot of organizations recognize the, the power that they could harness, right, in using, finding ways to use AI to amp up their work in pam. And it's just like any other technology. There is, you know, a great potential. There are a lot of pitfalls also, right. Because it is new. We are plumbing the depths to really understand the ways that we can effectively leverage it. But we also have to be mindful to not look at it as a silver bullet. There's never going to be a silver bullet for cam. There are core practices that are good practices that are the foundation of km. And my workshop this morning was very focused on that. Like, okay, don't think that, you know, not having a good way of characterizing your information and organizing your information is going to. Your generative AI will not solve those problems. You still have to do the foundational work. You have to put in the elbow grease to get the dividends. But there are a lot of ways that we could do CAM more efficiently and have it be an easier sell if we were. If we could figure out the best ways to leverage AI to do that. Obviously, there are the most ubiquitous, I think use case is summarizing content we have. As Stacy mentioned, the deck houses hundreds of thousands of documents. Our staff who are designing new programs seldom have the time to comb through more than a handful of those. And, you know, being able to synthesize a number of different documents from different contexts would absolutely amp up our ability to bring lessons learned to our new program design. So that is a really clear use case winner for us. If we can crack the nut on that. And to the point about this, you know, the structural amnesia that we have as a foreign affairs agency where we are designed to have people rotating right from post to post, we are structured to forget. And so if we have a systematic approach to transferring knowledge among those rotating staff, that's, that's the money for sure. But if we're finding ways to leverage AI to automate some of the really difficult and time intensive tasks around amassing the documents, summarizing the documents, producing handover memos, or even generating different outputs that are more user friendly for incoming staff, like recordings, doing podcasts, there are a number of different knowledge products that we could be generating with AI to make the consumption and the uptake of that information so much easier for folks who are doing it. I have a colleague who just a couple of weeks ago took an evaluation report from a program and used one of the new tools to generate a podcast. And he, this is a KM advisor. And he shared it with his monitoring and evaluation staff who gave it rave reviews. And he spent about 10 minutes producing that knowledge product that then was so much more consumable for users. Right. And so if you just look at that scale in terms of how many times we have staff throughout the agency who need to consume information but are challenged by time in doing that. There are lots of other ways that we could be thinking about leveraging AI, but many of them require us to have the ability to do that behind our firewall. We obviously have a lot of risks, security and privacy concerns that we have to deal with. And so for us to be able to effectively leverage a lot of these tools, we need to find ways to do that safely behind our firewall. So we are in the very early days of figuring this out and, and working with our Chief Information officer, figure out how we can do that safely and how to identify the risks, how to mitigate those risks, how to ensure that the content that we're finding, that we're summarizing, that we're synthesizing is actually good content, that it's actually accurate. Right. If we're asking for synopses, all of those are things that we're testing and trialing right now. We have a couple of efforts inside the agency to work with some of the larger open source providers. We have little pilots that are, we can either use public information or we have a small pilot behind the firewall. But I think that in the next 12 to 18 months, we're really going to have a lot more capacity to be able to identify those use cases, figure out the ways to find the right AI tools to leverage to support those use cases and drive a lot of productivity and efficiency gains for our staff, for our implementers that will allow us to spend our time in the highest value ways and also to spend our money as effectively as possible, which is obviously an interest we all have.
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C
Melissa, thank you. And you touched on this a little bit, but I'd like to hear a little bit more about. So AI, as you mentioned, is a tool. It's a tool to be used for knowledge management and I'd love to get into a bit more, you know, some of the potential risks. You see how you've even started thinking about mitigating them. Noted. Noting that we're all at very early stages. But I'd like to get a bit more of your thoughts on from a knowledge management perspective. With AI changing things, what still stays the same and what are the things that you see might, might be changing? Not asking you to forecast, you know, what's going to look like in even six months from now, but just, you know, what are some of your initial thoughts or observations both on what stays the same with, with knowledge management as well as what, what might change with, with some of the AI tools?
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Well, definitely one, one thing that we aren't going to be able to AI ourselves out of is how we characterize information, right? And taking the time to identify topics, to identify connections among topics from people who are domain experts, who are in the business, or, you know, our agricultural officers, our health officers, they're always going to be critical in identifying content, in effectively tagging content. We're not going to be able to shortcut that. We still have a very long road to go to make sure that we're curating and categorizing information in ways that make it discoverable, findable by as many people as possible. One, one thing I think that could change is that if we can become better, you know, this is very wonky, but we aren't good at providing metadata around our knowledge products. And that's one of the key, that's one of the keys to unlocking, you know, later reanalysis, later discoverability. And that is something that it seems that if we can figure out how to, to do it well in a few cases and then scale it and do it programmatically as opposed to manually, we can find ways to leverage AI to help us generate that metadata to compensate for some of our human behavior shortcomings. So I think it's really important for us to kind of, in our, in the ways that we work, identify okay, well, this is what happens when a partner, you know, produces a final report or product. We review it and we, you know, talk about the, the terms that are most important to tag and the partner uploads it. And then we have to review that and make sure that those terms are tagged in certain ways. And we have to characterize the document and describe, you know, its context and describe it in ways that then it is later ingestible by other. By machines. So that is going to be something that's really an important process point for us to figure out how to really leverage AI in the ways that would compensate for some of the things that we don't do well now and probably aren't going to do in the future. It's like finding that sweet spot between the tolerance level of humans for just undertaking some of the most basic tasks that they need to take and then figuring out, okay, we can safely rely on, you know, AI to do this part of the process for us. So then we can maybe modify our guidance in some ways around what evaluation reports need to look like, what the data fields need to look like when they're uploaded into things like the deck or the development data library, if it's a data set. So there I think it's going to be critical for us to have a look at that and determine where we absolutely need humans to undertake a task and where we're able to safely rely on a good output from AI and then modify our processes or modify our data fields and our IT systems accordingly.
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C
Thanks, Melissa. Stacy, with your 20 years at USAID in knowledge management. Yeah. What would you add to that? How are you seeing AI change things as well as. What do you see staying the same in knowledge management?
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Yeah, well, it's a great question. And like Melissa, I'm not going to forecast the future, but, you know, this issue of how we synthesize just the mountains of knowledge that are available in the sector is. That's huge for everybody. And, you know, a lot of donors are grappling with that and experimenting with ways of using AI for that. So that piece, I would love to see the changes that I think are possible and that Melissa is working on, testing around knowledge aggregation, knowledge synthesis, all of that decisions will always be made by humans, as it should be. And so how humans make sense of what comes out of those syntheses or what comes out of the other processes that generative AI makes possible, that's the piece that we will always have to focus on. How do we help people hone their analytic skills? How do we place them within processes that support not only decision making, but reflection and course correction. That's been a big part of cla. That will continue to be a big part of how we make sure that we are continuously improving as a learning organization. How are we understanding what comes before us? And then also how are we understanding are the effects that we're having through our programs? Are they what we intended and what else is going on? And how else can we understand the world? So this kind of brings me back to a little bit of what I was talking about before. And I did remember my other point about an expansive approach to evidence. It includes kind of shifting a little bit how we think about stakeholders as knowledge holders. And I was talking about that a little bit. That again, is a place where artificial intelligence is not going to take the place of really engaging differently with the stakeholders of our programs and understanding how they see their contexts, how they define what the challenges and opportunities are there and how they would like to proceed. And one thing that that means is, you know, as I've been saying, engaging them as knowledge holders and knowledge partners. And what that means has everything to do with power and it has everything to do with what are the questions that we go into that engagement with. I think too often, not because we're bad people, but because we're very busy people. USAID and our partners, we go in looking for approval for something that we've already, we think we've figured it out, right? So we want, we want to do stakeholder engagement to kind of get a sign off on something that we've already decided to do and we've been hearing loud and clear for a long time from developing countries and developing, developing communities, that doesn't work for them. So that whole engagement piece and putting together what we know with what they know and figuring out together, what are the priorities, what should we be doing here? What does that look like? Who's going to play what role? How will we understand the impact of what we're putting out? Those are all human processes. We can use AI to support us along the way. And I want to be clear, I think that local communities are asking for that. They, they want to know what we know. They want us to bring knowledge and evidence, but they also want to be invited to bring their own. And that's a more deliberative process than we've often made time for in the past. And it also requires things like cultural intermediation where we're not always very good at understanding the cultures that we're working in. And it requires letting go of some of the power to define the context to design the intervention and really shifting power to local communities. That's a big step for any development organization. But I think that's a really key part of the future of effective development assistance. And that's why we also emphasized it in the KMOL policy.
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C
And the hope with AI is that it will free up, Melissa, as you noted, some of the administrative time to Stacy, do some of the higher value tasks like improved collaboration and listening with partners and stakeholders globally. Stacy, with that, let's move right into the next topic on lessons learned for the USAID partners, both the established partners, the local partners, the international partners, as well as other donors and their partners who are listening to this. I'd love to hear from both of you. Stacy, maybe start with you first on what are some of those lessons learned that you would like to share with that? The broader aid market?
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A
Sure. Yeah. Well, one lesson that we've learned and we learn again and again, is that our partners are often ahead of us. They're often ahead of us in how they manage their knowledge. They're often ahead of us in how they conduct stakeholder engagement. They're often ahead of us in, in pausing and reflecting. And part of what we need to do is be more open to what they bring in terms of different approaches to managing knowledge, different kinds of deliverables. We've had some partners do some really cool things in place of that 80 page report that I mentioned earlier as ways to capture what they've learned in the course of implementing USA programs and engage USAID staff with that. And we really value that. We know that we need to make more space for that. We know that we need to keep working within USAID to make sure that everybody gets the message. Because the kinds of changes that Melissa and I have been involved in putting in place over many, many years around program cycle processes, around knowledge and learning, they the uptake is really uneven across the agency. And so we know that we need to keep working internally and we need to hear from our partners what's working and what's not from their perspective. So that's, that's one thing I think another thing that I want to mention, this is really, really important. When we put out something like the KMOL policy or ADS201 guidance on the program cycle or the forthcoming ADS chapter on kmol, which will be a big part of how we support implementation, that's a tool that we hope partners will use in their conversations with their USAID counterparts. Again, change rolls out really unevenly across usaid. It's challenging within this really decentralized organization to make sure that everybody's getting the right message at the right time and adopting new behaviors. So we need our partners to play their role in that. Use the things that we put out. Use the policy, use the ads. Bring it into your conversations with your USAID counterparts. Propose different ways of managing knowledge. Speeding learning across USAID partners through communities of practice and through other knowledge sharing. Fora ways to bring knowledge to bear on decisions that we make about our programs, ways to engage local and indigenous communities as equitable knowledge holders and so on. So we need all of that. You know, we see our partners as being every bit as important in advancing these kinds of changes as our USAID counterparts are. So, so that's a really big, important one. I think in terms of other things that I've learned At USAID across 20 years, some of these will sound really familiar. And Melissa, some of these are probably coming up at the CAM World conference that you're at. A big one for me has always been go where the energy is. I remember when I first came into USAID as a knowledge management person in a sector I was in, microenterprise development. And one of the biggest mistakes I made was wasting a lot of time on my grumpiest colleagues who were the least likely to want to share their knowledge. Had some real knowledge. Hoarders there really didn't get the, the point of it. And I wasted a lot of time on, on them. And it was only as I continued to do this work that I realized, oh, I need to go with the early adopters. I need to go where the energy is. Where's the opening? You know, it's really like a campaign, right? It's a change campaign. So you're looking for who needs what. And that's, that's kind of how we've been approaching kmol. We're looking at what are the things that drive people crazy? No. Knowledge retention, transfer. And they can't find the stuff. So they need, they need the work products organized. So go where the energy is. Work with the early adopters. The others will come along as you generate something that works better. I think another huge one for us has been we are so lucky in the development sector that people who work in this sector care deeply about doing effective development and humanitarian work. That caring, that passion for mission, that is a resource, and that's a resource that we can use strategically and intentionally to figure out what are the most effective solutions to the things that hang people up and trying to do effective work and how do we create those solutions and how do we roll them out? That passion is huge and we've been able to harness that a lot in the cla work. We're working on harnessing it a lot in kmol. It's a big driver around this piece around local and indigenous knowledge, people's passion for doing a better job at more equitable development. So that's a huge resource and that's something that we should leverage intentionally. I have other lessons, but I'm curious about what Melissa's lessons are.
- [44:48]
C
Yeah, let's jump to Melissa. Take it away.
- [44:51]
B
Thanks so much, Stacy. Yeah, I would say that as somebody who focused for a good third of my career on monitoring and evaluation, I really appreciate what knowledge management and earlier, you know, I was learning more about cla and found that, you know, what that brings to the table that more, you know, maybe we didn't have as much of a focus on in monitoring and evaluation is, you know, the good spade work of KM like the focus on people, the focus on processes, the focus on organizing and finding information. Because like you said, people who work at our, you know, in development have a passion for what they do and they want to do it more effectively. And you know, it goes without saying that knowing whether what you're doing is effective or not is a great aid to your job then and to your, to your mission and your passion. And so I think that's a wonderful selling point for KM and we were just having a conversation about, you know, making the case for KM in this morning session. And it's, you know, if you have a set of tools or practices that can save your staff time or can make your work more effective, then those translate into dollars, they translate into programs, they translate into impact in people's lives, they translate into your own job satisfaction with feeling like you are able to get more done. So I think that those are really important things for us to tap into as we, you know, work on it, supporting those policies that go. All of these goals that we have around being effective in the field and leveraging the tools that Cam and OL bring to that like that just amps up our effectiveness so much more. And I'll, I'll echo Stacy's points about change. It is a long build to change behaviors in any organization. It's a, it's, you know, a decades long kind of horizon is what we really should have. So we can't let ourselves get discouraged. You know, if we feel like change is uneven it's taken up very well and then maybe it's not taken up when staff rotate. That's just a, a considered and relentless effort is what we have to be prepared for. Right? To kind of, to shift the tide and the culture in our organization. The good news about our policy is that it was a very grassroots led effort. We've focused on things that staff have identified as perennial challenges and we, we've had leadership support over a number of years because it's, it's hard to argue against doing your work better. It's hard to argue against more productivity and efficiency. Those are, those are easy selling points also for leadership. So to the extent that we are assessing how the policy is, is supporting people in those ways, we can continually make the case to leadership as well as to staff to, you know, that it's worth the effort, that it's worth putting in a bit of time now to save, you know, to pay dividends in the, in the 2, 3, 4 year time horizon. So those are, those are some reflections that I have kind of navigating through my career trajectory and landing and in the KMOL space. I really see this as a, as a culmination and a bringing together of a lot of different tools that we have to wield them together and yield more dividends.
- [48:27]
C
Great. Thanks, Melissa. Stacy, I want to jump back to what you mentioned about the policy and even just rolling it out internally and then get back to Melissa some more on that. And really what the, so what is for the implement for the implementing partners around the world? You know, how does the, what should they learn? What should they take away really tactically into their day to day operations and program management. But Stacy, one thing we'd like to do is just share more how USAID operates so these partners can better support your, you and your colleagues and work with you. How do you roll out a policy like this internally at usaid? Is there an internal webinar link that you host that everyone joins? Is it an email? I think it'd be very interesting for everyone to hear a bit more about that initial internal launch of the policy at usaid.
- [49:14]
A
Sure, yeah. Thank you for asking. That is the primary thing that we're focused on right now and we're doing a lot of things. We'll see how well they stick. I mean, one of the things that we're doing, and Melissa is leading on this is, is trying to figure out how we're going to monitor and assess the impact that the policy is having on how we're working. So how effective Is it, You know, policy implementation is. Is a difficult thing to really understand and measure. So we're. So we're working on that. That's one of several things. So the policy was approved. It was a long process drafting it. It was a long process getting it cleared. It went all around the agency. It got cleared by many, many people. And then we formally released it via an agency notice. So these are notices that come out every day at usa. There's a digest that comes out at the end of the day. And these are the agency notices. And we had teed this up for that magic moment when the thing finally got cleared. So we put out the agency notice saying the policy was released. USAID's first ever knowledge management and organizational learning policy. Here's a link to the policy. It's on USA.gov so it's public, publicly available. And then we had a video that was just a short video kind of introducing why are we doing this, what it's for, what the focus is. So that was an initial communications splash and we've had some other communications things that we've done as well. We have leveraged an internal community of practice. We have that's called the Knowledge Management and Organizational Learning Action Group. It's kind of a sub community to the CLA community of practice. Lots of overlap in membership. And then of course, some folks who are in our internal M&E POCS group, they are also members of the KMOL Action Group Evaluation Interest Group also has members. So there's a lot of overlap. But we used the KMOL Action Group to publicize the policy. A lot of the people in the action group had actually contributed to earlier versions of the policy. So we shared the policy and we told people what was in it and invited them to share it with their leadership and so on. So we did that. We are working, as I mentioned, on a new chapter to the ads. So the Automated Directive Service, this is the publicly available USAID guidance. And this is the place where, where I really want to direct partners to, because you'll find there what we're telling staff about what they should be doing around what we've called in the policy leverage points for action. So the things that that Melissa was mentioning, the people, the processes, the culture, et cetera, et cetera, these are places where we can change actual things that we do. And so that's in the ads, and there are links in the ads to some tools that we've developed. I mentioned the Knowledge Retention and Transfer Toolkit, which is available on the USAID Learning Lab website. That's a.org site. It's in the public domain. There will also be, we call them additional helps. These are things that we append to the ads chapters. There will be a tool for the Google space organization guidance. So we're doing that. We're working on a series of video trainings. They're very short. It's four different trainings that together will add up to about an hour. So this is just to help staff understand what the policy is and what the implications are for them. Gosh, we're doing other things as well. Melissa, maybe you can chime in with some of the other stuff.
- [53:18]
B
Happy to do so. Yes, we, we've created one of the first things we did actually even well in advance of the policy was have an internal resource page or on our intranet where information is organized, where we, we had a lot of existing resources. We have a knowledge retention and transfer toolkit that was developed several years ago with, with missions. Right. And tested over a number of years. And we have communications campaigns around that. We try to focus on, you know, what we call transfer season, when many of our foreign service officers migrate in and out of their posts each year. We try to hit that season hard with reminders. Right. About preparing for that. And as Stacy mentioned, we, you know, are trying to leverage these internal groups to be sharing information, to be identifying tools and things that would bubble up right. To the level of this is a good tool that's used in one place. Should we elevate this to the agency level and make this more broadly available? Right. So, you know, we try to do those kinds of things. We also have a series of regional workshops that we're doing where we're trying to work with missions and regions to help them be prepared for developing their KMOL plans and workshopping that with them. We're noodling over the kinds of additional support, like online support in an ongoing way that we can make available to be working with with missions to help them emissions and operating units to help them get over the hump and produce that camel plan. So, you know, development of tools, amassing of tools, dissemination of tools, connecting people virtually and in person. We're doing a number of different using as many modalities as we can to try to influence and share information with different cohorts of staff at different levels in the agency. Because there are a lot of actions that people can be taking depending on their role, depending on their level of seniority. So we're trying to think through a sort of fulsome approach to addressing the change that we're hoping to see with the resources that we have available.
- [55:26]
A
One other thing that I want to mention in addition to all of those is this governance body that I mentioned. That's one of the requirements in the KMOL policy. We're actually launching it tomorrow. So this is a body that will make decisions about KMOL agency wide. This is a big deal for us. I think that, you know, we've done a lot of reflecting, Melissa and I have with our colleagues in the PLR Bureau at USAID on what works and what works less well in terms of trying to advance program cycle policy implementation at usaid. And one of the things that we have struggled with has been leadership awareness and leadership support at the highest levels in the agency. Because without sustained leadership support for any change effort, it will wax and then it will wane. And we want this to be sustained. So we are convening leaders from across the agency in this governance body, which is a subcommittee to the highest level governance body, which is the Management Operations Council that's convened by the Management Bureau launching tomorrow. I'm very excited. It's been a long time coming. This again will be a way to bring some cohesion across efforts across the agency and to address some issues that have been long standing pain points. So we're super excited about that as well.
- [57:04]
C
Well, congratulations. Thank you, Stacy. As we wrap up in one minute each, Melissa, starting with you, could you share the. So what for the implementing partners? What is the key takeaway that you want them to integrate into their operations, their, their, their, their project management that would really help them align with this, this new policy and the important knowledge management work you and your colleagues are leading and at usaid.
- [57:31]
B
Okay, so the, so what hot take on that I think is probably that they are critical partners with us, right, in terms of being knowledge holders and being connectors to local counterparts and local communities. And we need them to engage with us in supporting efforts to source knowledge from various places, to generate new knowledge if needed during the course of implementation and to think about from the outset how we make that knowledge as accessible as possible to the key audiences that we have. And therefore we will make decisions right in terms of accessibility and format and medium, all of those things that will make that, make that information, make that knowledge more relevant, more timely, more useful for them for their implementation for us collectively. So I would say that's a, that's a key takeaway that requires some forethought. Right. So thinking that through the outset of implementation is really important. What's the role that they're going to play in that.
- [58:38]
C
Thank you, Melissa. Stacy, same question to you. The so what for the implementing partners?
- [58:43]
A
Sure. And I think my answer is kind of an extension of what Melissa is saying. Our partners are absolutely critical in this and really everything else that we do I mentioned earlier, often our partners are ahead of us in innovating in knowledge and learning. So bring it to us and bring it to us in the form of what you put in your proposals. Bring it to us in candid conversations with your USAID counterparts. Tell us in the PLR Bureau when our guidance might be falling short or when you see gaps and we need to do something else. You can reach us@kmolsa.gov partner with us. Take us seriously when we say we acknowledge your leadership, we want to hear from you about what else we can do. We want to learn from you. And one thing that I'll say that is a key piece of this is we want the leadership in our implementing partner organizations to let their staff in country take risks. Sometimes I've encountered when I go out to a country, I've encountered really exciting forward leaning work that our partners are doing and they are sometimes held back a little bit by their leadership back in Washington or wherever their headquarters is because there's a certain kind of risk aversion involved in doing business with usaid. Work with us to push the envelope. Work with us to take on a little bit more risk to make these changes stick. Thank you Stacy.
- [60:25]
C
What a great way to wrap it up. Stacy, Melissa, thank you very much for taking an hour from your important work to share the great work you're doing on knowledge management USAID and to share the lessons learned and insight with the entire aid market. Really appreciate that work and and excited to see where this goes. I think probably would make sense to check back in again next year to see where everything's at. So Stacy, Melissa, thank you very much for being on the show today. Really appreciate it.
- [60:53]
A
Thanks Mike. Really appreciate the opportunity.
- [60:55]
B
Thank you, thank you.
- [60:57]
C
Thank you. Have a great day.
- [61:03]
B
Thank you for tuning in to the Aid Market podcast.
- [61:06]
A
If you enjoyed today's show, be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
- [61:10]
B
And connect with Mike Shanley on LinkedIn to stay updated on the latest USAID funding trends.