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• Virtual Peacecorps Fighting Poverty

Max Watzenboeck – watzenboeck@utanet.at

NGOs have contributed a great deal to the fight against poverty. They appear to have contributed even more to the world of global scandals. This may probably be attributable to the fact that bad news sell better than good ones. World Vision, Caritas Bayern and Ostpriesterhilfe are some of the bad guys, the number of good guys is hopefully rising.

Quite a deal of the success of fighting poverty in the world is more than ever dependent on non-profit organisations. It is crucial for their success that efficient management techniques are applied.

Sudy R. claims that supervision and control are managerial tasks. In Austrian the law of Insolvenzenzkreditrechtsänderung 197 (IRÄG 1997) increased the standard for accounting and requires a control system. §82 of IKG makes this a task of the board of directors.. The supervisory requirements demand the capability to answer the following types of questions: Which measures have been taken for assuring the assets and to inhibit fraud?
Which measures increase efficiency?
How are resources protected and how are work flows efficiently organised?
How are corporate guidelines, strategies followed?
How is the accuracy of accounting checked?
How is completeness and timeliness of accounting checked?

The Model of the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQ and the self assessment following the method for the European Quality Award or the process-oriented norm ISO 9001:2000 are possibilities to gain access to these methods.

Efficient Techniques for Identifying Deviations from Accepted and Pre-defined Goals

Schlögl lists the following quick-and-dirty auditing techniques for any type of organisations:
· Filter Functions
· ABC-Analysis
· Gap Analysis
· Indices comparisons
· Sorting according to multiple criteria
· Adding key sub-totals up to expert-estimations of thresholds

Redesigning Strategies for NGOs

Those are the questions that should be answered:
· What is our present strategy?
· How does our present value chain look like? How will the future value chain look?
· What is the real scope of our business?
· Which customer segments do we service exactly?
· What benefits do they gain from us?
· What are our core competencies?
· Which competencies (design, production , distribution) must we develop further in order to beat competition?

Learning by Doing in NGOs

In order to acquire experience, competency and learning in an NGO-environment the following steps are recommended:
· Immersion into field experiences
· Achieving a pre-planned objective within a pre-set time-frame as a pre-condition for promotion within the organisation
· Learning from deviations and adapting future goal setting to the acquired experiences

Two Pillars of Knowledge - Personal and Organisational

Personal knowledge is based on
· Observation skills
· Capacity to judge relevance of observations
· Construct mini-worlds of experiences

Organisational knowledge depends on
· Systemic cognition (Construct environmental sensors – art-driven human and instrumental-oriented ones)
· Identification of value patterns – what do living beings choose why?)
· Nourishing an organisational culture – God (or above) created my organisation
· Cultivating feed-back-systems skills(i.e., Plan – do – control – LOOPS)
· Practising scrutinising documentation
· Setting-up of organisational learning processes

Transforming NGOs into Knowledge Enterprises

Knowledge is inseparably linked with ignorance on the opponent’s side. New knowledge increases ignorance and it is beneficial to realise that knowledge never solves all problems.

Karl Deutsch , Amitai Etzioni and Agyris/Schön have identified the following pathological forms of organisational learning:
· Overemphasis on the past (memory)
· Overemphasising change and/or a fanatic missionary zeal for a conversion of the others
· Control-dominated systems (Stalin : Confidence is good, control is better)
· Consensus-maniacs

Further pathogenesis in organisational learning can be attributed to cycles that are incomplete in check-and-balance concerning
· The sequence of events, individual and organisational actions and the consequences thereof.
· This explains why so much training of employees is wasted in organisations because these newly trained employees do not allow themselves to act the roles that the training was supposed to prepare them for. The wrong interpretation of marketing failures often leads to counterproductive measures. Argyris/Schön 1996 state : “Indeed, much of what would count as organisational learning , in the overarching sense, works counter to the kinds of organisational learning, we consider most desirable.

Organisational knowledge can be subdivided into
· Dictionary knowledge
· Directory knowledge (=action knowledge)
· Recipe knowledge
· Axiomatic knowledge

Control knowledge in organisations is reflexive concerning the identity and the mission of a specific organisation. In times of prosperity this knowledge is latent , it becomes only evident and manifest in times of crises.

The identity of complex organisations lies outside the scope of specific organisational designers and should not be left to auto-evolution (f. i., Roman Catholic church , Camorra, Cosa Nostra, Chinese Triades, Opus Dei), if long-term existence is a major goal. There must be a PADRE SANTO or CHIEF that superimposes divine law.

Etzioni states: “Societal units may be viewed in terms of a two-dimensional activeness space. They may be characterised as commanding varying degrees of controlling sand consensus-forming capacities. Above all, it is important to note that there is no necessary contradiction between cohesive units and control networks , both are important for increasing the societal capacity to act, and active units command both cohesive and control elements.
Etzioni finds four exemplary modes of auto-control that are explained in the table below:

Types of Control (Etzioni)

Control [->] /Consensus[ V ] Weak Strong
Weak Passive Over-controlled
Strong Free-floating Active

Etzioni’s recipe for improving auto-control of organisations is complementing the bottom-up consensus-finding mechanisms by a top-down instrumentation of a divine will (“Wille zur Macht”, Nietsche) and additionally auto-regulative networks of control.

Abplanalp, P. A. : et al. : Unternehmensstrategie als kreativer Prozess , Gerling Akademie Verlag München 2000
Sudy,R. : Überwachung als Führungsaufgabe in ÖKZ 9/22 2001

Schlögl, J. : Prüfsoftware- Finanz setzt neue Prüfsoftware ein – www.akademie.co.at

Willke, H. : Systemtheorie III : Steuerungstheorie – Grundzüge einer Theorie der Steuerung komplexer Sozialsysteme, 3. Auflage

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Last modified 2006-08-29 07:58 by Max