• Capacity building in organisations

Capacity building in organisations

How do organisations change how they work? This chapter addresses the topic of change in humanitarian organisations. Drawing on the findings of a literature review and group interviews the authors question the efficacy of some of our traditional approaches to change. They consider performance improvement and suggest alternative principles and approaches developed outside the humanitarian sector. The document considers whether these approaches can be introduced into humanitarian agencies, and presents examples of successful organisational change programmes from NGOs, the UN, donor agencies and the Red Cross movement.

The authors outline approaches to thinking about organisations and how they change, they show how these approaches have been implemented. In addition the chapter shows how successful change programmes benefit from a clear vision of the future. This vision needs to describe what the organisation will do differently in the ‘outside world’ and it needs to show how the organisation will be different. The authors argue that vision which concentrates exclusively on what the organisation will do differently can lead to a situation where new processes are created, but are never fully implemented because the organisation hasn’t changed enough for new approaches to take root. Areas examined within this chapter include:

• major changes in the world that have influenced humanitarian work over the past decade
• approaches to organisations that have been developed by specialists in organisational development and change management
• how approaches to organisations can be used to create different ways of implementing organisational change
• specific structural and cultural constraints that humanitarian agencies may have in implementing the approaches
• how different humanitarian organisations have implemented change
  

• Full text of document
• Publisher details
• Send to a friend