Stories

Category: Leadership

  • Gender in emergencies: a new peer learning programme from The Geneva Learning Foundation

    Gender in emergencies: a new peer learning programme from The Geneva Learning Foundation

    This is a critical moment for work on gender in emergencies.

    Across the humanitarian sector, we are witnessing a coordinated backlash.

    Decades of progress are threatened by targeted funding cuts, the erasure of essential research and tools, and a political climate that seeks to silence our work.

    Many dedicated practitioners feel isolated and that their work is being devalued.

    This is not a time for silence.

    It is a time for solidarity and for finding resilient ways to sustain our practice.

    In this spirit, The Geneva Learning Foundation is pleased to announce the new Certificate peer learning programme for gender in emergencies.

    We offer this programme to build upon the decades of vital work by countless practitioners and activists, seeing our role as one of contribution to the collective effort of all who continue to champion gender equality in emergencies.

    Learn more and request your invitation to the programme and its first course here.

    Our approach: A programme built from the ground up

    This programme was built from scratch with a distinct philosophy.

    We did not start with a pre-packaged curriculum.

    Instead, we turned to two foundational sources of knowledge.

    • First, we listened to the most valuable resource we have: the firsthand experiences of thousands of practitioners in our global network. Their stories of what truly happens on the front lines—what works, what fails, and why—form the living heart of this programme.
    • Second, we grounded our approach in the deep insights of intersectional, decolonial, and feminist scholarship. These perspectives challenge us to move beyond technical fixes and to analyze the systems of power that create gender inequality in the first place.

    This unique origin means our programme is a dynamic space co-created with and for practitioners who are serious about transformative change.

    Gender in emergencies: Gender through an intersectional lens

    Our focus is squarely on gender in emergencies.

    We start with gender analysis because it is a fundamental tool for effective humanitarian action.

    However, we use an intersectional lens.

    We recognize that a person’s experience is shaped not by gender alone, but by how their gender compounds with their age, disability, ethnicity, and other aspects of their identity.

    This lens does not replace gender analysis.

    It makes it stronger.

    It allows us to see how power works differently for different women, men, girls, and boys, and helps us to design solutions that do not inadvertently leave behind the people marginalized by something other than their gender.

    Gender in emergencies requires learning at the speed of crisis

    Humanitarian response must be rapid, and so must our learning.

    A slow, top-down training model cannot keep pace with the reality of a crisis.

    The Geneva Learning Foundation’s Impact Accelerator is a peer learning-to-action model built for the speed and complexity of humanitarian settings.

    It is a ‘learn-by-doing’ experience where your frontline experience is the textbook.

    The model is designed to quickly turn your individual insights into collective knowledge and practical action.

    You analyze a real challenge from your work, share it with a small group of global peers, and use their feedback to build a concrete plan.

    This process accelerates the development of context-specific solutions that are grounded in reality, not just theory.

    Your first step: The foundational primer for gender in emergencies

    We are starting this new programme with a free, open-access foundational course.

    Enrollment is now open.

    The course is a quick primer that introduces core concepts of gender, intersectionality, and bias through the real-world stories of practitioners.

    It provides the shared language and practical tools to begin your journey of reflection, peer collaboration, and action.

    Building a resilient community

    This is more than a training programme.

    It is an invitation to join a global community of practice.

    In a time of backlash and division, creating spaces where we can learn from each other, share our struggles, and find solidarity is a critical act of resistance.

    If you are ready to deepen your practice and connect with colleagues who share your commitment, we invite you to join us.

    Image: The Geneva Learning Foundation © 2025

  • The crisis in scientific publishing: from AI fraud to epistemic justice

    The crisis in scientific publishing: from AI fraud to epistemic justice

    There is a crisis in scientific publishing. Science is haunted. In early 2024, one major publisher retracted hundreds of scientific papers. Most were not the work of hurried researchers, but of ghosts—digital phantoms generated by artificial intelligence. Featuring nonsensical diagrams and fabricated data, they had sailed through the gates of peer review.

    This spectre of AI-driven fraud is not only a new technological threat. It is also a symptom of a pre-existing disease. For years, organized networks have profited from inserting fake papers into the scholarly record. It seems that scientific publishing’s peer review process, intended to seek truth, cannot even tell the real from the fake.

    These failures are not just academic embarrassments. In fields like global health, where knowledge means the difference between life and death, we can no longer afford to ignore them. Indeed, the crisis in scientific journals is not, at its heart, a crisis in publishing. It is a crisis of knowledge—of what we value, who we trust, and how we come to know. That makes it a crisis of education.

    Crisis in scientific publishing: The knowledge we ignore

    Consider what Toby Green has called the “dark side of the moon.” He is referring to the vast body of knowledge produced by established experts in international organizations. Volumes of high-quality reports and analyses come from organizations large and small. They contain immense expertise. Often, not only do they qualify as science. They may be more likely to shape policy and practice than most academic outputs. Yet this “grey literature” is rarely incorporated into the scholarly record. This is why Green is actively implementing projects to find, collect, and index such materials.

    If the formal knowledge of some of the world’s leading experts is being left in the dark, what hope is there for the practical wisdom of a frontline nurse?

    In the rigid hierarchy of evidence that governs global health, a randomized controlled trial sits at the pinnacle. At the very bottom, dismissed as mere “anecdotes,” lies the lived experience of practitioners. A nurse in a rural clinic who discovers a better way to dress a wound in a humid environment has generated life-saving knowledge that could be useful elsewhere. A community health worker who develops a sophisticated method for building trust with vaccine-hesitant parents has solved a problem in context. Yet, in our current culture, their insights are not data. Their experience is not evidence.

    To dismiss such knowledge is an act of willful ignorance. Science, at its best, is a process of disciplined curiosity. Its fundamental purpose is to reduce ignorance and expand our understanding of the world. To willfully ignore entire categories of human experience and expertise is therefore a betrayal of the scientific ethos itself. It is an active choice to remain in the dark.

    Crisis in scientific publishing: the architecture of exclusion

    This devaluation of practical knowledge is not an accident. It is a feature of a system designed to exclude. The modern ideal of science began with a radically open mission. As the scholar John Willinsky has meticulously documented in his history of Western European science, the creation of scientific journals in the 17th century was intended to create a public commons of knowledge, accelerating progress for the benefit of humanity. The principle was one of access. How was this mission corrupted?

    The architecture of modern science was built on a colonial foundation. Its violence was not only physical but also scientific and intellectual. Frantz Fanon, the Martinican psychiatrist who became a theorist of decolonization in the crucible of Algeria’s war of independence, described colonization’s deepest work as the effort to “empty the mind of the colonized.” This is a systematic process of convincing people that our own histories, cultures, and ways of knowing are worthless.

    Generations later, the Māori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith detailed how this was put into practice. She showed that Western research methodologies themselves were often not neutral tools of discovery but instruments of empire. The acts of observing, classifying, extracting, and analyzing were used to control populations and invalidate their knowledge systems, replacing them with a single, supposedly universal, European model of truth.

    This worldview pretends to be a neutral, “view from nowhere,” a concept also critiqued powerfully by the white American feminist philosopher Donna Haraway. She argued that all knowledge is situated—shaped by the position and perspective of the knower. You see the landscape differently from the mountain top than you do from the valley. A complete map requires both perspectives.

    Echoing this, her philosophical and geographical sister Sandra Harding argued that by excluding the perspectives of marginalized people, dominant science becomes “weakly objective.” It is blind to its own biases and assumptions.

    Crisis in scientific publishing: Fear of knowledge

    A common and deeply felt fear among scientists is that embracing diverse forms of knowledge will lead to a dangerous relativism, where objective truth dissolves and “anything goes.”

    Harding’s work shows this fear to be misplaced. She argues that the “view from nowhere” provides not a stronger, but a more brittle and fragile grasp of the truth. A truly “strong objectivity,” she contended, is achieved by intentionally seeking out multiple, situated perspectives. This does not mean that all views are equally valid. It means that by examining a problem from many standpoints, we can triangulate a more robust and reliable understanding of reality. We can identify the biases and blind spots inherent in any single view, including our own.

    This process is the antidote to the willful ignorance mentioned earlier. It strengthens our grasp of objective truth by making it more complete and more honest.

    Can change be paved by good intentions?

    Today, the need for a change in research culture is widely acknowledged. The world’s largest research funders publish reports calling for more diversity and inclusion. Yet we observe paralysis rather than progress. The individuals who sit on the decision-making committees of such institutions will almost certainly not fund a project with a primary investigator whose work is not validated by the existing system of prestigious but exclusive journals. Elite global scholars leading the vital movement to “decolonize global health” first established their legitimacy by adhering to conventional norms, then began using the master’s tools to have their critiques of the system heard. Such contradictions illustrate how deeply the exclusionary norms are embedded.

    Since top-down change is caught in such contradictions, a meaningful path forward may be to change the culture of science from the ground up. The core challenge is to correct for epistemic injustice: the wrong done to someone in their capacity as a knower. This injustice takes several insidious forms.

    The most obvious is testimonial injustice. Imagine the scene. A senior male doctor from a famous university presents a finding and is met with nods of assent. His words carry the weight of evidence. A young female nurse from a rural clinic presents the exact same finding based on her direct experience. Her knowledge is dismissed as a “story” or an “anecdote.” She is not heard because of who she is. Her credibility is unjustly discounted.

    Even deeper is hermeneutical injustice. This is the wrong of not even having the shared language to make your experience understood by the dominant culture. The community health worker who builds trust with hesitant parents may have a brilliant system, but if they cannot articulate it in the formal jargon of “implementation science,” their knowledge remains invisible. They are wronged not because they are disbelieved. They are wronged because the system lacks the concepts to even recognize their wisdom as knowledge in the first place.

    Projects like Toby Green’s grey literature repository or initiatives like Rogue Scholar, pioneered by Martin Fenner, that assign a permanent Digital Object Identifier (DOI) to science that was not previously in the scholarly record, are practical interventions. But this not a technological problem. It is an educational one. Changing a culture that perpetuates these injustices is the primary work. Within this larger project, new tools can serve as tactics of resistance. As such, they can be used to support acts of epistemic defiance, for example by creating a formal, citable record of knowledge that exists outside the traditional gates. Yet they remain tools, not the solution.

    The science of knowing

    You cannot fix a broken culture by patching its systems. You must change its DNA. The crisis haunting science is not ultimately about publishing, fraud, or peer review. It is a crisis of education—not of schooling, but of how we come to know. If physics is the science of matter, education is the science of all sciences. It provides the architecture of assumptions and values that shapes how every other field discovers and validates truth.

    A new philosophy of education is needed, one that includes these three principles:

    1. It must recognize that the most durable knowledge comes from praxis—the cycle of acting in the world and reflecting on the consequences.
    2. It must be built on collaborative intelligence, understanding that the most difficult problems can only be solved by weaving together many perspectives.
    3. It must pursue strong objectivity, not by erasing human perspective, but by intentionally seeking it out to create a more complete and honest picture of reality.

    To change science, we must change how scientists are taught to see the world. We must educate for humility, for critical self-awareness, and for the ability to listen. This is the work of creating a science that is not haunted by its failures but is directly contributes to a more just and truthful account of our world.

    References

    1. Boghossian, P., 2007. Fear of knowledge: Against relativism and constructivism. Clarendon Press.
    2. Couch, L., 2021. Wellcome Diversity, equity and inclusion strategy [WWW Document]. Wellcome. URL https://wellcome.org/what-we-do/diversity-and-inclusion/strategy (accessed 11.8.22).
    3. Fanon, F. (1963). The wretched of the earth. Grove Press.
    4. Fenner, M., 2023. The Rogue Scholar: An Archive for Scholarly blogs. Upstream. https://doi.org/10.54900/bj4g7p2-2f0fn9b
    5. Gitau, E., Khisa, A., Vicente-Crespo, M., Sengor, D., Otoigo, L., Ndong, C., Simiyu, A., 2023. African Research Culture – Opinion Research. African Population and Health Research Center, Nairobi, Kenya. https://aphrc.org/project/african-research-culture-opinion-research/
    6. Green, T., 2022. Wait! What? There’s stuff missing from the scholarly record? Med Writ 31, 44–48. https://doi.org/10.56012/ajel9043
    7. Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066
    8. Harding, S. (1991). Whose science? Whose knowledge? Thinking from women’s lives. Cornell University Press.
    9. Smith, L. T. (2012). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples (2nd ed.). Zed Books.
    10. The Social Investment Consultancy, The Better Org, Cole, N., Cole, L., 2022. Evaluation of Wellcome Anti-Racism Programme Final Evaluation Report – Public. Wellcome, London. https://cms.wellcome.org/sites/default/files/2022-08/Evaluation-of-Wellcome-Anti-Racism-Programme-Final-Evaluation-Report-2022.pdf
    11. Wellcome Trust, 2020. What researchers think about the culture they work in. Wellcome, London. https://wellcome.org/reports/what-researchers-think-about-research-culture
    12. Willinsky, J., 2006. The access principle: The case for open access to research and scholarship. MIT press Cambridge, MA.

    Image: The Geneva Learning Foundation Collection © 2025

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  • From Murang’a to the world: remembering Joseph Ngugi, champion of peer learning for community health

    From Murang’a to the world: remembering Joseph Ngugi, champion of peer learning for community health

    “What keeps me going now is the excitement of the clients who receive the service and the sad faces of those clients who need the services and cannot get them.” Joseph Mbari Ngugi shared these words on May 30, 2023, capturing the profound empathy and dedication that defined his life’s work. This commitment to serving those most in need—and his deep awareness of those still unreached—characterized not only his career as a senior community health officer and public health specialist in Kenya’s Murang’a County, but also his extraordinary five-year journey through the Geneva Learning Foundation’s most rigorous learning programmes.

    It was the morning of the first day of August, 2025. The message from his daughter was simple and devastating: “Hello this is Wanjiru Mbari Ngugi’s Daughter. I am the one currently with his phone. This is to inform you that Dad passed away this morning.”

    Joseph’s passing represents more than the loss of a dedicated health worker in Kenya’s Murang’a County. It marks the end of an extraordinary journey that saw him evolve from participant to peer mentor within the Geneva Learning Foundation’s learning networks—a community where over 60,000 practitioners now connect across country borders and between continents to learn from and support each other to solve problems and drive change from the ground up.

    Joseph Ngugi: The making of a global health scholar

    Over the years, Joseph shared his personal story. His path to leadership in this global community began with family tragedy. “When I was young, my sister contracted malaria number of times, leading to numerous hospital visits and long periods of missed school,” he told us. “These experiences were not only distressing but also financially draining for my family, as medical costs piled up and my parents had to take time off work to care for her.” That childhood experience of watching illness devastate a family became the foundation for his professional mission. 

    In November 2020, when the world was grappling with the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, Joseph joined the Foundation’s COVID-19 Peer Hub—a groundbreaking initiative launched in April 2020 that connected over 6,000 health professionals from 86 countries to face the early consequences of the pandemic. Unlike traditional training programmes that positioned experts as sole knowledge sources, the Peer Hub recognized that frontline workers like Joseph possessed crucial insights about overcoming vaccine hesitancy that needed to be shared across borders.

    The timing was significant. When news of the first vaccines came, participants decided to examine how they had previously helped communities move “from hesitancy to acceptance of a vaccine.” Joseph’s case study, developed through peer collaboration between November and December 2020, drew on his extensive experience with routine immunization programs in Murang’a County. His documented approach to building trust with communities became a teaching resource for colleagues across Africa and beyond—knowledge that would prove invaluable when COVID-19 vaccines began arriving in Africa months later, starting with Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire in March 2021.

    Joseph Ngugi: The Scholar’s progression

    Joseph’s engagement with what would become the Movement for Immunization Agenda 2030 (IA2030) reflected his deepening sophistication as both learner and teacher. The Movement initiative, launched globally in support of the ambitious aims of the world’s immunization strategy to leave no one behind, required more than technical knowledge—it demanded practitioners who could analyze complex local challenges and adapt global strategies to diverse contexts.

    Starting with the WHO Scholar Level 1 certification in 2021, Joseph mastered the Foundation’s approach to structured problem-solving. But it was his progression to the 2022 Full Learning Cycle, where he earned certification with distinction, that revealed his true analytical capabilities. His systematic deconstruction of vaccine storage challenges in Murang’a County exemplified this growth.

    Rather than accepting equipment failures as inevitable, Joseph deployed rigorous root cause analysis: “Why are vaccines not stored properly? Because the refrigeration units are often outdated or malfunctioning.” But he didn’t stop there. Through five levels of inquiry, he traced the problem to its fundamental source: “The most important root cause: inadequate training and information dissemination among healthcare workers and administrators.”

    This insight—that knowledge gaps, not resource constraints, lay at the heart of vaccine storage failures—helped colleagues in other countries to address similar challenges in very different contexts.

    Joseph Ngugi: From local practice to global knowledge

    Joseph’s work exemplified how the Foundation’s network transforms individual insights into collective wisdom. His malaria prevention campaigns in Murang’a County carried particular personal significance—having witnessed his sister’s repeated malaria infections as a child, he understood intimately how the disease devastated families. Now, as a health professional, he could take systematic action to prevent other families from experiencing similar suffering.

    “Local leaders, health workers, and volunteers went door-to-door distributing nets and educating families about their importance,” he shared. “The project was successful due to the collaborative effort and the support of local influencers who championed the cause. This grassroots approach helped build trust and ensured widespread adoption of bed nets.” The boy who had watched helplessly as his sister endured “numerous hospital visits and long periods of missed school” had become the health worker who could mobilize entire communities for prevention.

    Meanwhile, his immunization work achieved impressive results by using lessons learned and shared across the network. His measurable success spoke to the power of peer-tested approaches: “My county was listed in 2nd position with 95% with the highest percentage of children (aged 12-23 months) who are fully vaccinated for basic antigens as per basic schedule compared with the leading at 96% and the lowest with 23%.”

    Through peer learning that he helped facilitate – giving and receiving feedback– both his malaria prevention methods and immunization strategies became available to thousands of colleagues facing similar challenges. When global immunization leaders engaged with TGLF’s network, asking for feedback on a new framework to support integration of immunization into primary health care, Joseph’s feedback illustrated this knowledge multiplication effect. “I have referred to [the] framework more than once and shared with my colleagues and supervisors and it has been very useful,” he reported. “My colleagues were excited to know such a tool existed and were ready to use it. The framework made a difference in solving the vaccine advocacy as it has the solutions to most of my challenges.”

    Joseph Ngugi: Crisis leadership in a changing climate

    When Kenya’s devastating 2019 floods tested every assumption about health service delivery, Joseph emerged as an innovative crisis leader whose documented responses became learning resources for the Foundation’s growing focus on climate change and health. His detailed accounts revealed both the scale of climate disruption and the ingenuity required to maintain health services under extreme conditions.

    Working with local government and humanitarian agencies, Joseph helped coordinate emergency airlifts using helicopters to deliver essential medical supplies to isolated communities, with the Kenya Red Cross playing a critical coordination role. When helicopter transport was unavailable, his team improvised: “We resorted to unconventional means, such as using motorbikes and porters to deliver medicines to stranded populations.”

    His documentation captured both community solidarity and the chaos of disaster response: “People were incredibly supportive, offering shelter and food to those displaced. Local youth groups helped clear debris from roads, making some areas passable. On the other hand, there were instances of looting of medical supplies during the chaos, which slowed down our efforts.”

    Joseph’s prescient observations about the health impact of climate patterns became increasingly relevant: “Over the years, I’ve noticed that such weather-related disruptions have become more frequent and severe, a clear sign of climate change. The rainy seasons are no longer predictable, and their intensity often overwhelms existing infrastructure.” His first-hand accounts became part of a growing body of evidence showing how health workers worldwide are witnessing climate change impacts firsthand—knowledge that often precedes formal scientific documentation by years.

    Joseph Ngugi, the equity advocate

    Perhaps nowhere was Joseph’s moral clarity more evident than in his systematic approach to health equity challenges. When he witnessed an elderly rural woman being ignored at a hospital registration desk while younger, well-dressed patients received immediate attention, he documented both his direct intervention and his proposed systemic solutions.

    “I later engaged hospital staff in a discussion about unconscious bias and the need to treat all patients with dignity,” he explained. His characteristically systematic solution—implementing a token system for patient queuing that would ensure first-come, first-served service regardless of appearance or language—provided concrete guidance that colleagues could adapt to their own contexts.

    Joseph’s approach to neglected tropical diseases demonstrated similar principled persistence. Working on lymphatic filariasis in Murang’a County, he documented comprehensive community intervention approaches that included support groups for affected patients and collaboration with traditional healers to address cultural misconceptions. “Building partnerships and fostering ownership within the community were crucial in sustaining our efforts and driving positive change,” he noted—an insight that resonated across the Foundation’s network of practitioners facing similar challenges with stigmatized conditions.

    A family committed to learning

    Joseph’s commitment to collaborative learning extended to his household. His wife Caroline participated alongside him in Foundation activities, making their home a center of both local health advocacy and global knowledge sharing. Caroline documented her own community engagement successes: “Positive response from the community on the importance of taking their children for immunization. Able to reach pregnant mothers and sensitized them the importance of starting antenatal care clinic early.”

    Their partnership embodied the Foundation’s philosophy that effective global health work requires both deep local engagement and broad network connections. Joseph’s honest assessment of community health work captured both its frustrations and profound rewards: “The worst part of my job is when you reach out to the community for services and [they] are not willing. The best part is when you reach the community members and they listen to you and hear what you have brought in the ground.”

    The pioneer’s final exploration

    Even in his final months, Joseph continued pushing boundaries in ways that reflected his lifelong commitment to innovation. His recent exploration of artificial intelligence tools as potential aids to health work represented not disengagement from human learning but rather his latest attempt to incorporate emerging capabilities into community health practice—a continuation of the innovative thinking that had characterized his entire journey with the Foundation.

    For The Geneva Learning Foundation’s Executive Director Reda Sadki, Joseph was “a pioneer exploring the use of artificial intelligence” within global health contexts, demonstrating how practitioners could thoughtfully experiment with new technologies while maintaining focus on community needs.

    A voice that bridged worlds

    From November 2020 through August 2025, Joseph Ngugi completed an extraordinary progression through the Foundation’s most demanding programmes: the COVID-19 Peer Hub, WHO Scholar Level 1 certification, the Movement for Immunization Agenda 2030’s first Full Learning Cycle with distinction, Impact Accelerator certifications, and advanced collaborative work with the Nigeria Movement for Immunization Agenda 2030, which connected over 4,000 participants across Nigeria’s diverse health system.

    His Nigeria collaborative work, completed in July 2024, demonstrated his evolution into a mentor for colleagues in countries other than his own, facing similar challenges. Through structured peer review processes and collaborative root cause analyses, Joseph helped dozens of Nigerian health workers develop their own systematic approaches to immunization challenges—knowledge that will continue influencing practice long after his passing.

    “What I have learned from sharing photos and seeing photos from colleagues: we share common challenges, challenges are everywhere, love for human being is universal, health is wealth, immunization is the best investment in the world,” he wrote, capturing the spirit of global solidarity that sustained his work and connected him to practitioners worldwide.

    A legacy of networked learning

    Joseph Mbari Ngugi’s death leaves a profound void in a global learning network where his thoughtful analyses, generous mentorship, and systematic documentation created lasting value for thousands of colleagues. His comprehensive body of work—from detailed root cause analyses to innovative crisis responses, from equity advocacy to climate adaptation strategies—represents one of the most complete records of how a dedicated practitioner can evolve into a sophisticated analyst and effective advocate through structured peer learning.

    His progression from childhood dreams inspired by witnessing healthcare compassion to becoming a leader in global health networks demonstrates the transformative potential of connecting local practice with worldwide learning communities. In an era of unprecedented health challenges—from climate change to emerging diseases to persistent inequities—Joseph’s documented approach offers a roadmap for practitioners worldwide seeking to make systematic change while remaining deeply rooted in their communities.

    Joseph Ngugi’s voice may now be silent, but his contributions continue speaking through the colleagues he mentored, the frameworks he helped refine, and the thousands of health workers who will encounter his insights through the Foundation’s ongoing work. His legacy reminds us that the most effective global health leadership often emerges not from traditional hierarchies but from practitioners who combine deep local knowledge with the courage to share their experiences across borders, creating networks of learning that can respond to our world’s most pressing challenges with both precision and compassion.

    Photo credit: Matiba Eye and Dental Hospital, Murang’a County Kenya. Joseph Mbari Ngugi submitted this photo for World Immunization Week in 2023. Here is what he told us about the image: “This is me, and Grace M Kihara, nursing officer, on the 15th of March 2023 at the Kenneth Matiba Eye and Dental Hospital in Murang’a County, Kenya. My work includes explaining to clients the importance of measles immunization and other vaccines, and advocating for immunization.”

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  • What is the relationship between leadership and performance?

    What is the relationship between leadership and performance?

    In their article “What Have We Learned That Is Critical in Understanding Leadership Perceptions and Leader-Performance Relations?”, Robert G. Lord and Jessica E. Dinh review research on leadership perceptions and performance, and provide research-based principles that can provide new directions for future leadership theory and research.

    What is leadership? 

    Leadership is tricky to define. The authors state: “Leadership is an art that has significant impact on individuals, groups, organizations, and societies”.

    It is not just about one person telling everyone else what to do. Leadership happens in the connections between people – it is something that grows between a leader and followers, almost like a partnership. And it usually does not involve just one leader either. There can be leadership shared across a whole team or organization.

    The big question is: how does all this connecting and partnering actually get a team to perform well? That is what researchers are still trying to understand.

    What we do know about leadership

    Researchers have learned a lot about what makes a leader “seem” effective to the people around them. Certain personality traits, behaviors, speaking styles and even body language can make people think “oh, that person is a good leader.” 

    But figuring out how those leaders actually influence performance over months and years is tougher. It is hard for scientists to measure stuff that happens slowly over time. More research is still needed to connect the dots between leaders’ actions today and results years later.

    How people think about leadership matters 

    Learning science shows that how people process information shapes their perceptions, emotions and behaviors. So to understand leadership, researchers are now looking into things like:

    • How do the automatic, gut-level parts of people’s brains affect leadership moments? (This means how emotions and instincts influence leadership)
    • How do leaders’ and followers’ thinking interact?  
    • How do emotions and body language play a role?

    This research might help explain why leadership works or does not work in real teams.  

    Some pitfalls to avoid 

    There are a few assumptions that could mislead leadership research:   

    1. Surveys might not catch real leadership behavior, because people’s memories are messy. Their responses involve lots of other stuff beyond just the facts.  
    2. What worked well for leaders in the past might not keep working in a fast-changing world. They cannot just keep doing the same thing.
    3. Leaders actually have less control than we think. Their organization’s success depends on unpredictable factors way beyond what they do.

    The future of leadership research has to focus more on the complex thinking and system-wide stuff that is hard to see but really important. The human brain and human groups are just too complicated for simple explanations.

    Reference: Lord, R.G., Dinh, J.E., 2014. What Have We Learned That Is Critical in Understanding Leadership Perceptions and Leader-Performance Relations? Industrial and Organizational Psychology 7, 158–177.

  • The capability trap: Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened

    The capability trap: Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened

    Here is a summary of the key points about the capability trap, from the article “Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened: creating and sustaining process improvement”.

    What is the capability trap?

    • Many companies invest heavily in process improvement programs, yet few efforts actually produce significant results. This is called the “improvement paradox”.
    • The problem lies not with the specific tools, but rather how the introduction of new programs interacts with existing organizational structures and dynamics.
    • Using system dynamics modeling, the authors studied implementation challenges in depth through over a dozen case studies. Their models reveal insights into why improvement programs often fail.

    Core causal loops

    • The “Work Harder” loop – managers pressure people to spend more time working to immediately boost throughput and close performance gaps. But this is only temporary.
    • The “Work Smarter” loop – managers encourage improvement activities which enhance process capability over time for more enduring gains, but there is a delay before benefits are seen.
    • The “Reinvestment” reinforcing loop – successfully improving capability frees up more time for further improvement. But the reverse vicious cycle often dominates instead.
    • The “Shortcuts” loop – facing pressure, people cut corners on improvement activities which temporarily frees up more time for work. But this gradually erodes capability.

    The capability trap

    • Short-term “Work Harder” and “Shortcuts” decisions eventually hurt capability and require heroic work efforts to maintain performance, creating a downward spiral.
    • However, because capability erodes slowly, managers fail to connect problems to past decisions and blame poor worker motivation instead, leading to a self-confirming cycle.
    • Even improvement programs just increase pressure and drive more shortcuts, making stereotypes and conflicts worse. This “capability trap” causes programs to fail.

    The “capability trap” refers to the downward spiral organizations can get caught in, where attempting to boost performance by pressuring people to “work harder” actually erodes process capability over time. This trap works through a few key mechanisms:

    1. Facing pressure, people cut corners and reduce time spent on improvement activities in order to free up more time for immediate work. This temporarily boosts throughput.
    2. However, this comes at a cost of gradually declining process capability, as less time is invested in maintenance, training, and problem solving.
    3. Capability erosion then reduces performance, widening the gap versus desired performance levels.
    4. Managers falsely attribute this to poor motivation or effort from the workforce. They lack awareness of the capability trap dynamics, and the delays between pressing people to “work harder” and the capability declines that eventually ensue.
    5. Management increases pressure further, demanding heroic work efforts, which causes workers to cut even more corners. This spirals capability downward while confirming management’s incorrect attribution even more.

    Key takeaway for learning leaders

    Learning leaders must understand the systemic traps identified in the article that underly failed improvement initiatives and facilitate mental model shifts. This help build sustainable, effective learning programs to be realized through productive capability-enhancing cycles.

    Key takeaway for immunization leaders

    It is reasonable to hypothesize that poor health worker performance is a symptom rather than the cause of poor immunization programme performance. Short-term decisions, often responding to top-down targets and donor requirements, hurt capability and require, as the authors say, “heroic work efforts to maintain performance, creating a downward spiral.” Managers then incorrectly diagnose this as a performance problem due to motivation.

    How to escape the capability trap

    The key to avoiding or escaping this trap is therefore shifting the mental models that reinforce the incorrect attributions about motivation. Some ways to do this include:

    • Educating managers on the systemic structures causing the capability trap through methods like system dynamics modeling
    • Allowing time for capability-enhancing improvements to take effect before judging performance
    • Incentivizing quality and sustainability of throughput rather than just short-term volume alone
    • Seeking input from workers on the barriers to improvement they face

    With awareness of the structural causes and delays, managers can avoid erroneously attributing blame. Patience and a systems perspective are critical for companies to invest their way out of the capability trap.

    • Shift mental models to recognize system structures leading to the capability trap, rather than blaming people. Then improvement tools can work.
    • A useful example could be system dynamics workshops that achieved this shift and enabled successful programs, dramatically enhancing performance.

    Reference

    Repenning, N.P., Sterman, J.D., 2001. Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened: creating and sustaining process improvement. California management review 43, 64–88. https://doi.org/10.2307/41166101

    Illustration: The Geneva Learning Foundation Collection © 2024

  • Towards reimagined technical assistance: thinking beyond the current policy options

    Towards reimagined technical assistance: thinking beyond the current policy options

    In the article “Towards reimagined technical assistance: the current policy options and opportunities for change”, Alexandra Nastase and her colleagues argues that technical assistance should be framed as a policy option for governments. It outlines different models of technical assistance:

    1. Capacity substitution: Technical advisers perform government functions due to urgent needs or lack of in-house expertise. This can fill gaps but has “clear limitations in building state capability.”
    2. Capacity supplementation: Technical advisers provide specific expertise to complement government efforts in challenging areas. This can “fill essential gaps at critical moments” but has limitations for building sustainable capacity.  
    3. Capacity development: Technical advisers play a facilitator role focused on enabling change and strengthening government capacity over the long term. This takes time but “there is a higher chance that these [results] will be sustainable.”

    Governments may choose from this spectrum of roles for technical advisers in designing assistance programs based on the objectives, limitations, and tradeoffs involved with each approach: “The most common fallacy is to expect every type of technical assistance to lead to capacity development. We do not believe that is the case. Suppose governments choose to use externals to do the work and replace government functions. In that case, it is not realistic to expect that it will build a capability to do the work independently of consultants.”

    Furthermore, technical assistance should be designed through “meaningful and equal dialogue between governments and funders” to ensure it focuses on core issues and builds sustainable capacity. Considerations that need to be highlighted include balancing short-term needs with long-term capacity building and shifting power to local experts.

    However, this requires reframing technical assistance as a policy option through transparent dialogue between government and funders.

    What key assumptions about technical assistance does this challenge?

    The article challenges some key assumptions and orthodox views about technical assistance in global health:

    1. It frames technical assistance not as aid provided by donors, but as a policy option and domestic choice that governments make to meet their objectives. This contrasts with the common donor-centric view.
    2. It critiques the assumption that all technical assistance inherently builds sustainable government capacity and questions this expected linear relationship. The article argues different types of technical assistance have fundamentally different aims – gap-filling versus long-term capacity building.
    3. The article challenges the idealistic principles often promoted for technical assistance, like localization, government ownership, and adaptability. It suggests the evidence is lacking on if these principles effectively lead to better development outcomes on the ground.  
    4. The article argues that technical assistance decisions involve real dilemmas, tradeoffs and tensions in practice rather than being clear cut. It challenges the notion of win-win solutions and highlights risks like unintended consequences.
    5. By outlining limitations of different technical assistance approaches, the article pushes back against a one-size-fits-all mindset. The appropriate approach depends on contextual factors and clarity of purpose.
    6. The article questions typical measures of success for technical assistance based on fast results and output delivery. It advocates for greater focus on processes that enable long-term capacity development even if slower.

    How does The Geneva Learning Foundation’s work fit into such a model?

    At The Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF), we realized that our own model to support locally-led leadership to drive change could be described as a new type of technical assistance that does not fit into any of the existing three categories, because:

    1. TGLF’s model is grounded in principles of localization and decolonization that shift power dynamics by empowering government health workers from all levels of the health system – not only the national authorities – to recognize what change is needed, to lead this change where they work. We have observed that, even in fragile contexts, this accelerates progress toward country goals, and strengthens or can help rebuild civil society fabric.
    2. It focuses on nurturing intrinsic motivation and peer accountability rather than imposing top-down directives or extrinsic incentives. 
    3. It utilizes lateral feedback loops and informal, self-organized networks that cut across hierarchies and geographic boundaries.
    4. It emphasizes flexibility, adaptation to local contexts, and problem-driven iteration rather than pre-defined solutions.
    5. It builds sustainable capacity and self-organized learning cultures that reduce dependency on external support.

    Reference: Nastase, A., Rajan, A., French, B., Bhattacharya, D., 2020. Towards reimagined technical assistance: the current policy options and opportunities for change. Gates Open Res 4, 180. https://doi.org/10.12688/gatesopenres.13204.1

    Illustration: The Geneva Learning Foundation Collection © 2024

  • Listen to the Eighth Dialogue for Learning and Leadership

    Listen to the Eighth Dialogue for Learning and Leadership

    Discover the leadership journeys of two remarkable learning leaders

    Every episode is different, drawing on the life experiences of Key Contributors and of listeners.

    As a listener, you can become a Contributor by sharing your own learning and leadership challenge – and what you are doing about it. Share your challenge…

    In the Eighth Dialogue, Karen E. Watkins and I were joined for the first time by Key Contributors Iris Isip-Tan and digital higher education strategist Keith Hampson. In Part 1 of the Dialogue – before deep-diving into the Metaverse – we explored:

    • How Iris Isip-Tan, Director of the Interactive Learning Center at the University of the Philippines in Manila, helped her colleagues pivot to emergency digital learning during lockdown – and to what extent this has led to more lasting change. How has this shaped her leadership journey?
    • In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Peter Tippett built a platform to help yoga teachers replicate and augment the direct observation and feedback that are key to their experience of teaching and learning. You will be surprised to discover where and how Peter learned the practice of leadership. 

    On the Metaverse and its significance for learning leaders

    In Part 2, we shifted our attention to the Metaverse, following Mark Zuckerberg‘s announcement that he is betting his company’s future on it. Here is how Marne Levine, Facebook’s chief business officer, described her vision for learning:

    “In the Metaverse, learning won’t feel like anything we’ve learned before. With a headset or glasses, you’ll be able to pull up schematics you’re studying, or maybe even the service manual for a vehicle you are learning to repair. Let’s say you’re a med student or a doctor. With apps like Oh So VR, you can learn new techniques in surgery first hand, practicing until you get it right. Or, if you’re studying earth science, you could swim through the Great Barrier Reef, get up close to Earth’s mightiest insects, with your instructor David Attenborough whose VR documentary is playing now in Oculus TV [David Attenorouogh voiceover]. This is just one of the ways that we are going to learn in the future.”

    Listen to the Dialogue for Learning & Leadership on Spotify

    Listen to the Dialogue for Learning & Leadership on YouTube

  • Listen to the seventh TGLF Dialogue on learning, leadership, and impact

    Every episode is different, drawing on the life experiences of Key Contributors and of listeners who become contributors by sharing their own learning and leadership challenges – and what they are doing about them.

    For this Seventh Dialogue for Learning & Leadership, recorded on 26 September 2021, we have around our table for the first time three new Key Contributors.

    • Victoria J. Marsick, PhD, is a professor of Adult and Organizational Learning in the Department of Organization & Leadership, Teachers College, Columbia University. Prior to joining Teachers College, she was a training director at the United Nations Children’s Fund.
    • Dorothy Marcic went, she says, “from Footnotes to Footlights”. She quit academia and a regular paycheck to become a full-time playwright. She wrote two hit musicals, RESPECT, which has played 2800 performances in 72 cities and SISTAS, currently playing Off-Broadway in New York City for over six years.
    • Nabanita De‘s full-time occupation is as a cloud security engineer. She is also the founder of Returnships, a non-profit initiative, aimed to help women to get back to work after a long haul in career.

    We welcome back Bill Gardner and Nancy Dixon, who listen and share their insights from the Dialogue, and thank Tari Lawson, Joyce Muriithi, and Aanu Rotimi for their insightful contributions.

  • Listen to the sixth TGLF Dialogue on learning, leadership, and impact

    In this sixth Dialogue for learning, leadership, and impact on 29 August 2021, Reda Sadki and Karen E. Watkins explore:

    • Is there a meaningful difference between change and transformation? Key Contributor Aliki Nicolaides believes that there is. She has just completed editing the new Palgrave Handbook of Learning for Transformation, a collection of more than 1,100 pages of research, thinking, and practice, exploring a more complex and deeper inquiry into the “Why of transformation.”
    • We talk to Australian communications guru Mike Hanley about how he learned to survive, adapt, and lead an organization’s communications in a world where, he says, “everything changes, in real time, as the digital media environment shifts with technology, trends and events.”
    • Tari Dawson is a doctor and teacher of medicine in Nigeria. She shares her leadership journey, revisiting a time during the HIV pandemic when she had to make difficult decisions to reshape an organization – and discovered that change is “a process, not a procedure.”
    • New digital platforms are transforming the relationships between creators and their patrons. We discuss Patreon CEO Jack Conte‘s perspective about the transformation of patronage in the Digital Age – and explore what this might mean for learning leaders. 

  • Listen to the fifth TGLF Dialogue on learning, leadership, and impact

    Welcome to this fifth episode of the Geneva Learning Foundation’s Dialogue for Learning, Leadership, and Impact, recorded on 25 July 2021. First of all, with my Co-Convenor Karen E. Watkins, I want to thank the Contributors who have brought this Dialogue to life. There are many venues where leadership and learning are discussed. I do not know of another one quite like this one, focused on practitioners from everywhere working on everything, fusing theory and research with practice, and dedicated to exploration with no rigid institutional or disciplinary boundaries.

    Bill Wiggenhorn, the legendary founder of Motorola University, is with us tonight for the first time. The other Key Contributors for this episode are: Katiuscia Fara, Bill Gardner, and Esther Wojcicki. Charlotte Mbuh, Emmanuel Musa, and Min Zha shared their leadership journeys. Other Contributors included: Esther Dheve Djissa, Joseph Ngugi, Joyce Muriithi, Morufu Olalekan Raimi, Muhammad Umar Sadkwa, and Ritha Willilo.

    Together, we explored the following issues through the twin lenses of learning and leadership:

    1. Climate change specialist Katiuscia Fara contributed the following question for discussion: How to ensure equity when looking at digital trainings given that not everyone, and especially those most vulnerable, might have access to it. What are some of the solutions that we can look at in delivering at the last mile?
    2. For the first time, we called on Contributors to fill the “Empty Chair”. This was suggested by Nancy Dixon: choose a person in the room and ask them about their insights on leadership – and share their learning journey. Charlotte Mbuh, Min Zha, and Emmanuel Musa are the first to fill the chair.
    3. Return to shared physical space? With two corporate learning heavyweights in the room, we discussed what Chief Learning Officers (CLOs) should be advising Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) to navigate the seismic shifts in the world of work wrought by the digital transformation and compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic.