December 16, 2006
Vision-setting, Pangarap, Panaginip, and Damgo

Libre naman ang pangarap.

I've facilitated many workshops, and over time, I got the feeling that Filipinos think the term "vision" is too corporate, abstract, or esoteric. I have begun using the words pangarap, panaginip, and the visayan "damgo" instead.

I think it works better for my participants. Below is a comparison between vision and pangagap, in the minds of many of my participants.
Vision-setting is for top management, pangarap is for everybody.

Vision-setting is long-term, pangarap is a daily as well as a long-term guide.

Vision-setting is a corporate process, pangangarap is a soul's process.

The vision is the corporation's, pangarap is the individual's, usually for one's self or for a beloved individual or group.

Visions are often grand, abstract, motherhood statements, pangarap is often usually personal and practical.

In the Filipino mind, pangarap sits beside panaginip, ambisyon, and pag-asa. Pangarap has a hopeful, dreamy, romantic, rose-colored quality. I wonder if pangarap draws its etymological roots from pang-harap, or future. Visions are grand statements in the annual report and office lobby.

A few years ago, I started getting workshop participants to draw or write about their pangarap for the next 3-5 years. After they've thought it through, I'd ask them to write a dedication of their pangarap to a person or entity of their choice. They often dedicate their pangarap to their children, grandchildren, the forest, the sea, or their community. I think this dedication helps make the pangarap more powerful in their lives if they committed or yearned for it for persons of their choice.

None of them dedicated their pangaraps to their employers! :)

December 4, 2006
Networking Schmertworking 2

Here it is. I found it.

As I mentioned in my previous blog, it's difficult to get traction conceptually and operationally when various agencies and NGOs attempt to do "networking".

Below is a network evolution roadmap that I designed for the alumni association of my school. We all wanted to start acting as a network. One senior at that alumni gathering poignantly said, "It is time to light a candle instead of cursing the darkness."

Here's my attempt helping make this networking thing more comprehensible.

December 2, 2006
Networking Schmertworking 1

I've heard and participated in so many multi-sectoral meetings, interagency fora for networking and integration but I get the feeling that the development sector still has trouble getting a handle on networking. Is attending a meeting networking? Is agreeing to not work in the same district networking? Is being a member of a mailing list networking?

I remember from one of my books (I wonder if it was by Fritjof Capra) a concept from evolving ecosystems, the sequence of isolation, attunement, alignment, synergy, and quantum leap. Those stages help me get a better handle on the concept of networking.

Level 0 – Isolation.

At this phase, actors act in isolation, unaware or unmindful of other actors directly or indirectly related to his own. There is not networking whatsoever.

Level 1 – Attunement.

This could be the first step and simplest step towards networking, just finding out who is there and what they are doing. I attended a WHO coordination meeting in Jogjakarta, Indonesia shortly after the earthquake in May 2006, and 2 weeks after the earthquake, they were trying to assemble a WWW map, which stood for Who, What, Where. With the rapid influx of humanitarian NGOs from various countries, the neither the Ministry of Health nor the World Health Organization knew who was operating in Jogjakarta. They asked the participants to walk up to a map and pinpoint where they were and declare what they were doing. I'd say this was attunement, just listening to each other, which is a step forward from isolation.

Level 2 – Alignment.

I think of alignment in many ways. In geometric terms, where a line (or more accurately a ray) may be parallel, convergent, divergent, or may be on different planes. Sets on a venn diagram may overlap, intersect, or become unified into one set. In physics, vectors and waves may have an additive or cancelling effect on each other.

In development work, donors in the Philippines have agreed to "converge" by assigning non-overlapping areas of work. GTZ now works intensively in Samar and Leyte. This type of convergence de-duplicates work. Probably as an unintended effect, it also strengthens brand identity to the local stakeholders and communities. In Jogjakarta, some NGOs agreed to work exclusively in one area to de-duplicate work. I'd say they moved up from attunement up to alignment when they had some geographic coordination and deduplication.

Level 3 – Synergy.

I think of synergy in algebraic terms, where 1 + 1 = 3, or 2 x 3 = 6 (or 10!). I also think of it in terms of aikido, where application of force in a few points in the right direction sends the opponent tumbling.

One prominent example of synergy to me is the Sony-Ericsson tie-up to produce mobile phones. Ericsson was an early player in the mobile phone market in the late 90's but lost much ground to the cooler, hyper-innovative Nokia. Sony is a tech giant on its own right and could have launched its own mobile phone just like Samsung. Instead, Sony tied up with Ericsson to develop a co-branded phone. Sony-Ericsson was weak in its first few years, but Sony's deep knowledge from its product lines Playstation, Handycam, Walkman, and movie-making will become aces in their hands as mobile phones evolve into cameras, gaming devices, and entertainment gadgets.

When Globe partnered with McDonalds to push sim cards along with burgers, I think there was some synergy there. Globe added the McDonalds chain to its set of outlets for selling sim cards and building up the Globe brand.

I don't think I've come across much synergizing in the development sector. As I wrack my brain, the case of a coop in Mindanao comes to mind. Just last night, their general manager and board chairperson were telling me about how they started a consumer store in 1997 with P2,700 pesos. The coop store grew, and the coop diversified such that now, they operate the local water system, run an micro-finance program, served as a conduit for credit for a reforestation program. It looks like they accumulated competencies and built up a brand that attracted a growing portfolio of partners and donors.

Perhaps synergies are triggered when knowledge capital, rather than financial capital is leveraged. Sony and Ericsson leveraged both their technologies and their brands. Globe and McDonalds leveraged their brands and McDonalds' retail network. The coop triggered a self-reinforcing loop of risk-taking, competence accumulation, and brand building.

Level 4 - Quantum Leap.

Malcolm Gladwell would call this the Tipping Point. Now I'm having trouble thinking of quantum leaps. Perhaps it was EDSA 1, where the media, military, politicians, and the citizenry started behaving with a new dynamic, if only for a moment. Ghandi's movement and Martin Luther King's movement would be similar examples of quantum leaps in the collective consciousness.

Silicon Valley is a common example of a hyper-innovative business ecosystem that resulted from the synergy of venture capitalists, academe, and entrepreneurs which resulted in a self-reinforcing, rapidly evolving community or engineers, entrepreneurs and researchers. The open source movement, and the intervention of Mozilla in browser evolution, to me, are also examples of quantum leaps.

I think these Levels may be used to rate network performance. I'd use it this way:

1. identify individual nodes/actors/individuals within the network
2. identify individual links across the nodes
3. identify the level of the relationship across each link. Is A attuned to B, are they aligned, or synergized? Come to think of it, attunement, alignment, and synergy may be directional. A may be synergized with B, but not B with A.

I organized my thoughts a bit further in a previous note and I will find that piece and publish it in this blog in the future.
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November 25, 2006
Institution-building and Brand Management

I once facilitated a workshop discussion where we discussed institutionalization. After much talk, I realized that participants seemed to use the word "institutionalization" in different ways. I asked for their definitions and sure enough, there were at least 7 significantly different definitions of institutionalization going around the table.I realized that the concept of institutionalization could be dissected using concepts in brand management. Adopting from the concepts of brand weight , breadth, depth, width, and lenght.

Below is an adaptation of these concepts of brand in the promotion of Directly Observed Treatment Short-Course (DOTS) for Tuberculosis. I applied the same adaptation to a program on community libraries and the concepts do help give us a grasp of "institution building".

Institutional Breadth - the breadth of acceptance that DOTS has achieved across various direct adopters such as pediatricians, pulmunologists, internists, infectious disease specialists, industrial medicine physicians, DOH, WHO, etc. In a way, breadth can be thought of as popularity, but it goes beyond recognition and is reflected in the expressed acceptance of DOTS as manifested by covenants signed among the medical associations.


Institutional Depth - the degree of commitment that DOTS has achieved among its adopter base and beyond. How die-hard are supporters of DOTS about DOTS? Thus depth measures the loyalty of physicians and patients to the practice of DOTS, possibly as reflected by the number of trained referring physicians who are actually referring, dropout rates of enrolled patient, and commitment of DOTS clinics to continue DOTS even without external financial incentives, simply because they believe that DOTS is superior to SAT. PDI was able to achieve depth when pharmaceutical companies committed their entire networks to DOTS at their own cost.


Institutional Length - the stretch or extension that DOTS has achieved especially outside its original category or models. Taking off from the original DOTS Clinic model, the SPN team seems to have moved largely in terms of increasing institutional length by exploring ways of DOTS-enabling HMOs, pharmaceutical companies, school clinics, DepEd, faith-based organizations, and cooperatives.


Institutional Flexibility – the degree that DOTS is standardized in its various versions as expressed by different adopters. In ways, the rigorous DOTS Clinic standards as imposed by the NTP were relatively inflexible. The 4 Levels of DOTS adoption may be thought of as introducing degrees of flexibility in DOTS adoption which in turn allowed an increase in institutional length.


Institutional Weight - The dominance of DOTS over SAT as the protocol for treating TB. Over time, it is possible for close to 100% of TB cases to be treated using DOTS, and this indicator will result from the cumulative effects of breadth, depth, and length.