What Should You Consider Before You Pivot?

Recently I attended a conference on “Doing Things Differently”, hosted by the Asian Development Bank in the Philippines and supported by GIZ. It was superbly organized and managed by Futuregov, a swell bunch of folks who also introduced the “Unconference”.

This is where they allow conference participants to propose their own topics for discussion. Other participants can “vote with their feet” - join any Unconference session that interests them. As participant, you can move freely between any of the five or six simultaneous Unconference sessions.

I proposed a session around the question  - when you’re project approach does not seem to be working and you want to change strategies, what are the factors that you should consider before you pivot?

The beauty with these Unconferences, I learned, is that the “host” does not have to do all the talking. Other participants chimed in with their ideas, even trafficked the discussion.

Here are some of the ideas that I noted down after the session.

When you’re caught between persevering or pivoting, you need to think about:

• The way your project was designed in the first place. If it’s a traditional contract with specific activities and deliverables, you might have very little option to do things differently. If it’s anything like the Coalition for Change partnership of The Asia Foundation (Philippines) and the Australian Embassy’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (Philippines), you have more room to manuever;
• The ethics of abandoning any commitments or obligations that you have already made;
• Loss of social and political capital - you could seriously damage relations with partners who favor the original approach, even if it looks to you like that approach is not working;
• Financial and legal consequences;
• Your funding burn rate - should you throw in good money after bad?

So it looks like there’s a lot to of things that need to be considered before one shifts strategies. What’s significant for me is now more people are talking about these things. A decade ago this was out of the question - an implementing organization has to do what it agreed to do, with it’s ODA funder. Now implementors are asking ODA funders to be more flexible, to be more effective. This flexibility, I believe, is at the heart of doing development differently.