Author: Linda Mayoux

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iLEAD Tool 6: Leadership Flower

Growing the change movement

Brings together the individual vision journeys as a flower diagram where each member’s journey is a flowerlet around a central stem. The flower and all the flowerlets need to flourish and send out nectar and pollen and increase the numbers of flowers.

Participation Flower 2

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Steps

Step 1 Draw the leader stem to represent the leadership journey

Referring back to the Leadership Diamond, the tip of the stem represents the characteristics of a very good leader – what distinguishes them from normal members – then moving down to qualities which are basic and more normal.

Step 2 Flowerlets to represent ideal membership qualities

Both members and leaders each have flowerlets with their name or symbol representing their individual leadership vision journeys. Leaders’ journeys should be at the bottom because they are supporting the others to move up. Members who have least confidence should be at the top because everyone will succeed only if the most disadvantaged also succeed.

Step 3 How many ripe and unripe seeds are there currently in each flowerlet?

Referring to the criteria in the stem, each person puts along their journey red circles to show which criteria they have already reached, green circles to show which criteria they are planning. They do not need to have everything in their plan.

Step 4: What are the diseases of the leadership stem? the gnawing insects of the flowerlets?

Starting with the qualities identified as most important what are the most significant causes. Which are gnawing insects which just affect one or two flowers or just gnaw one bit of the stem? Which causes are general and undermine the whole plant?

STEP 5. What are the types of nourishment needed for the roots and flowers?

Then quantify on a chart which are the characteristics most people have and which most people want. Then plenary brainstorm of what sorts of fertiliser are needed to help them attain these qualities.

Step 6: Review individual targets

For any people who think they have all qualities – what next so their flower can become even more beautiful and spread to others? Each person must then put on a sheet their target qualities and strategies to put on their Vision Journeys when they go home.

Facilitation

Materials
Preparation
Timing

Step 1: Ask one person to draw the stem and then one person from each pair to come up and place what they think is the most important distinguishing feature of a good leader and put it at the appropriate place up the stem. They must justify their choice and placement.

Step 2: Ask the other person in each pair to come up and draw a flower and place the card they think is most important at the appropriate place, justifying their decision and placement.

Step 3: This can be done in plenary, or more privately over a break or while others are eg finalising the song.

Step 4: Ask people to come up and draw what they think are the most significant causes. In order to make this fun you could ask people to draw insects and diseases which look like the causes and ask people to guess what they are eg very mean looking bees or fat greedy caterpillars.

Step 5:

Step 6:

Documentation Checklist
  • Different criteria identified in a form suitable for comparison with criteria identified by other groups.
  • Numbers and percentage of group members identified in each category
  • Types of solutions proposed for increasing participation which are of broader relevance for other groups.




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iLEAD Tool 5: Leadership Plan: Individual Vision Journey

An individual leadership plan with the individual leadership vision, target outreach, opportunities and challenges and timebound steps.

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Steps

Step 1 future leadership vision

Reflecting on the discussion of leadership in Tool 1 Visioning, put your own personal leadership vision in a large red sun circle at the top right hand corner of your page. Remember to put details and draw in a way that will inspire you to pick yourself up, and continue to move forward if you fall and stumble on the rocks along the road.

Step 2 present leadership situation and drafting the road

In a smaller current circle at the bottom left hand corner of the page put your current position as leader of member.
Draw two straight lines as a single road to link both circles.

Step 3 opportunities and constraints

Thinking back to the discussion on the Challenge Action Tree, on either side outside the road draw:
at least 10 opportunities at the top of the road – the things which will help you up if you fall down. The more opportunities you can think of, the easier it will be to advance. Think particularly of skills and experience you may have of leadership eg as a mother or father, or elder daughter or in a friendship group.
at least 10 constraints go under the road because these are the things which can drag you down. It is important to foresee and avoid them if possible.
The things which are most under your control nearest the road. The things which you cannot control go furthest from the road.

Step 4 Leadership target and milestones

Every journey starts with small steps. Now you need to plan how realistically, with the opportunities and challenges, you can start to move.
Draw a circle next to the vision where you will fill in the numbers of people of different types that you aimed to reach in your leadership chain map.
Then put 3 circles at equal distance along the road as milestones for each 3 months. Leave enough space in between – that is where you will put the actions.

Step 5 SMART action plan

Then between each milestone you put in the actions needed to move from one to the next – revising the milestones and target if necessary.

Step 6 Tracking

You will then track your progress over time, and adjust your drawing as needed to get as far as you can towards your vision.

Facilitation

This is an individual exercise facilitated interactively by participants. If facilitation so far has been participatory from the back, the facilitator at this level should not need to intervene. A good time to take photos or polish notes.

Materials and preparation:
– blank flipchart and markers at the front for participants to remind people of basic steps
– participants should have their own notebook diaries and coloured pens



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iLEAD Tool 4: Leadership Strategies: Challenge Action Tree

Role Play and

Discusses the challenges encountered and/or anticipated in peer sharing and movement building for different contexts: informal peer sharing, group sharing etc. And discusses potential solutions and actions to address these challenges.


Steps

STEP 1: LEADERSHIP VISION TRUNK

Draw two lines for the trunk in the middle of the sheet of paper.
Place a symbol for leadership vision at the top of the trunk.
Put a circle for current assessment at the bottom of the trunk
In the middle put number of leaders and members with different symbols for each and different colours for women and men.

STEP 2: CHALLENGE ROOTS OR CAUSES

What are the challenges that mean the group functioning or upscaling is not yet reaching the vision. Many different causes may be interrelated for different targets. Some causes are for women, some for men, and some for both.
In the case of leadership we put roots for: individual causes, household causes, group-level, community and government, religious institution etc as relevant from the mapping. Try to combine these so as not to have too many roots.

STEP 3 BRANCHES OR POTENTIAL SOLUTIONS

For each root draw one branch: household, community, individual. Then for each element on the roots identify an appropriate action, or series of actions which can be taken. Put these in the corresponding position along the branch.

STEP 4 FORCES ON THE TRUNK

What are the external context forces acting on the trunk or poisoning the subsoil?

STEP 5: DEFINING THE SMART ACTION FRUITS

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For each solution identify a SMART action fruit that you will commit to.

STEP 6: TRACKING
FACILITATION

Materials

Preparation

Timing

This is a group activity in the same groups as Activity 1 Step 1 ie 4-6 groups of women and men, divided into leaders and members. But participants also draw their own situation in their notebooks.

Step 1 is done interactively by a volunteer from the back – on the assumption they are the less confident ones to encourage.

Steps 2 to 5 are done with participants drawing on cards and coming up in turn to present at the front.
After each step has been discussed and shared, each person does their own drawing in their notebook. Putting as many symbols as they want that they agree with from the discussion.

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iLEAD Tool 3: Leadership structures: Empowerment Movement Map

Reviews the peer sharing and upscaling of the PALS/GALS tools so far and identifies ways of increasing the leadership networks as a chain process where those trained then go on to train others in a type of pyramid marketing process for exponential upscaling of the change movement.

Animation

Steps

Step 1

Step 2

Step 3

Step 4

Step 5

Facilitation



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iLEAD Tool 2: What is good leadership? Leadership Role Play and Diamond

Purpose: Fun process to start discussion of 6 characteristics of 1) good leaders 2) bad leaders 3)good members 4) bad members with role reversal plays and ranking and voting on a Leadership Diamond. The aim are to break down barriers and distinctions between leaders and members and to build confidence and listening skills of all participants, particularly leadership visions of poorer and more disadvantaged women and men. The activity provides a good basis of conceptual understanding of leadership for discussions of peer sharing experiences and individual vision journeys in the next tools.

Steps and facilitation

Materials:
– cards in different colours for each group and pens in two colours: green and blue for each group

Preparation:
– large blank parent diamond diagram placed at the front of the hall
– if possible arrange to play a leadership song from another process as people arrive eg download the You Tube video on this page to a laptop with speakers and screen if possible.

Timing: 3 hours with break

Step 1: Leadership Drawing

20 min: As people arrive divide them into 4-6 groups of 2-6 people:
1) women leaders and better-off 2) men leaders and better off to work on membership qualities.
3) women members and poorer 4) men members and poorer to work on leadership qualities.
Each group is given cards of a different colour, 4 cards per person.
Sufficient marker pens are given to each group in two colours – green for good and blue for bad leadership.
Each person draws in green 2 good cards and in blue 2 bad cards.

Step 2: Group sharing and discussion

10 minutes in each group each person presents and places their cards on the wall at the front. First good cards in rows on top, then in a second round their bad cards in rows lower down.

Step 3: Role Reversal Play

20 min role play preparation: from each group half the people move taking with them the relevant cards so that there are new gender-segregated groups with both members and leaders 1) women’s good leadership 2) men’s good leadership 3) women’s bad leadership 4) men’s bad leadership.
Each group prepares a short role play with members playing leaders and leaders playing members in their respective groups.
10 minutes presentation and discussion per group .
As the groups come up they place their cards in their respective ranked position on a leadership diamond pre-prepared by the facilitator.

Step 4: Voting

10-20 minutes: Each participant is given 3 votes for the best leadership characteristics and 3 votes for the best membership characteristics. They do not have to vote for their original ideas, and they can give 3 votes to 1 criterion, or 1 vote to 3 criteria. Depending on numbers, time and sensitivity, this can be done by a simple plenary show of hands or in a more private way over a health/meal break or while others are doing Step 5.

Step 5: Leadership Song

30 minutes to write, 10 minutes to perform per song.
Now participants form three groups to write the short chorus of a song:
– women and men leaders to write a good membership song of how they want members to be.
– women members write a good leadership song.
– men members write a good membership song.
Each will be progressively developed in each group with verses in the following exercises(see song writing facilitation guide) and finally combined into one performance at the end.

Documentation

Video the Diamond plenary with translation, role play with notes and songs.

Photograph of all diamonds first without annotation. Then put small sticky notes with the meaning of the symbols and take a second photograph.

From this make an Excel sheet of the good and bad leadership and membership qualities, disaggregated by leader/member and women/men. See sample sheet.

Photographs of the diamond process and song-writing

Words of the chorus of each song on two large flipcharts placed at either end of the room for future use

Translation of each chorus and both texts in a Word document.

Qualitative process notes and implications for facilitation of following tools eg issues of sensitivity, particular participants who may need more support and encouragement to speak and come to the front or be encouraged to listen more and speak less and stand further back to let others forward.



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iLEAD Tool 1: Why leadership? Visioning a better world

Soulmate visioning as a recap bringing together individual visions and updating and refining collective visions for change from earlier PALS processes.

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Advanced Tools And Leadership Strengthening

After 3-6 months more advanced versions of the same tools are introduced for the most active champions emerging through the catalyst phase through:

  • core skills strengthening (eg livelihoods, health, climate change) (3 days) to: introduce more advanced versions of the basic diagram tools adapted for livelihoods (increasing incomes challenge action tree, household business tree, market map, livelihood calendar vision journey) and examine areas for collaboration to increase incomes. This starts to look at how the business/efficiency case for gender and PALS could be established and how to collect the necessary information.
  • leadership strengthening (3 days) introduces tools for leadership development (leadership soulmate visioning, leadership diamond, leadership challenge action tree and leadership vision journey) and reflect on PALS facilitation and peer sharing experience.
  • initiating monitoring system reviews experience so far looking at the achievements (red ripe fruits) on the original diagrams and introduces the core PALS monitoring tool for the whole process (Multi-lane Vision Journey).
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Impact Assessments

https://www.ifad.org/documents/38714170/41377902/hhm_stocktake.pdf/d64f0301-19d5-b210-3ace-765ba0b5f527

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Empowering Enquiry

Case Story suggested guidelines

We need:

some short welcome messages from champions for the Swahili Karibu page and for the beginning of the page on each process – to make things welcoming and human to visitors

Photos:

  • general environment and context, crops, richest and poorest houses, markets
  • people with their house and economic activities – particularly anything unusual. Or extremely good quality coffee.
  • people with their families eg doing things achieved on their gender balance tree – to show how differently things can be done
  • people sharing GALS with others in their houses and/or meetings – to show the facilitation process
  • peoples’ diagrams on the walls in their houses and/or in their notebooks with description or annotation (just lots of pictures does not mean much to outside visitors to the website)

Video clips or spoken interview

Background

  • the champions introduce themselves briefly – name, what they do, family background, leadership positions
  • when did they first learn GALS

Catalyst tools:

  • what was their vision, including ownership issues
  • their vision journey – what have they achieved, what were the opportunities, what were the challenges, what is their plan now?
  • their gender balance tree – what were the things they wanted to change, what have they achieved, what is their plan now?
  • empowerment leadership map – who did they plan to share with? what have they achieved? what is their plan now?

Livelihood tools

  • what was their vision?
  • challenge action tree
  • market map
  • livelihood calendar

including effects on coffee production

Leadership tools

  • what was their vision? what do they think good leadership is?
  • leadership vision journey

(informally ask about issues in governance)

.Conclusions

  • what are the main things they like about GALS
  • what are the main achievements they value most?
  • what things do they think could be improved?
  • how would they persuade other people to join?

For print version click Case Story Suggested Guidelines

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Empowering Enquiry

Quantitative methods

Advocacy campaigns often require justification through ‘rigorous’ quantitative information on large numbers of people. Quantitative methods as they are commonly conceived derive from experimental and statistical methods in natural science.

The main concern is with rigorous objective measurement in order to determine the truth or falsehood of particular pre-determined hypotheses.

  • the main focus is on measuring ‘how much is happening to how many people’.
  • the main tools are large scale surveys analysed using statistical techniques. Quantitative measurable indicators relevant to the pre-determined hypotheses are identified and combined into questionnaires.
  • questionnaires are then conducted for a random sample or stratified random sample of individuals, often including a control group.
  • causality is assessed through comparison of the incidence of the variables under consideration between main sample and control group and/or the degree to which they co-occur.
  • in large-scale research projects teams are composed of a number of skilled research designers and analysts assisted by teams of local enumerators.

Use of quantitative methods on their own have a tendency to reduce complex issues, including gender issues, to simplistic indicators chosen for ease of measurement, but which may not be the most important or relevant in planning for change.

Empowering Enquiry in Quantitative Research

All research and impact assessment methodologies, including statistical surveys, informal interviews as well as participatory methods, can be more empowering for those giving their valuable time to answering questions.

Empowering Enquiry provides simple guidelines that can underpin any methodology.

  1. Stakeholder participation
  • ensure inclusion and informed participation of the most vulnerable stakeholders
  • include these stakeholders in those stages in research where participation can be most directly empowering to them. Participation may be more important at the design, analysis and dissemination stages than the actual collection of information itself.

2) Design of questionnaires, interviews and participatory meetings to contribute to increasing people’s understanding of their situation and ways forward as well extracting information without necessarily increasing their length. Questions can be sequenced to:

  • start by clarifying the vision people have
  • celebrate what they have already achieved
  • identify challenges to further progress
  • identify clear concrete strategies for moving further along the road to their vision.

3) The research process itself aims to contribute to an ongoing multi-stakeholder learning process through:

•  building up capacities and structures for ongoing representation of poor women and men and other vulnerable people in the policy making process.

•  facilitating direct interaction between powerful stakeholders and poor people in order to break down the barriers of complacency, misinformation and prejudice which are in themselves key causes of gender inequality and poverty.

For more details see the Empowering Enquiry Toolkit:

What is Empowering Enquiry?

1: What do we want to know? Selecting Indicators
2: Whom do we ask? Sampling
3: How do we find out? Collecting Information
4:What Do We Do with it? Documentation and dissemination

Gender inequalities raise particular challenges for all types of research: participatory, quantitative and qualitative. See:

Intra-household Impact Assessment 2005

For easily accessible overviews of the strengths and pitfalls of different statistical techniques see the website for Statsoft For access to many further resources see the quantitative methods, statistics and quantitative database sections on the MathsZone and LearnStatistics.com websites.