Kick off meetings signify the start of a new program, with a new team. This is a crucial opportunity to embed responsive feedback ab initio.
What to do:
Unite a team of stakeholders who are motivated to improve through feedback
- Getting the right people into the room is key to ensuring success from responsive feedback. A number of stakeholders are responsible for a program’s success and are similarly responsible for adopting and advocating responsive feedback within teams.
- Involve a diverse team, including those responsible for decision making, program implementation and measurement and evaluation.
- Challenge each team member to identify opportunities where they can utilize responsive feedback and improve through learning.
Streamline decision making by agreeing decision processes and areas of authority
- Identify and agree roles and responsibilities.
- Work together to agree a process for decision making and ensure team members are clear on their area of authority
Plan responsive feedback into timelines
- Throughout discussions, ensure that listening, learning and iterating is planned for.
- This could mean allocating more time than usual in between milestones, and specific reflection time is mandated after milestones such as midline research, so teams can discuss learnings and decide whether there is a need to re-calibrate or optimize.
Use a Theory of Change to identify areas where testing and learning could be particularly fruitful
- Ask these questions:
- What don’t we know much about?
- Where are our biggest assumptions?
- Which area of the program has the highest chance of going wrong?
Ensure appropriate plans for data capture and feedback are in place
- Discuss the feedback mechanisms in place currently, ask how these could be improved.
- Discuss the methods of sharing this data capture, are there mechanisms in place so insights can be disseminated between stakeholders?