Adaptive collaborative management of community forests in Asia ...

Chapter 5: Muddling Towards Cooperation in Malinau • 149
Learning within the facilitation team
Creating this adaptive facilitation required an initial large investment in
team building and communication skills during the first year, with ongoing
efforts at a lower level of intensity. Our team size and composition shifted
with each phase, but the continuity of a core team of five people ensured that
our own learning was cumulative 13 . The team’s deep and rich knowledge of
Malinau over the years provided the foundation for judging when to adjust
our strategy and how.
In the beginning, our team was very focused on creating structures that
allowed reflection. Over time, the team developed its own organisational
culture and rhythm in which reflection and feedback became automatic. We
had daily sessions during events such as the intercommunity workshops, and
we met at about three-month intervals for planning. Villagers sometimes
participated directly in the sessions, and we often solicited feedback from
external observers or villagers to inform our reflections. Our usual planning
horizon was three to six months. The initiation of a new cycle of activity
emerged naturally during the planning sessions, in which we reviewed the
effectiveness of previous plans based on the results from the monitoring and
other activities. We built risky or uncertain activities 14 into our plans with
the understanding that we would learn by doing and be flexible enough to
make midcourse adjustments.
Ironically, however, as the process became more automatic, we tended to
make fewer structured opportunities for it to happen. The learning process
also tended to become a low priority in the rush of events. We suggest that
maintaining a structured, explicit approach to learning even after it becomes
well accepted will help ensure that it is not neglected. The challenge is to
find fresh approaches to reflection to avoid making the learning process too
time-consuming, tedious or boring.
Results of our learning
Each cycle of activity evolved in the context of work that preceded it and
reflected our own deeper understanding, commitment and embeddedness
in Malinau. Our understanding of spontaneous orders for cooperation,
on the other hand, emerged from what we referred to as the ‘theory of
coincidence’ and has become clear to us only in recent years.