Jenny Pearson: ‘I’m impressed'

September 16, 2011 - On September 8th and 9th Jenny Pearson joined us for a joint learning session and conducted an inspiration session linked to the Thematic Learning Programme Organizational Assessment. Jenny joined us representing a Southern ‘voice of practice’.

We invited  Jenny Pearson because she is a hybrid: A European who has lived and worked in Cambodia for nearly 17 years and is founder of VBNK (a successful Cambodian Capacity Building institute).  She has a lot of professional and personal similarities with colleagues in Dutch organizations but also an extensive experience and Southern perspective on organizational development, donor relations and other relevant topics. For Jenny this was the first time she took part in such sessions.

Mutually impressed
She impressed us with her insight in various Organisational Assessment topics, in particular concerning the various cultural aspects of learning in partnerships. But we also impressed her. In her impression report she puts it like this: ‘Firstly I am very impressed that this TLP OA is happening at all.  So many organizations say that they are learning organizations, but in reality they give no resources and make no space in their results-driven organizational lives to pay learning the attention it needs.  Any learning that happens is individual, by chance, on the run, and very rarely recorded, synthesized or in any other way integrated into knowledge systems for broader and deeper organizational learning. While this type of learning of course has its place in the totality of learning opportunities it is by no means sufficient to address the urgent needs we all face for improved development practice at all levels in the system. The deep, intentional learning that is necessary for significant change in how we approach complex development challenges can only come from deep, intentional and well structured processes.

This is especially so for those working across cultures, at a distance and with the added complication of being donors in ‘partnership’ with local organizations in other countries’.

‘Another impressive aspect of the TLP is that the PSO personnel involved are approaching everything in the spirit of being fellow learners with their MO (member organizations’) colleagues – not for them the role of expert telling others how to do it, a very good start indeed’.

At the Joint Learning sessions OA practitioners of Red een Kind, Woord en Daad, the War Trauma Foundation and Dark and Light were present. The inspirational sessions were open to the public.

More information

• Read Jenny Pearson’s full impressions report (Draft).
• View the VNBK ICCO Partners Project powerpoint presentation.
• View the agenda for the reflection meeting on September 8 and 9.

View photos of the meetings in Seats 2 Meet