The ingredients of a capacity building process

Bland, soggy, boring. The world is aching for capacity building opportunities to address the problem of bad sandwiches. It’s easy to have a vision for a world full of delicious, textured, layered sandwiches, but it’s harder to know what a process that facilitates that looks like. It comes down to the fundamental question of what we mean when we use the term “capacity building”.

Over time, I’ve noticed four major ingredients in a capacity building process.

1. Defining the challenge

A successful capacity building process requires understanding the context surrounding the gap we’re trying to address, at the individual, group and system level. Do we care about making good sandwiches? Why? Is it something others will be interested and able to invest their time and energy into? What are the habits, norms, mindsets and practices that have led to these terrible sandwiches? How are they perpetuated? At its core, this phase allows us to identify the opportunities and barriers in your sandwich-making quest and the specific capacities that might be required to address them.

2. Fostering understanding

We need to understand current ideas about sandwich making and come to a common understanding of the characteristics of a tasty sandwich. Does it depend on the context? Are there universal sandwich principles? Coming to this common understanding is a process that often happens through conversation. We need to wrestle with our ideas about sandwiches, where they come from, and if they’re helpful in the broader sandwich landscape. When we have a chance to socialize the idea of what it looks like to improve sandwiches, the foundations for capacity building have been built. If we are unable to create this understanding, it’s nearly impossible to move forward.

3. Building skills

We need the practical and technical skills to be able to build sandwiches. We need to practice baking bread. We need access to fresh ingredients and reliable recipes. Practicing with one another is an opportunity to learn from  collective efforts and reflect on the implications on the understanding that we’ve already created. Does the practice of putting a sandwich together change our understanding of what a good sandwich looks like? Even if you’re building capacity around something less concrete than sandwich-making, opportunities to practice new mindsets is an important part of taking things from the ideal and hypothetical and making them tangible and real.

4. Integrating it into the everyday

It’s great to have a sandwich workshop, but if we go home and continue to make our tasteless sandwiches, the capacity building process has not been successful. There are so many reasons why this may be the case. Sometimes the problems are rooted in previous phases: we did not identify with the problem around sandwiches, it’s not a priority for us; we never gained clarity about the qualities of a great sandwich; we never developed the skills to execute on our vision. Other times, the problems are rooted in barriers that exist outside of the context of the capacity building opportunities: we no longer has access to an oven to bake our bread; we no longer have time to dedicate to our sandwich craft; our sandwich making approach keeps getting vetoed by people who are used to and benefit from the old ways of doing things.

As always, these phases aren’t as linear as I’ve made them out to be. They are iterative and intertwined. But paying attention to the layers of capacity building, and how they relate to each other, can help us diagnose what’s effectively building capacity and where there are challenges. Overall, breaking down a capacity building process into these ingredients is one way of being sure that we can ask ourselves whether and why we’re having the impact we’re hoping for and ensuring that what we learn can help us improve our approach.