Introducing: From the Inside Out, A New Podcast Series from USAID Learning Lab
USAID Learning Lab is back with a new podcast series called From the Inside Out: Achieving Better Development Outcomes through Collaborating, Learning, and Adapting. Our four-episode pilot series, Collaborating, Learning, and Adapting at USAID, provided an overview of the concept of CLA and featured deep-dive CLA case studies.
From the Inside Out was designed to empower USAID staff and partners with evidence, tips, and tools to collaborate, learn, and adapt in their day-to-day work.
It covers the following topics:
- May 1 - Going Beyond Technical Skills: How to Build an Adaptive Team
- May 8 - Staying Curious, Together: How to Create a Learning Culture
- May 15 - Meeting Strategically: How to Collaborate, but Not Too Much
- May 22 - Staying in the Loop: How to Learn from your Data
- May 29 - Stopping to Think: Why it Pays to Pause and Reflect
Listen as Stacey Young, Senior Learning Advisor and CLA Team Lead in USAID’s Bureau for Policy, Planning and Learning, Ian Lathrop, Communications Manager on the USAID LEARN contract, and Amy Leo, Communications Specialist on the USAID LEARN contract, discuss evidence on these topics from development and other fields, reflect on their own work experience, and share examples from USAID projects.
From the teaser episode:
“International development is a complex process, and we don’t always get it right. We don’t always coordinate with local partners as we should. We work in silos. Changes in the local context obstruct our plans. And we continue to implement programs that aren’t meeting our goals.
But USAID and its partner organizations are made up of motivated people who want to do better. This podcast is for you. Here at USAID Learning Lab, we believe that we all have a role in improving organizational effectiveness, and, ultimately, achieving better development outcomes. Change starts with people like you and me using evidence and tools to work more collaboratively with our local partners, learn from the data we collect, and adapt our programs accordingly.
In this series, we’ll talk about how you can build an adaptive team, create a learning culture, collaborate strategically, use the data you collect, and pause and reflect along the way. So, whether you work for USAID or a partner organization, we hope that this series helps you work more effectively. Together, we can improve the results achieved by USAID, and the development sector at large, from the inside out.”
We’re releasing a new episode each Tuesday in May, so subscribe to the USAID Learning Lab podcast wherever you listen to podcasts (iTunes, Stitcher, PocketCasts) to find out when new episodes are available. You can also find them posted as blogs here on USAID Learning Lab.
The information in this series comes from our effort to build the evidence base for collaborating, learning and adapting. If you’re interested in learning more about this area of work, visit USAIDLearningLab.org/eb4cla.