Jake, our founder and CEO, has returned to the States for a rotation on this side of the Atlantic. We domestic staffers are very pleased that this is the case. It’s nice to have his strategic direction at our disposal a little more readily than it is when he’s in Kenya.
Of course, this is entirely selfish of me to say. The work that happens in Kenya is Nuru’s bread and butter, and we domestic staffers are all working in support of that field work. It’s nice to have him back here though.
A couple of days ago, Stephanie (who, as a reminder, is in charge of our M&E system and thus this year’s overhaul and the development of Metrics 2.0), Jake, and I had a powwow about our Metrics system. It was a very cool discussion.
This is a very interesting time in Nuru’s history, as we have been at our field location for almost two years now. We have experienced some great successes out in the field that you can read all about throughout this website, and we have experienced some significant setbacks that you can also read all about throughout this website.
Because we believe in self-assessment, iteration, and learning from our mistakes, many aspects of the work we do at Nuru are in “re-set” mode for much of this year. A couple of the program areas have put some work in the last several months on determining a new umbrella model under which to operate and make decisions in the field, we are going through a revamp of our entire Nuru organizational structure right now, and as mentioned above, we are doing a metrics overhaul here on the research team.
A challenge inherent in all this re-setting, revamping, overhauling, and iteration is the fact that we are still an operational organization! We are still trying to get things done while discussing whether the way we’re doing things is the right way. That is tough.
The reason Stephanie and I needed to have the above-mentioned powwow with Jake is that a lot of discussion and work on Metrics has happened in the field with the field staff under Jake’s guidance in recent months. The field staff, in working to determine their umbrella models, has had to narrow down and make a few choices on what major Metrics they wanted to “move the needle” on in their work. At the same time, we are trying to deliberately and effectively create a new Metrics system based on good solid thorough research. This takes time! So, the three of us needed to talk to make sure that one part of the staff was not moving swiftly in a direction different from that of another part of the staff!
We allayed our concerns on that front, and got on the same page. No one is running in differing Metrics directions. Even more exciting, we came up with some new ideas collectively about what the Metrics system should look like! More on that for you later. Do hold your breath. Until next week!